A melancholy orb, the queen of night, chief nucleus of all the
dark idolatries of earth; the Moon, Isis, Hecate, Ashtaroth, Diana of
the Ephesians!
This expression of a thought by no means improbable, gives an easy
chance to shallow punsters; but ridicule is no weapon against reason.
Why should not the case be so? Why should not Earth's own satellite,
void, as yet, be on the resurrection of all flesh, the raft whereon to
float away Earth's evil? Read of it astronomically; think of it as
connected with idols; regard it as the ruler of earth's night; consider
that the place of a Gehenna must be somewhere; and what is there in my
fancy quite improbable? I do not dogmatize as that the fact is so, but
only suggest a definite place at least as likely as any other hitherto
suggested. Think how that awful, melancholy eye looks down on deeds of
darkness how many midnight crimes, murders, thefts, adulteries, and
witchcrafts, that would have shrunk into nonentity from open, honest
day, have paled the conscious Moon! Add to all this, it is the only
world, besides our own, whereof astronomers can tell us, It is fallen.
AN OFFER.
Nothing were easier than to have made this book a long one; but that was
not the writer's object: as well because of the musty Greek proverb
about long books; which in every time and country are sure never to be
read through by one in a thousand; as because it is always wiser to
suggest than to exhaust a topic; which may be as "a fruit-tree yielding
fruit after its kind whose seed is in itself.
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