The Divine Order of the Universe as Interpreted by Emanuel Swedenborg with Especial Relation to Modern Astronomy

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Longmans, Green, 1877 - Astronomy - 121 pages
 

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Page 48 - For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office; so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.
Page 109 - On the other hand, in the regions beneath the dark side, a solar eclipse of fifteen years in duration, under their shadow, must afford (to our ideas) an inhospitable asylum to animated beings, ill compensated by the faint light of the satellites. But we shall do wrong to judge of the fitness or unfitness of their condition from what we see around us, when, perhaps, the very combinations which convey to our minds only images of horror, may be in reality theatres of the most striking and glorious displays...
Page iv - More Worlds than One. The Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope of the Christian.
Page 3 - But if we were disposed to survey it, we must quit the small vessel of human reason, and put ourselves on board the ship of the church ; which alone possesses the divine needle for justly shaping the course.
Page 92 - Motions which require whole centuries to accumulate before they produce changes of arrangement, such as the naked eye can detect, though quite sufficient to destroy that idea of mathematical fixity which precludes speculation, are yet too trifling, as far as practical applications go, to induce a change of language, and lead us to speak of the stars in common parlance as otherwise than fixed.
Page 4 - A time may therefore come when this ultra-scientific region by which we are now enfolded may offer itself to terrestrial, if not to human investigation. Two-thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse in the eye the sense of vision. The rays exist, but the visual organ requisite for their translation into light does not exist. And so from this region of darkness and mystery which surrounds us, rays may now be darting which require but the development of the proper intellectual organs to...
Page 52 - ... before man was created. Why then may not other parts of creation be still in this brute and inert and chaotic state, while the earth is under the influence of a higher exercise of creative power ? If the earth was, for ages, a turbid abyss of lava and of mud, why may not Mars or Saturn be so still ? If the germs of life were, gradually, and at long intervals, inserted in the terrestrial slime...
Page 104 - Jupiter is still a glowing mass, fluid probably throughout, still bubbling and seething with the intensity of the primeval fires, sending up continually enormous masses of cloud, to be gathered into bands under the influence of the swift rotation of the giant planet.
Page 55 - The planets and the stars are the lumps which have flown from the potter's wheel of the Great Worker ; — the shred-coils which, in the working, sprang from His mighty lathe : — the sparks which darted from His awful anvil when the solar system lay incandescent thereon ; — the curls of vapour which rose from the great cauldron of creation when its elements were separated.
Page 40 - For the corruptible body presseth down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things.

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