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reasons for human action; such reasons as control our conduct in the every day affairs of life. Keeping this remark in view, let us now look at some of these intimations.

And here, as we pause upon the threshold, let us endeavor to look distinctly, and, if we can, fearlessly and without tears, at the fact which necessitates our argument. The life-span is measured. "All the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died." The child of Adam, whose struggles from day to day with the destroyer we have noted, shares at last the doom of his great progenitor. He is dead! The last struggle ends-pulsation ceases, and death with unmistakable impress has placed his seal upon the settling features. Subdued if not awe-struck, we stand in the very presence of the destroyer and gaze upon the lifeless form which we think of by association as the proper man, though we feel and know that he is absent. Is there not a voice which from the pulseless bosom, the marble forehead, the pallid features, the corrupting carcass, seems to say, that this is the end? that the living soul with all its marvellous capacities has ceased to be, and forever? Its tones sometimes in those of guilty hope, sometimes in those of wailing lamentation, are: "Man dieth and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" "The dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten." It is an utterance which depresses the good and encourages the bad; which cuts the sinews of all moral excellence, and nerves with desperation the arm of the assassin and evil-doer. There are, perhaps, moments in the experience of all when its depressing influence can not be altogether put aside. That it has not annihilated all idea of immortality from the minds of a great majority of our race, is one of the most remarkable facts in the record of human experience. Death visibly reigns. His dominion is manifest and overpowering. "After life's fitful fever" the child of mortality "sleeps well." "Dust to dust he mingleth well among his native soil."

And yet by a strange and marvellous fascination we linger. The bitterness of death is passed, and that which we thought of almost with dread, holds us with its almost unearthly stillness. It is not life, yet how peacefully and beautifully like

the fact of our present existence, which the Atheist asserts, his own argument involves the admission that it is not inconsistent with a life continued beyond this world. These two things-Atheism and annihilation-usually go together by sympathy. In reality there is a suppressed premise by which they are logically connected—the denial of all spiritual existence. But that denial does not break the force of Butler's statement. In this he takes the Atheist upon his own ground, that the soul may be material, and thus deprives him of the advantage of his suppressed premise. Upon the Atheist's own principles the human soul is material. When he denies the existence of a purely spiritual being, God, he can not argue back from this to the annihilation of his own material soul. He is fairly entrapped in his own craftiness. He must establish his annihilation upon other grounds if he would be secure. The will being father to the argument, it may be made out perhaps that there is no God; that nature, conscience, and reason upon this subject are giving false testimony. Still he has not shaken off or gotten rid of his own existence, either present or future. It is not enough for him to prove that he is uncaused. He must go further and show that he will not continue to be. Here he is, a living soul, however he came. And for aught that he can show, he may continue for an indefinite period, perhaps forever. By whatever name he may choose to call the power which gave him being, "nature," "nothing," "fate," or "chance," that power, as now, may operate without cessation; may, as in the present world, through opposite courses of conduct, be productive of happiness or misery. Until this also be shown to be impossible, the subject in question must be investigated in the spirit already mentioned. Simple disregard of the doctrine of immortality upon the bare possibility of its truth, in the absence of demonstration against it, is on the part of a being like man, not only unreasonable but criminal.

What then are some of these natural intimations of a future life? How far are they of interest to those who enjoy the light of inspired revelation? Of course, to use an idea of the profound writer just alluded to, we are not looking for demonstration. We are rather called upon to weigh probabilities, to note those hints and intimations which constitute practical

reasons for human action; such reasons as control our conduct in the every day affairs of life. Keeping this remark in view, let us now look at some of these intimations.

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And here, as we pause upon the threshold, let us endeavor to look distinctly, and, if we can, fearlessly and without tears, at the fact which necessitates our argument. The life-span is measured. "All the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died." The child of Adam, whose struggles from day to day with the destroyer we have noted, shares at last the doom of his great progenitor. He is dead! The last struggle ends-pulsation ceases, and death with unmistakable impress has placed his seal upon the settling features. Subdued if not awe-struck, we stand in the very presence of the destroyer and gaze upon the lifeless form which we think of by association as the proper man, though we feel and know that he is absent. Is there not a voice which from the pulseless bosom, the marble forehead, the pallid features, the corrupting carcass, seems to say, that this is the end? that the living soul with all its marvellous capacities has ceased to be, and forever? Its tones sometimes in those of guilty hope, sometimes in those of wailing lamentation, are: "Man dieth and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?" "The dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten." It is an utterance which depresses the good and encourages the bad; which cuts the sinews of all moral excellence, and nerves with desperation the arm of the assassin and evil-doer. There are, perhaps, moments in the experience of all when its depressing influence can not be altogether put aside. That it has not annihilated all idea of immortality from the minds of a great majority of our race, is one of the most remarkable facts in the record of human experience. Death visibly reigns. His dominion is manifest and overpowering. "After life's fitful fever" the child of mortality "sleeps well." "Dust to dust he mingleth well among his native soil."

And yet by a strange and marvellous fascination we linger. The bitterness of death is passed, and that which we thought of almost with dread, holds us with its almost unearthly stillIt is not life, yet how peacefully and beautifully like

ness.

it!-and even while looking upon this repose of the dead, our thoughts and feelings experience reäction. The imagination is filled, it may be, with the process of physical corruption and decay, which ere long the decencies of the grave shall hide from our sight. And yet there is something in this aspect of the dead to which that imagination clings in hope of a future restoration.

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Only those who have been conversant with the mysteries of the last hour, can understand the last two of these lines placed by the poetess in the mouth of the broken-hearted and dying Rosalind. It is this "corpse's smile" which not indeed always, but which so frequently shineth with an expression of radiant and perfect peace upon the features of the departing, bringing back the well-known expression which waste of sickness and rack of pain had destroyed; it is this upon which even sense and sight sometimes depend, in their anticipations of future reünion. Thirty years ago there was an expression of countenance with which, in boyhood, we were perfectly familiar. This expression of gentle cheerfulness, of freedom from care and anxiety, had gradually in the course of years, and almost imperceptibly through pressure of trouble, been replaced by another of carefulness and solicitude. So gradually and imperceptibly had this change been accomplished, the latter expression had been worn so long, and been so much, in turn, softened by the consoling influences of Divine grace, that the earlier expression had glided from our memory, and we had come to look on this latter as natural. Not long since, it was our mournful duty to look upon those lineaments again, and in the great change from time to eternity. And there in the last moment, in the radiant expression of perfect peace which lit up the settling features as with a prophecy of heaven, we again recognized that expression known so well in

childhood; that expression so long faded from memory, but which thus coming back in the moment of separation not only recalled the past but seemed to point onward to future reunion. Frequently, we are persuaded, has this very aspect of death itself suggested the idea of some future state of being. The silent majesty of that repose which needs no second glance to assure us that physical suffering and' anguish are no longer possible; that unspeakable grace and loveliness which the departing spirit so often impresses upon its former companion; that well-known face brought back in death after having been so long lost in life; all these have prompted the rising thought, the half-hope: "He is not dead but sleepeth." This can not be the end. The slumber is indeed profound, unlike any thing and beyond any thing that he has ever before experienced. Yet it is not, it is too much like life; it can not be endless. It must at some time and in some way know of an awakening. We can not prove, but we will hope that death is not utter destruction. This marvellous semblance of life even in death, is, we trust, an intimation that life has not ended forever.

Thus far the imagination. But sense and sight, and the imagination, can only deal with appearances. Are there deeper grounds for supposing that life is not destroyed by the event in question? If so, what are they?

1. First of all, we are met by the great physical fact that there is no such thing known in nature as annihilation. There is change, and decay, and dissolution; but never, so far as we can see, utter destruction. The wreck of one era goes to the But in this work of re-construction.

re-construction of another. we are not able to detect any waste of material. The fragments are all gathered up, and nothing is lost. All the proba bilities seem to intimate that such destruction is as much beyond our power as is the fact which forms its complement, that of creation.* God, it is true, may annihilate that which

* The feeling which Cebes is described as giving utterance to in the Phædon, that the passage of any thing from the sphere of visibility, is its passage into nonenity, exercises perhaps as powerful influence upon the mind now as it did in his day. We are constantly tempted to look only at the things which are seen; and

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