CHAPTER III.

IMMORTALITY.

DEATH is every where; but man can not die. He exists forever, and therefore he must think, and agonize to think; and it is because he is capable of an endless succession of ideas with an incessant consciousness of his own selfhood, that the desire for life becomes intensified into an instinct for immortality in man. Reason is born dogmatical, and she asserts her nobility by demanding a life suited to her nature; she discourses with intelligence, and draws an argument for her deathlessness from the fact that to love truth is to love existence for its highest purposes, since all the truth she learns so far reveals God, and therefore prompts the hope of enjoying a perpetuity of supply from the fountain of wisdom and goodness. But to, suppose a desire for acquaintance with the wisdom of God, is to suppose a desire also for his goodness; and to feel this is to have in the heart that right love which believes itself incapable of death; to look for a continuance of life beyond the grave from any other motive, is to expect existence, only because we expect a retribution and an eternal vengeance suited to the rebellion of a fallen and malignant spirit. All our ideas concerning a futurity of living, thinking, and acting are mere phantoms seen in the dark, without revelation; and yet there is no reasonableness in reasoning, unless a man seek something more than daily amusement, occupation, and aliment; if he knows what he wants, he will seek for eternal life, and truth, and good, to live upon forever; since, whether we think of the right means or not, what we wish for is happiness without

death. Would you tell a man he is to perish to-morrow, and forever, and then exhort him to thank God? He can not be truly grateful to his Maker without the hope of an imperishable existence as an irrevocable boon. But there is really no possibility of finding any distinct evidence in favor of such a hope, except in the Bible; for however ready men may be to promise themselves what they wish, they only deceive themselves with their desires, and rest only in the Rhadamanthine dreams of natural heathenism, if they found not their hopes upon what God offers.

It is of small importance to determine when creation began; but it is of vast importance that neither reason nor revelation will allow us to believe that what is can ever cease to be. Form may alter, and the elements may be newly arranged; but omnipotence would be opposed to omniscience, could there be annihilation. The material world has existed an indefinite period, but we, as individuals, are but just now created, and we are intent to know where and why we are; and, in endeavoring to learn, we find that nothing of the past is lost to us, since what has been still is, and eternity is before us, to throw all its light into our being. An immortality of mind can be conferred only for mental purposes,—to know and to love, to will and to act.

Not a particle of even the insensate world can be altered in its nature as a center of forces, but yet it continues not everlastingly without change; it must be relatively altered, although in its affinities the same, and so it must be with the soul. Every atom of every block of granite has been otherwise situated than it is, and it is in process of being put in new relations to the other elements, for nothing has yet reached the ultimatum of its existence. The progress must be onward, without limit, in subserviency to the Mind, from which all power, motive, and purpose originate. God

is the eternal cause of eternal consequences. Each atom of each element must answer its end, and so must we, and that according to our nature. Atoms act according to physical laws; beings of thought and will, according to the state of thought and will, in relation to spiritual laws. The subtile and unsearchable mind of man, although, as mind, unalterable, must yet be exposed to mutations from without, and in the exercise of its affinities, according to orderly appointments yet to be evolved from the hand of the Almighty. But whatever results toward us in the eternity to come, must still be in keeping with the nature of our minds, as evinced in reason and affection; for the soul, like every thing else, is formed on fixed principles in relation to the rest of creation, and therefore subjected to laws which can not be abolished, because the unchangeable is their source, and His glory their fulfillment.

Morality and religion are based upon immortality; and not only so, but the emotions proper to moral and religious conduct necessarily indicate deathlessness. In short, we can not entertain a notion of right and wrong, without believing in a future state, or a life in which good or evil dispositions find their results. We are bound to right conduct, because the laws of heaven are the laws of eternity, and we can not escape the judgment already against us if we neglect our salvation. If nominal death, the death of the body, were the end of man's being, he might dismiss the claims of conscience from his soul; he would then have nothing to mind, nothing to concern himself about but to take his ease as long as it lasted, and to seize upon the accommodations of this world of promise and provision to the best of his ability. Might would then be right. No one could blame another for trying with all his heart to have his own way in spite of his neighbor's claim, since he would have no account to render to any one

who did not demand it before his death, for in that event his Maker would forever absolve him from all his obligations. Those who do not look forward to a life beyond the grave really act on this unaccountable principle" Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." And they would be quite justified in so doing, if something did not say within them-you can not die --your God has to do with you forever.

Indifference to results is all the ethics of ignorance. The profanum vulgus of all conditions are those who, practically believing in death as their finale, endeavor to pass their lives in desperate disregard of the coming event; and lest it should abbreviate their guilty pleasure before its time, even by its shadow, they resolve to look another way. Thus desperado is the becoming name of every consummate criminal, and the dark souls that crowd our jails have usually advanced in vice without the visible fear of any judgment higher than that which here condemns them. They are adversaries to society, perhaps because society has been adverse to them, and has not convinced them that heaven reigns in righteousness forever. They have not been trained on principle to subdue impulse. No revealing light has entered the chambers of imagery to show them their own characters: they have not seen the hideousness of guilt, boldly raising an unblushing brow in the presence of the Holy One: they have not been taught, or in their habits they have been oblivious, that darkness holds no secrets from God. The doctrines of existence as to power, purpose, and eternity, they have not listened to: the light that awakens conscience has not fallen on their spirits. Eternal life, therefore, has not dwelt in their thoughts; and thus men have been prepared for murder as only a transitory matter, forgetting that the soul of the slain and of the wronged will call for vengeance from beneath the throne of God, and, in a world without

mistakes, will meet the murderer and the oppressor face to face, and say, “ Thou art the man.”

Repentance is not demanded, but because immortality is revealed and a day of judgment appointed for the world, the certainty of which is known to all who have received the hostages of God and looked into the evidence-Christ is risen. If indeed there be any virtue, it can not be without results; it must be productive of present happiness, either in the enjoyment of what is passing or in the hope of what is to come; it must give a warrant of future bliss, not from a possibility of merit, but simply from the assurance which a mind rightly engaged can not but feel that it is walking in the way that wisdom appoints, and hence in a path that, though it may not be naturally pleasant in itself, is yet evidently conducive to a perpetuity of peace and joy, because God has ordained it as a way to an end. There is, however, no virtue in merely pleasing oneself the word means nothing unless it signifies a state of mind with regard to Heaven, a state that is blessed, because it is an obedience to some law acknowledged by the mind as good in itself; for both the motive and the joy of virtue consist in conscious fulfillment of duty. But duty depends on relationship between the mind that yields obedience in love, and the mind that commands in love. Without love there is neither authority nor duty. Therefore there is always reason in moral law, and every man who can apprehend it is bound to submit to it, or to suffer in his conscience, because he sees it to be perfectly good; and he could not be required, as a rational being, to obey, except in the faith and affiance of a soul satisfied that righteousness in God is one with benevolence. But where is the reasonableness, where the righteousness, where the benevolence, in the Omnipotent, if He grant only a short lease of life and enjoyment to His reasoning and confiding creature that