strained, disguised, or suppressed, may there be all that it tends to be, in good or evil. The intercourse of incorporeal beings must be free from many of our present impediments. Even now, the word is fleeter than motion, and the glance than the word; and a whole volume of thoughts and feelings is told by a single flash of the eye. When a still lighter and clearer communication shall be possible, the conveyance of knowledge, the participation in occupation, and the joy of love, may be unspeakably multiplied. For this, our souls are longing now; and we feel that, if we could see heart to heart and mind to mind, the good would be severed from the evil, and truth and charity would have their perfect triumph. That, for which the spirit longs, it confidently hopes; and there must doubtless be a fulfilment in the future. Our acquaintance with the works of our Maker is limited by the imperfection of our present organs. The telescope above, and the microscope below, have opened to us worlds which, without their mechanism, would have been utterly unknown. Our spirits pant to discover more; and, in the words of the Spectator, "It pleases us to think that we who know so small a portion of the works of the Creator, and with slow and painful steps creep up and down on the surface of this globe, shall, ere long, shoot away with the swiftness of imagination, trace out the hidden springs of nature's operations, be able to keep pace with the heavenly bodies in the rapidity of their career, be a spectator of the long train of events in the natural and moral worlds, visit the several apartments of the creation, know how they are furnished, and how inhabited, comprehend the order, and measure the magnitude and distances of those orbs, which to us seem disposed without any regular design, and set all in the same circle; observe the dependence. of the parts of each system, and, if our minds are big enough to grasp the theory, of the several systems upon one another, from whence results the harmony of the universe." If the spirit be immortal, these desires must doubtless be gratified; so much even nature would expect with joy and assurance. Henry More says, of the disembodied soul, "She is one orb of sense, all eye, all airy ear." There is, however, something even painful in the thought of varieties of existence so far beyond our present capacity of imagination. But it is softened by the remembrance that this world is as wonderful as any which can open upon us hereafter; and that both are the work of the same power, and under the same supreme control. We know that whatever we are called to meet becomes familiar as we approach; and that our souls are perpetually growing to their natural destiny. XXXVII. Natural Consciousness of a Life after Death. "The soul, uneasy and confined from home, POPE. THAT death should be the termination of the existence of a human soul, the very consciousness of that soul in the act of death seemed to deny and disprove. Very often, up to the moment of departure, it resembled much more a bird spreading its wings for a strong flight, than one that folds them for sleep in its nest. Where it was otherwise, the causes were of the same nature with those which, during life, from time to time press on the bodily organs, and produce a temporary or partial unconsciousness. The continuance of consciousness to the last, itself a strong token of immortality, has been sustained by added proofs, drawn from a multitude of analogies. Plants, fading in autumn, and renewed in spring; insects emerging from the chrysalis, with bright pinions; night, brightening into day, as day has darkened into night; the life that is everywhere blooming up from the very ruins of death: all have furnished comparisons, and some have yielded evidence. Besides, a train of arguments, even such as aided Socrates in his last discourse with his friends, have been borrowed from sources still less reliable; as, from the mere necessity, that as death grows out of life, so life should grow out of death, or from the notion of the pre-existence of souls. To such analogies other analogies may be opposed; to such arguments, arguments scarcely less effective. The breath, or wind, or air, from which the soul or spirit has its name, passes, and is lost as the lightest of all things. In vegetables and in brutes, the species is continued; but the individual, even if renewed from season to season, quite perishes at last. A perpetual succession of beings, rather than the revival of the same being, may be suggested by the course of the seasons. Little is demonstrated by reasons brought from the nature of the soul, as an immaterial, uncompounded essence, incapable of being dissipated or dissolved. The truth is, that these and other arguments, which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates, are but the efforts of the mind to find a defence for believing what it previously desired, and was even constrained, to believe, by its own. consciousness. It wishes, it longs, it expects to live onward; it cannot bring itself to feel that its course is to come at once to an end; it is sensible that the purpose of a being like its own would then be incomplete. To demonstrate this may exceed the wisdom of the profoundest philosopher; to feel it has been the privilege of all mankind, except the subtle and the skeptical. The most stupid amongst the heathen Greenlanders were struck with horror at the idea of annihilation. It is not difficult, perhaps, to prove, as an abstraction, that the soul does not perish with the body. In vain might atheists, like Fouché, endeavour to crush the instinct of nature, by writing on the churchyard gates, "Death is an eternal sleep." But may not the soul be withdrawn from its personal, individual existence, into that general mass of life from which it was taken at first? May it not be, like the animating principle in vegetables and mere animals, something which may be continued in other individuals or other species, but which ceases to dwell in a single being conscious of his identity? Socrates and Plato contended for the immortality of the soul, because they said that all knowledge was remembrance, and that the soul had existed before its union with the body. But, if so, there was no chain of conscious identity between the present life and the past, and there might be none between the present and the future. Such an immortality was not that for which the human spirit longed, and accordingly the conclusions of Socrates went. far beyond his reasonings. He expected a life of personal continuance; his ignorance, he said, would soon be dispelled; but he knew not this from his own argument, and he was as much sustained by representations drawn from the poets as by all his philosophy. He was determined to believe; he followed the dictates of his own nature; and those dictates were expressed in the popular feeling of the ancients, in the aspirations and even in the fictions of poets, and in the solemn meditations of the bereaved. Frederick Schlegel says, that we can hardly give the name of faith to "the conception of the immortality of the soul among the primitive nations;" for it was "a lively certainty, like the feeling of one's own being, and of what is actually present." In all the ancient world, as in all the modern tribes, except, possibly, the most abject of all, there was always an expectation of a life to come, usually taking a form which connected the future man with his very pursuits in this life. The hunter was buried with his bow, that he might use it in |