get, my dear children, that men would rather give anything to God, than their hearts. The Lord asked for the heart, and they gave him a STONE,- -a pile of stones, large as a cathedral, before they would give him the heart. How wonderful has this error been, acting on a guilty conscience. The priests took advantage of this disposition, and enriched themselves with the offerings; and raised themselves into spiritual tyrants, by the homage of the ignorant. Hence arose many of the old churches and abbeys, that are monuments of human folly and superstition.' We here exhibit the ruins of one of those buildings.

The same feeling,' observed William, 'will account for the servility of kings, who were so mean, that they did penance, held the Pope's stirrup, and ruled their kingdoms as the servants of his holiness, as they call the Bishop of Rome.'

'You are right, my dear,' enjoined Oldcastle, 'and it would have been of little moment, had the evil ended here, the nobles might have spent their money on the church, and a few royal tyrants might have acted the slave without much public loss; but the people were corrupted and taught to look for the sun at midnight. The Bible* was kept out of their sight, they were not to think, but to obey the priests: the virgin and saints were to receive that worship which should have been offered to God. The form of religion was placed in the room of its power: the mere act of baptism, was said to change the heart of the baptized, and the eating of the wafer, to be the saving reception of the body of Jesus Christ: men were indeed to be saved by their own good works or rites, or by the good works or rites of others, instead of being taught to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. With the priesthood, gain was godliness, and with the people, indulgence in sin was gladly purchased by money and superstitious services, (as depicted in our engraving, page 241,) darkness covered all parts of the earth, nominally christian, and gross darkness, the people. This long, dismal period might well be called the dark ages. So much, my dear children, for the state of Europe, and for the necessity of a reformation. This cheering event we must make the subject of our next conversation."

Popular Astronomy for Sunday Scholars.

No. IX.

BY THOMAS DICK, ESQ., L.L.D.

ON THE NEW PLANETS.

WITHIN the limits of the present Century, four new Planets have been discovered, none of which were known to former Astronomers. They are named VESTA, Juno, Ceres and PALLAS. They are all situated beyond the orbit of Mars, and within that of Jupiter; and they are all invisible to the naked eye. Considering the vast interval of 350 millions of miles, which lies between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter, it was conjectured as highly probable that some undiscovered planet existed, so as to present something like proportion in the arrangement of the system;

* In 1274, the price of a Bible with a commentary, fairly written, was £30! A most enormous sum! It would have cost a labourer, whose wages were three-half-pence a day, more than 15 years labour. Equal at least to £500 of the present money.

and this conjecture may be considered as having been in some degree realized by the discovery of four small bodies about a hundred millions of miles beyond the orbit of Mars.

The first of these bodies which was discovered was the planet CERES, which was first seen at Palermo, by Piazzi, a Sicilian Astronomer, on the first of January, 1801, and within the limits of the next seven years, all the other three were discovered. On the 28th of March, 1802, the planet Pallas was discovered by the celebrated Astronomer, lately deceased, Dr. Olbers, of Bremen. The planet Juno was discovered on the 1st September, 1804, at the observatory of Lilienthal, near Bremen, by M. Harding, while endeavouring to form an Atlas of all the stars near the orbits of Ceres and Pallas. The planet Vesta was discovered on the 9th March, 1807, by Dr. Olbers, who had previously discovered Pallas, and who had formed an opinion that the three small bodies formerly discovered, were merely the fragments of a larger planet which had been burst asunder by some internal convulsion, and that several more might yet be discovered. On this hypothesis, he concluded, that as these fragments must all have diverged from the same point they ought to have two common points of reunion, or two nodes in opposite regions of the heavens, through which all the planetary fragments must sooner or later pass. And it was on the ground of the calculations founded on this bypothesis, that he was led to the discovery of Vesta.

The magnitude of these bodies, on account of their small size, have not yet been so accurately determined as those of the other planets. The following is a summary of what is known respecting their revolutions, distances and magnitudes. VESTA, which was the last discovered, is considered as the nearest the sun. Its distance is reckoned to be about 225 millions of miles, and it performs its revolution round the sun in 3 years, 7 months, at the rate of 44,000 miles an hour. Its Diameter has been estimated by some, at 276 miles; and if so, its surface contains 229,000 square miles; but it is probably considerably larger. The distance of JUNO from the sun is 254 millions of miles, and finishes its revolution in 4 years and 128 days. Its diameter has been estimated at 1425 miles. It is of a reddish colour and free from any nebulosity, and is supposed to be encompassed with a dense atmosphere. The planet CERES is 263 millions of miles

from the sun, and performs its revolution in 4 years, 7 months and 10 days. Its real diameter is estimated at 1624 miles, and its surface contains 8 millions of square miles. Its atmosphere is reckoned to be 675 miles in height, and its appearance is like that of a star of the 8th magnitude, and of a slight ruddy colour. PALLAS is distant from the sun 263 millions of miles, or about the same distance as Ceres, and it moves round the sun in 4 years, 7 months, which is within a day of the time of the revolution of Ceres. It is reckoned the largest of the four, being computed to be 2099 miles in diameter, or nearly the size of our moon. It is surrounded with a nebulosity like Ceres but not so extensive.

These four planets present to our view certain singularities which, at first view, appear incompatible with the harmony and proportions which we might suppose originally to have characterized the arrangements of the solar system. 1.-Their orbits are in general more eccentric than those of the other planets, in other words, they move in longer and narrower ellipses, in consequence of which, it happens that Pallas and Juno will sometimes be 129 millions of miles farther from the sun at one period than at another. 2. Their orbits have a much greater degree of inclination to the ecliptic than those of the other planets. 3.-They revolve nearly at the same mean distance from the sun, while, in the case of all the other planets many millions of miles intervene between their orbits. 4.-They perform their revolutions in nearly the same periods. 5. The orbits of some of these planets cross each other. This is a very singular and unaccountable circumstance in regard to planetary orbits, and cannot possibly happen in the case of the other planets, or any of their satellites; and therefore it is a possible circumstance that a collision might take place between several of those planets.

Such singularities and anomalies, in the case of these lately discovered bodies-so very different from the arrangement of the other planets-have opened a vast field for speculation and enquiry. It has been supposed, on somewhat plausible grounds, that these planets are only the fragments of a larger planet, which had been burst asunder by some immense eruptive force, proceeding from its interior parts. This hypothesis accounts, in a great measure, for the anomalies, and the apparent irregularities to which we have alluded, particularly for the intersection of their orbits, and for the fact, that the

planets are not round, as is indicated by the intantaneous diminution of their light, when they present their angular faces, It has also been supposed that the small fragments that may have escaped at the time of the disruption, may account for some of the meteoric stones, which at different times, have fallen from the higher regions upon our globe, the precise origin of which, has hitherto been mysterious and unaccountable.

Whether we consider the present peculiarities, positions and motions of these planets, as accordant with the state in which they were originally created, or, whether we view them as the effects of some tremendous shock or disruption, there appears to be something sublimely mysterious and worthy of attention, in the physical, not to say moral arrangements of the Almighty, in the state in which these bodies are now found. If they were originally arranged in the position and order in which they now appear, they present an anomaly, a want of proportion and harmony to whatever appears elsewhere throughout the whole range of the system. And if their present phenomena be the effects of some dreadful concussion, the fate of the beings that inhabited the original planet must have been involved in the awful catastrophe. We need not be much surprised although such an event should have taken place, nor should we consider it as inconsistent with what we know of the physical and moral government of the Almighty. For an event somewhat analogous happened to our own globe at that period when the cataracts of heaven were opened, and the fountains of the great deep were broken up' when a flood of waters ensued which covered the tops of the loftiest mountains, transformed the earth into a boundless ocean, and buried the myriads of its population in a watery grave. And, we profess to believe that a period is approaching when the great globe we inhabit shall undergo a tremendous change, and its elementary parts be dissolved, when the ærial 'heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up.' All the parts of the material system are liable to change; and we have no reason to conclude that, throughout the future periods of duration, the earth is the only globe in the universe whose present constitution and aspect shall undergo an important change. As it is probable that the work of creation is incessantly going forward throughout different regions of immensity,