there? No, my dear brethren; our journey is not yet finished; there are still many things for us to see.
In the firmament among the stars. From the sphere of the sun we ascend into the region of the stars, which is called the firmament, where the fixed stars are that now we can see twinkling pleasantly only during the night. This firmament is at a distance of thirty-eight million, eight hundred and ninety-three thousand and fifty German miles from the earth; so that if an arrow were shot off from here by an impulse such as God alone could give to it, and preserved its original velocity all the way, it would not reach the firmament in less than ninety-two years, supposing it travelled upwards at the rate of two hundred thousand miles an hour; so say astronomers. How we shall gaze and be filled with wonder at the sight of that beautiful sky, so immense in size, and so filled with stars that the Holy Scriptures say they are innumerable; while some of them are thirty-five times greater than the earth, others forty-four times, others seventy-two times, others ninety times, others a hundred and seventy times, and the very smallest eighteen times greater than our earth, although they now appear to us only as small spots of light. Consider, too, how much unoccupied space there is in this vast region; and from that we can form some idea of its immensity. A certain theologian maintains that if God were to turn into a world as large as ours every grain of sand on the sea-shore, those worlds would certainly be innumerable, but even then there would not be enough of them to fill up the heavens. We shall have ocular proof of this when, as we hope, we shall all be on our way together to the city of God; and when we reach that part of our journey we shall almost think in our joy and wonderment that we have already arrived at heaven.
From which the earth is scarcely visible.
Let us now stand still a moment and cast a last glance at the place we have come from, the earth. Oh, what a deep abyss! we shall exclaim; and where is the world we lived on during our lives? Where is Europe, that celebrated continent, that was formerly divided into so many kingdoms, duchies, and principalities, for the possession of which so many sovereigns shed torrents of blood and spent years in strife? Where is the town of Treves in which we lived so long? Where is the house in which I passed my life? Ah, we can see nothing of it all! And is that the earth? What a little spot it is compared to the vast place in which we are! It seems no greater than the head of a
