Who that knows all this and thinks rationally can ever say
that the planets are empty bodies? Moreover, I have said to spirits
that man might believe that there are more earths in the universe
than one, from the fact that the starry heaven is so immense, and the
stars there so innumerable, and each of them in its place or in its
system a sun, resembling our sun, although of a varying magnitude.
Any one who duly weighs the subject must conclude that such an
immense whole must needs be a means to an end that is the final end
of creation; and this end is a heavenly kingdom in which the Divine
may dwell with angels and men. For the visible universe or the heaven
illumined by stars so numberless, which are so many suns, is simply a
means for the existence of earths with men upon them from whom the
heavenly kingdom is derived. From all this a rational man must needs
conclude that so immense a means to so great an end could not have
been provided merely for the human race on a single earth. What would
this be for a Divine that is infinite, to which thousands and even
myriads of earths, all of them full of inhabitants, would be little
and scarcely anything? There are spirits whose sole pursuit is the
acquisition of knowledges, because their delight is in this alone;
and for this reason they are permitted to wander about, and even to
pass out of our solar system into others, in acquiring knowledge.
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