Only its effects are visible and tangible. What is it? No philosophy can tell. Where is it? None can answer except in saying it is every-where. To describe it in the verity of its being is impossible; for it is intangible as a spirit, ethereal as the spirit's home, and in its essence incomprehensible as God himself. And yet it is and remains the same through all the ages. Depends this upon Shatter the earth

organization, or is it the cause of it? in ten million fragments, and grind all the planets to powder, and this, all-pervading power shall hold every particle of them in its embrace, and construct a universe anew. Away, then, with the thought that material things alone are real.

What is life? When the frosts of winter come, vegetation droops and dies, and desolation and decay are upon all the fields of nature. Is nature dead, or shall it live again? Who does not know that there are latent forces of life, in the midst of this death, that shall raise a new creation from the ashes of the old, and make the earth again green and beautiful? Do we not see that herb, and flower, and fruit, have not life because they grow, but, on the contrary, they grow because they have life? The life is first, and the organization last. What is mind? Is it something, or nothing? Substance, or shadow? Behold how it works and moves in all human hearts and hands, and is the main-spring of every effort of man for the achievement of his God-given dominion over the earth. Material obstacles are but mole-hills in its way. See how it triumphs over them in the steamship, the railway, and the telegraph. The giants of Anak are pigmies in its presence. The mighty man of Gath, with his spear as a weaver's beam, may walk forth a huge material thing and defy the armies of the living God, but the spirit power of the stripling David shall smite him that he die.

The skeptic must not have one line of advantage from the assumption that material things are substantial and spiritual things ethereal. He must not be allowed to argue thence, that, when the material organism is dissolved, the spiritual being is reduced to nothing, and is no more forever. On the contrary, we claim for the human soul or spirit that it is absolutely something; that it is even more real and more substantial than the body. That the life of the body depends upon the spirit, and not the spirit upon the body, nor yet upon the union of the two; so that when the frail body is battered down it does not follow that the spirit is annihilated with it. But there is in the spirit that is in us a fair basis for an affirmative answer to the question, "If a man die, shall he live again?"

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE QUESTION OF IMMORTALITY-CONTINUED.

The Landmark of Thought-Man Is-The Body Subject to Laws-The Movement of the Mind also Controlled by Law-What We Can Not Think, Can Not be True-Continued Existence Conceivable; not so the End of Existence-Forms Change, but the Substance of Things Remain-Laws of Being Compel the Thought of Continued Existence-The Argument-The Teaching of Common Sense Above that of the Philosophers-The Oriental Doubter Alone Consistent-The Only Avenue of Escape is to Deny that the Soul is Any Thing-What Death Does-Death Can Not Annihilate Even the Body-The Boundaries of Science-The Analogies of Nature--Solomon and his Testimony-"The Dust to Dust, the Soul to God "-The Old Philosophers Compelled to Admit Immortality in Some Form-Metempsychosis – Brahminism and Other Systems-The Doctrine of Continued Existence One of the World's Primitive Beliefs-All Men Believe Because They Must Believe The Foundation of the Great Hope.

WE have laid a foundation on which we can stand. We have set up this solid landmark, which we know with all the certainty that we know any thing. MAN IS. He who does not know that much, does not know any thing. Man is. Man has a body, and he has a soul, or spirit, which actuates, commands, and moves the body, and this last is as much a reality as the first; yea, more so. Hence we take our departure and seek the solution of the problem of future life.

We all understand that our bodies are subject to certain laws by which all their activities are regulated.

Every thing that we do must be done in accordance with these laws, and we can never transcend them. There are some things that we can do, and some things that we can not do. We can walk, but we can not fly. We can stand on our feet, but not on our heads; and whenever we encounter one of these laws we fall upon a fixed fact, and there is an end of all controversy as to what is to be done in the premises. If, by the law of our physical organization, we can not fly, and are compelled to walk, then the truth is clear as sunlight that we were made to walk and not to fly; and the question whether or not a man shall fly, is settled by the laws of his being, once and forever. Thus much the merest tyro in learning fully understands. If we tell him that God made him to fly like a bird, he will at once confute us by saying that he has no wings and he can not fly, and, therefore, God never intended that he should fly. But we do not as well understand that mind has its laws also, so that the process of thought is regulated by them, and we can only think in accordance with them. The movements of mind are precisely as much governed by law as the movements of body. There are ideas that our mental constitution forbids us to put together. They are as incongruous as fire and water, or as life and death. Let a man try to think of two solid bodies, as a block of marble and another of iron, occupying precisely the same point of space at the same time. Let him try to think of two and two as equal to five; or of a thing as existing and not existing at the same time. And he may thus satisfy himself that his thoughts are regulated by laws, and that his mental as well as bodily activities have their metes and bounds that they can not pass over. And the law is always right, and all attempts to gainsay it, or set it aside, are futile. If the laws of thought compel us to think that a block of marble, a foot

square, and another of iron of equal size, must occupy different portions of space, then it is true that they do occupy different portions of space; and if these laws prohibit us from thinking that they occupy the same space, at the same time, then the position thus inhibited is false and not true, and so all our perception of the true and the false rests upon the agreement or disagreement of our ideas. What we can not by any possibility think, can not possibly be true. What, then, if it should be found on examination that the laws of our mental constitution are such that existence after death is a necessary thought, and the idea of non-existence an impossible thought? In that case the doctrine of future existence would come to us, backed by the immutable laws of our being, and the foundation of faith would be firm as adamant. Let us see if it is not so.

We have said that there are laws of thought, and these laws are bourds that we can not pass. There are some things that we can, and others that we can not think. One of the things that we can not think is an absolute end. We can grasp in the mind an idea of continued existence; but we can not construe in thought the idea of an absolute end of all existence. We allude not to forms or appearances, for these come and go, and are made and unmade, at the bidding of thought. But we allude to things, substances, realities, and say the thought, that what is absolutely something to-day shall be nothing tomorrow, is impossible. Let any one try it and see. Take a golden coin and melt it in a crucible. We have only destroyed the form. The substance remains. Hammer it out into sheets whose thickness is next to nothing. We have only changed the form. Dissolve it in an acid so that it shall be held in solution, utterly invisible to the eye. We have changed the form again; but we can not