Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/411

one of those larger systems of suns, which, when seen at a distance, look like a whitish speck of light; and that lustrous streak called the milky way is found to he one of the extremities of the immense group of suns in which our system is placed. The heaven is covered with an incalculable number of these white specks, and the better the telescopes the more are discovered, and the more distinctly the confusion of white light is resolved into stars. All this was not known during the gradual invention of the Christian mythology, and was never even suspected by those barbarians, in the obscure extremities of the Roman Empire, by whom it was first adopted. If these incalculable millions of suns, planets, satellites, and comets are inhabited, is it to be supposed that God formed their inhabitants better, or less liable to offend him than those primordial spirits, those angels near his throne, those first and most admirable of his creatures, who rebelled and were damned? Or has he improved like a proficient in statuary or painting, proceeding from rude outlines and imperfect forms, to more perfect idealisms or imitations, so that his latter works are better than his first? Or has some fortunate chance, like that which, when the painter despaired of being able to depict the foam of a horse, directed the spunge so as to represent it accurately, interfered to confer stability and exactness upon one, or how many, among the numerous systems of animated nature? There is little reason to suppose that any considerable multitude of the planets were tenanted by beings better capable of resisting the temptations of the Devil than ours. But is the Devil, like God, omnipresent? If so he interpenetrates God, and they both exist co-essentially; as metaphysicians have compared the omnipresence of God, pervading the infinity of space