(Griesbach.) "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," said the dying proto-martyr, when he committed himself to his Saviour for eternity, and the thought next before death was becoming a resister of sin and a follower of the crucified One—“ Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep." Fell asleep; is it not somewhat strange that this gentle and frequent phrase, which so sweetly expresses the peaceful departure of a believer, should have led to the conclusion that the Christian soul continues without wakefulness until the end of time? Strange, that because the man of faith closes his eyelids upon the light of earth and reposes as confidently in the arms of his God as a weary child upon the bosom of its mother, therefore the soul awakes not to the light of heaven, although the very scripture in which the phrase is placed also tells us that the Lord, to whom the martyr had committed his being, was seen by him in spirit at the right hand of God, and with God's glory, in that heaven to which he looked.

A name* famous in the subtleties of logic is associated with the defense of this notion, but it appears as if it had been with a total abandonment of his accustomed acumen, and in a desperate hope of modifying the objections of materialists to the broad and unaccommodating language of revelation. It is a grief of soul to see the benevolent efforts of a lordly spirit so completely defeated by the extravagance of his ready accommodation to those spiritual paupers who so sturdily ask charity because they have no faith. Not being able to discover the least glimmering of a reason to infer from the words of the Bible, or its spirit, that man dies with his body, the gifted writer referred to, met the smiling skeptic half way, with a surmise that as the body seemed so essential to action in this world, it might be the appointment of Omnipotent wisdom to keep the * Archbishop Whately.

soul in a sound sleep, somewhere, until the resurrection, when it would find itself suitably provided with a machinery to work with. But this purposeless slumber of the soul served only to excite the greater ridicule of the unbelieving and profane while deepening the sorrow of the devout; for the notion seemed to imply that the Maker of all worlds being deficient in materials to employ human and departed spirits, laid them by in dormant idleness until a new organization could be conveniently arranged for their use, which might be after indefinite ages had rolled over their transmuted dust.

It is said, "Them also who sleep in Jesus will God bring with him." In keeping with this language is that most ancient and unfulfilled prophecy, "Behold, the Lord cometh with the myriads of his saints." "The Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee." (Zech. xiv. 5.) Now if they come, they must exist; but do they come as resuscitated frameworks and nerve systems? No, unless we are deluded with a nominal revelation, there is another mode of being besides the visible and material, and in that mode they come.

In insisting on the spiritual existence of man I would desire to guard against conveying the notion that material existence is contemptible. That God is the maker of both souls and bodies, is sufficient to give dignity to both, and that the fact that every being but the Infinite must be localized, is sufficient to prove that human beings must be corporeally accommodated with media of action and manifestation in whatever sphere they may dwell.

Those who doubt that the soul may perceive out of the body, should inform themselves how and why the soul perceives in the body. What relation has an object to the sensation which it produces? There is no sensation but in a mind: there is no other necessity for the connection between an image on the retina and the idea which we call sight, than that it is the ordinary

It is the

law of our constitution while in the body. soul that sees, according to this law, but it sometimes happens that the soul does not see according to this law, but to some other still more inscrutable. Thus in certain states of mind the soul does not perceive the idea of the object really before the eye, but some other idea suggested by that object. This often happens in délirium and mental derangement. Therefore it is manifest that the mind itself makes the idea in such cases. And, indeed, it always produces its own ideas, in so far as there is no idea but by an act of the mind. Thus to confine ourselves to sight, by way of illustration, images are constantly impinged on the retina, but we do not discriminate between them unless we attend to them. We must look at them with the mind's eye, or we discern nothing; as we find, if we are busy in thought instead of minding what is about us, we run against a post and beg its pardon. We might always live in such abstraction but for the demands of the body, and, in some diseases, this is a permanent state. Sensation is but one mode of the soul with regard to this objective world, and we know that there is at least one other mode of perceiving-namely, memory, which includes imagination, and by the exercise of which we realize our past experience and make it available knowledge.

We recall ideas in a great measure at will, and we reason on them, and strongly feel them too, without using our eyes, or ears, or tactual organs. Ideas are sometimes vivid enough in meditative minds to obscure all present objects by their brightness. We actually reproduce sensation by pure mental conception and association, and that so powerfully as that emotion also is excited even to a greater degree than when the sensation was first experienced. Thus I have often known a person so disgusted at the remembrance of a disagreeable medicine as not only to seem to taste it,

but really to suffer a repetition of all its effects. We do, then, perceive objects again without their presence, and ideas are compounded and multiplied also in our minds, without the use of the senses, so that we may be capable of thinking out of the body, so far as the continuance of mere sensation is concerned. We may have thoughts even if we may not have sensations out of this body, and thought is quite enough to make us either happy or miserable, according to the habits and convictions of our souls. But as sensation is a mode of the soul, and is subject to variations according to the mental states, there appears to be no reason, in the philosophy of the subject, why sensations also may not be experienced in other modes than any with which we are familiar in this world, since those we experience are but mental states and adaptations of our minds in relation to our present life.

Brown, Butler, and other metaphysicians distinguish between outward and inward affections, as if sensation were not mental as well as memory, pain, and desire. In dreams, are our affections outward or inward? I dream, for instance, that I receive a letter, and actually seem to read it with deep interest; I feel the strongest emotion, and on waking I remember many of the sentences, just as I thought I saw them in my dream. Now these sentences were not produced by memory in the act of dreaming, for they had no evident connection with any thing previously in the mind; they were fabricated by the mind without the use of the senses, and without extraneous impression. Therefore the so-called external and internal affections have the same source.

Some persons always dream; others never. Are those that do not dream justified in denying that others do? No; the testimony is too strong to be resisted. But supposing there was but one man in the world who could affirm that he had dreams, ought we to

deny the fact simply on the ground that we could not understand it, and it did not accord with our experience?

Exceptions are not contradictions, but they prove the existence of other laws than those in common operation. St. Paul informs us of facts in his experience, by which we learn that a man may enjoy a wondrously higher mode of perception than ordinary : whether he were in the body or out of it he indeed knew not; but yet he in rapture entered Paradise, and in unutterable words received a superabundance of revelations. This was at least an exalted and superior state of mind, something above ordinary sensation a vast but sudden development of perceptive power, concerning the reality of which we ought no more to doubt, than when an honest person relates to us a dream. We can no more account for the dream than we can for the heavenly ecstasy, and, under certain circumstances, the one might be as common as the other. There are, then, various modes of mental sensation and perception, so unlike each other, that they can scarcely be compared, and therefore we have no reason to question the possibility of still other modes of mind in other conditions of that which is miud, since it is constituted to experience an incalculable variety in its emotions and its perceptions, under the government of the Power whose resources are infinite.

The doctrines of the Bible are in direct contradiction to much that goes under the name of philosophy. The former teaches us, that the universe is controlled by spiritual agencies or beings; the latter, that mental and moral existence is the result of physical arrangements, and consequently, that action, affection, feeling, faculty, reason, and religion, are properties of matter. On this system the cessation of cerebral function is the death of the thinking being. Death is the annihi