THE HEAVENS,

OR SKY, ACCORDING TO THE ANCIENTS.

A SILK-WORM might as well give the name of heaven to the little down which surrounds its shell, as the ancients give that appellation to the atmosphere, which, as M. Fontenelle, in his Plurality of Worlds,. prettily says, is the down of our shell.

The vapours which exhale from our seas and land, and form clouds, meteors, and thunder, were at first taken for the residence of the gods. Homer always brings down the deities in golden clouds; and thence it is that our painters still represent them seated on a cloud: but it being very proper that the master of the gods should live in greater state than the others, he was provided with an eagle to carry him, the eagle flying higher than any other bird.

The ancient Greeks seeing that princes lived in citadels, built on the top of some mountain, conceived that the gods might likewise have their citadel, and placed it in Thessalia, on mount Olympus, the summit of which is sometimes hid in the clouds, so that their palace was even with their heaven.

Afterwards, the stars and planets, which seemed fixed to the azure arch of our atmosphere, became the mansions of deities, seven of whom had their respective planets, the others taking up with what quarter they could find. The general council of the gods was held in a large saloon, to which they went by the milky-way; for men having council-chambers on earth, the gods, to be sure, should have one in the heavens.

When the Titans, (a kind of creature between the gods and men,) declared war, and not without some grounds, against those deities, to recover part of their inheritance, (being on the father's side, the sons of Coelum and Terra,) they only heaped two or three mountains one on the other, concluding that would be full enough for them to reduce the citadel of Olympus, together with the heavens :

"Nor were the gods themselves more safe above:
Against beleaguer'd heaven the giants move.
Hills piled on hills, on mountains mountains lie,
To make their mad approaches to the sky."

This absurd system of physics was of prodigious antiquity: yet certain it is, that the Chaldeans had as just ideas of what is called the heavens, as we ourselves. They placed the sun

in the centre of our planetary world, and nearly at the same distance we have found it to be; and they held the revolution of the earth, and of all the planets round that body. This we are informed of by Aristarchus of Samos; and it is the true system of the world, since revived by Copernicus. But the philosophers, to be the more respected by sovereigns and people, or rather to avoid being persecuted, kept the secret to themselves.

The language of error is so familiar to men, that we still give the name of heavens to our vapours, and to the space between the earth and moon. We say, to go up to heaven, as we say, the sun turns round, though we know it does not; probably we are the heaven to the moon, and every planet makes the neighbouring planet its heaven. Had Homer been asked to which heaven the soul of Sarpedon went, and where that of Hercules was, the poet would have been a little puzzled, and eluded the question by some harmonious verses.

What certainty was there, that the aerial soul of Hercules would have had a better time of it in Venus, or Saturn, than on our globe? It is not to be supposed that its residence was appointed in the sun: that place would have been too hot. After all, what did the ancients mean by the heavens? They knew nothing of the matter; they were perpetually bawling, Heaven and earth; which is just as much as to cry, infinitude and an atom. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as the heavens: there is a prodigious number of vast globes, rolling in the void expanse, and our globe rolls like

the others.

The ancients thought that the way to the heavens was by ascent: no such thing; the celestial globes are sometimes above our horizon, and sometimes below: thus, supposing Venus was returning from Paphos to her planet, after its setting, the goddess, relatively to our horizon, instead of going up, went down; and in such a case we ought to say, to go down to heaven. But the ancients were not so nice; their notions, in every thing relating to natural philosophy, were vague, uncertain, and contradictory. Immense volumes have been written, to know what their opinions were on many such questions; whereas five words would have done-they never thought of it.

Here, however, we must except a few wise men; but they came late few opened their minds freely, and those who did, the empyrics on earth took care to despatch to heaven the shortest way.

A writer, I think his name is Pluche, has pretended to make

Moses a great natural philosopher; another before him, in a piece called Cartesius Mozaizans, has reconciled Moses with Descartes. According to him, Moses first found out the vortices and the subtile matter; but it is well known, that God meant Moses for a great legislator and a great prophet, and not for a professor of physics. He instructed the Jews in their duty, and not a word in philosophy. Calmet, who has compiled a vast deal, and never once reflected, talks of the system of the Hebrews; but, so far was that rude people from having a system, that they had not so much as a geometry-school. The bare name was unknown to them: all they understood was brokerage and usury.

In their books we meet with some vague, incoherent ideas, on the structure of the heavens, and such as show them to have been a dull, illiterate people. Their first heaven was the air; their second, the firmament, to which the stars were fastened. This firmament was solid, and of ice, and supported the upper waters, which, at the time of the deluge, made their way out of this reservoir, through gates, sluices, and

cataracts.

Over this firmament, or these upper waters, was the third heaven, or the empyreum, to which St. Paul was caught up. The firmament was a kind of demi-arch round the earth. They little thought of the sun moving round a globe, whose form they were ignorant of. When it got to the west, it had some unknown path for returning to the east; and as to its not being seen, Baron Feneste accounts for that, by saying, it came back in the night.

Further, these whimsical ideas the Hebrews had borrowed from other nations, of whom, except the Chaldean school, the greater part looked on the heavens as solid; the earth was fixed and immoveable, and, by a third, longer from east to west than from south to north, whence are derived our geographical terms, longitude and latitude. This opinion, it is evident, admitted no antipodes; accordingly St. Austin calls the notion of antipodes an absurdity; and Lactantius flatly says, "Are there any so foolish, as to believe there are men whose heads are lower than their feet?" St. Chrysostom, in his fourteenth homily, asks, "Where are they who say the heavens are moveable, and their form round?"

Lactantius again says, book iii. of his Institutions, "I could prove to you, by a multitude of arguments, that it is impossible the heavens should encompass the earth."

The author of Spectacle de la Nature is welcome to tell the chevalier over and over, that Lactantius and Chrysostom

were eminent philosophers; still it will be answered that they were great saints, which they may be without any acquaintance with astronomy. We believe them to be in heaven, but own that in what part of the heavens they are, we know not.

HELL.

WHEN men came to live in society, they could not but perceive that many evil-doers escaped the severity of the laws: these could affect only open crimes; so that a curb was wanting against clandestine guilt, and religion alone could be such a curb. The Persians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and the Greeks, introduced a belief of punishments after this life; and, of all ancient nations we are acquainted with, the Jews alone admitted only temporal punishments. It is ridiculous to believe, or to pretend to believe, from some very obscure passages, that the ancient Jewish laws, their Leviticus, and their Decalogues, correspond with the doctrine of future punishments, when the author of those laws says not a single word which bears any relation to that doctrine. One might justly say to the compiler of the Pentateuch, You are inconsistent with yourself: you have no more judgment than probity: you a legislator, as you style yourself! How! you conscious of a tenet so coercive, so powerful, so necessary to people, as that of hell, and yet not make it known explicitly, nor urge it? And, though received among all the nations round about you, 'you leave so momentous a doctrine to be guessed at by some commentators, who are not to come into existence till four thousand years after your time, and who will wrest and distort some of your words, to find in them what you never meant? Either you are an ignoramus, who do not know that this was the universal belief in Egypt, in Chaldea, and in Persia; or a very weak man if, being acquainted with this doctrine, you did not make it the basis of your religion.

The very best answer the authors of the Jewish laws could make, would be this: We own ourselves to be extremely ignorant it was very late before we learned to write our people, a savage and barbarous tribe, which, by our own accounts, wandered for nearly half a century amidst deserts; at length, by the most heinous violence, and most detestable cruelties ever mentioned in history, seized on a small territory. We had no intercourse with polished nations: how then could we, the most earthly-minded of all men, invent a system entirely spiritual? We used the word answering to soul, only to

signify life. We thought God and his angels to be corporeal beings: the distinction of soul and body, the idea of a life after death, can be only the result of long meditation, and refined philosophy. Ask the Hottentots and Negroes, whose country is a hundred times larger than ours, whether they know any thing of a future life. We thought we had done wonders, in persuading our people that God punished evildoers to the fourth generation, either by the leprosy, sudden death, or the loss of what little substance a person might have possessed.

To this apology it may be replied, You have invented a system palpably ridiculous: for the evil-doer, who was in health, and whose family prospered, must necessarily laugh

at you.

The apologist of the Jewish law would then rejoin, That is your mistake: for among us, where one delinquent reasoned rightly, a hundred did not reason at all. He who, on the commission of a crime, found no punishment declaring itself against him or his son, still feared for his grandson. Further, though to-day he had no putrid ulcer on him, to which, by the by, we were very subject, it was odd, that within some years but it happened to be his case: no family is without misfortunes and afflictions, and we brought the people to believe that these misfortunes were sent by a divine hand, punishing secret transgressions.

This answer admits of an easy reply: Your excuse will not hold water; for every day we see very good people seized with sickness, and, by one misfortune or other, deprived of their substance; now if there be no family totally free from all misfortunes, and if these misfortunes are divine chastisements, all the individuals of your families were then knaves and profligates.

The Jewish priests might further reply, that there are misfortunes annexed to human nature, and others sent expressly by God. But this reasoner's mouth might soon be stopped, by showing the extreme absurdity of thinking that sickness and hail are sometimes a divine punishment, and sometimes a natural effect.

At length the Pharisees and the Essenes, among the Jews, admitted the belief of a hell, in their way. This dogma the Greeks had already disseminated among the Romans, and the Christians made it a capital article of faith.

Several fathers of the church did not hold the eternity of hell torments: they thought it very hard that a poor man should be burning for ever, only for stealing a goat. Virgil