"Like the insect, the human personality has three states, and changes, and forms of being, but continues indestructible through all. It emerges from its ovum into the figure and life of the present fleshly body; it rests in its earthly grave, unextinguished, though visible to mortal eye no longer; and it will emerge from that at its appointed time into its ethereal nature and immortalized capacities; always the same self in each transmutation; never dying or dissolving with its material investment; but surviving, to bloom in everlasting youth amid the most exquisite felicity— the spiritualized butterfly, with angel wings perhaps, and an imperishable vitality. We cite this extract as containing several beautiful ideas, and, on the whole, pertinent to our theme, but there is one point upon which we wish, in passing, to indicate our dissent; and that is, where the writer speaks of the "human personality" as resting in the grave unextinguished, to emerge therefrom at the resurrection. He seems here to imagine that the soul sleeps in the grave till the body is raised; and yet so contrary is this idea to what he had before said of the 'psyche-the animating and surviving soul," that we rather attribute it to the confounding of the two ideas of the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the body, for the time being, in the mind of the writer; and to an overweening desire for the moment to make the analogy between the case of man and the butterfly as complete as possible. He had no idea after all of the sleep of the soul in the grave from death to the general resurrection. 66 We have thus seen that various facts and phe * Turner's Sacred History of the World, p. 354. nomena in the natural world are strikingly adapted to shadow forth and illustrate the change of death, and the survivency of the spirit when the body dies. That such was the design of these arrangements on the part of the Creator, it might be too much to affirm; and yet what Christian can doubt that they were so intended? Who but man can become the observer and the student of these phenomena? And to what can he apply them if not to the problem of immortality? Man is not all of earth; The glowing brightness of bright Fancy's fires,— Prove him of heavenly birth. Look on his glorious face! There the quick play of varied passions see! Behold that changing eye! Does not that glance of tenderness and love, Something that will not die? The grave can claim no part, Save that on which there falleth our sad tears; Which swell each throbbing heart. Would God a palace rear For a frail being with no nobler life Than that which closes with the dying strife? A life that endeth here? Ah, no? the tenant must More glorious than its glorious mansion be; Whose dome and columns soon, All crumbling into dust, alas! we see Dust may to dust return, Ashes to kindred ashes fall again; But thought dies not: of all the mind's bright train None find a funeral urn. Then, though thine eye grow dim, And sluggish flow the current of thy blood, CHAPTER XXII. SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT AND PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS. WE have now gone over the entire ground of the argument, noticing the principal evidences, natural and revealed, of the soul's immortality. Let us now recapitulate the various points established and considerations urged, and notice the bearing of the general doctrine upon several other minor questions in which we all have or should have a deep and abiding in terest. In the first ten chapters, devoted to the development of the Scripture doctrine of immortality, we have shown that matter and spirit are distinct essencesthat man is a two-fold being, consisting of a spirit in a body—that souls are propagated and not immediately created—that as the life of Adam began with the union of the spirit with his body, so death is a separation of these two natures of man-that souls do not become extinct at death, or sleep in the grave with the body till the resurrection, but have a separate and conscious existence from death to the resurrection morning-that they do not at once enter upon their final abode, but remain in Hades, "Paradise," or "the intermediate state," till their bodies are raised in the last day—that immortal existence is not a result of redemption, hinging upon our faith in Christ; and that the supposed annihilation of the wicked at the day of judgment is both unscriptural and absurd. In the last twenty-one chapters, Part Second, devoted to the Rational Evidences of a Future Life, we have explained the character and value of the Rational Argument; have cited various indications of another life in the structure and phenomena of the natural world; and have corroborated the infallible teaching of the Divine Oracles, by arguments drawn from the general belief of mankind-the relation of man to the lower animals-the exquisite structure of the human body-the dominion of the soul over the body-the unequal development of the mind and body—the energy of the soul in cases where physical organs are wanting-the completeness of our mental powers under bodily mutilations-the phenomena of reverie, sleep, dreaming and catalepsy; and the vigor and activity of the soul in the hour of death. We have also shown from natural analogies that the dissolution of the human body affords no ground for the presumption that the mind perishes with it; and have sustained the teachings of the Bible by arguments drawn from the indestructibility of matter,-the immateriality of the soul, and her powers of memory,the rapidity of her mental process-her capabilities of improvement, and her vast achievements in know ledge and skill, the desire for posthumous remembrance and fame, our earthly discontent, the power of hope, and our longings for immortality. To all this we have added an argument drawn from our forebodings of the future, and the power of con |