The Great Gospel of John
Volume 3
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus near Caesarea Philippi
- Chapter 223 -
The natural order of the worlds.
Murel says, "I thank you, my deeply awakened friend and brother Philopold! You have now given me such a revelation about which probably even Solomon in his highest wisdom never dreamed! The issue is so extremely extraordinary that every thinker would have to doubt it right from the start, because not even a spark of an idea exists in our external human intellect; but nonetheless I cannot have even the smallest doubt any longer. For if things were not founded on your sober personal experience, you could not possibly have told it to me, because such a thing, as long as the Earth carries the people, could never have been thought up by a person and you could also never have thought it if you had not been led by the clearest experience. For such a thing is not pulled out of thin air; it is a very highest, most wonderful revelation from above, and I accept it as obviously true as if I had experienced it myself.
2
But tell me now a little bit about the worlds of the stars; for I still cannot imagine how these tiny lights can be worlds!"
3
Philopold says, "Yes, dear friend, that will be a little difficult because you still have no understanding about this earthly world of ours and have no idea how it all looks and how it placed in comparison to the other worlds! I have to tell you therefore how this Earth looks and how it is placed and you will then be able to have a better idea about the other worlds."
4
Here Philopold described to Murel the whole Earth, like a genuine Professor of Geography, and gave him proof based on events and experiences that Murel had certainly made on his long journeys. He showed him also the reasons deriving, through which the night and day on the Earth always had to change regularly one after the other, and besides he explained to him the moon, its nature, distance and designation, as well as the other planets which belong to the sun.
5
When he had come to end with these explanations, illuminated as clearly bright as possible, only then he moved on to the fixed stars and continued:
6
"You have now learnt about the existence of our Earth, the moon, the sun and the other planets around it as perfectly as is possible in such a short period of time, and you can no longer have any doubt about the "so, and in no other way"; and I can only say to you that all the greater and smaller spots of light in the sky are also nothing other than pure, extremely large sun worlds, some of which are hardly believably larger than this sun of ours, about whose size you almost became dizzy.
7
But that they seem so small to us is a consequence of their distance from here. If you can imagine the great distance of our sun from the Earth four times a hundred thousand times greater, then you have the actual distance of the next fixed star from our sun. And from this you can easily see the reason why they seem so small to our physical eyes, since even our sun, which is so large, in order to encompass a thousand times a thousand of our Earth's quite easily in itself, seems to us hardly as large as the palm of our hands.
8
Other fixed stars, which we also see, are so unspeakably far away from us that we do not even have numbers to describe their distance. If you have now understood all that, it will be very clear to you how the little spots of light can very well be enormously large worlds, even if they don't appear to the human eye to be what they are! Have you understood all this?"