As we walked on the country road out of Springfield, he turned his eyes to the heavens full of stars, and told me their names and their distance from us and the swiftness of their motion. He said the ancients used to arrange them so as to make monsters, serpents, animals of one kind or another out of them; but said he: “I never behold them that I do not feel that I am looking in the face of God. I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up in the heavens and say there is no God.”