gone.

Free agency would be destroyed, and the peaceful rest of faith and submission would be displaced by knowledge and coercion. Any further absolute knowledge of the future than God has given would upset the whole scheme of redemption, and change the entire aspect of our mortal career. Tupper wrote no truer proverb than

the following:

"A moral sickness, like to sin, must have a moral cure;

And faith alone can heal the mind whose malady is sense."

The greatest and best men who have ever lived, have taught doctrines in accordance with those we have here advanced. Christ brought life and immortality to light in the gospel, but, as Rev. Dr. Thomas P. Field remarks, by this we are not to understand that there was no knowledge of immortality before the advent of the Redeemer. We do not believe that Moses and the prophets, however rarely they may have alluded to the eternal life, once dreamed of annihilation. Their faith in a living God carried with it faith in immortality. We do not believe that man, anywhere, is left without a witness to his immortal being. The ancient Egyptians embalmed the body, believing it would be again the abode of . the spirit. The ancient Roman would write on the tomb of the dead, Requiescat in pace. But what is the resting in peace of annihilation? Addison's Cato makes the natural reflection:

"It must be so-Plato, thou reasonest well-
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire.
This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread and inward horror
Of falling into naught? Which shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?

'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us;

'Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter
And intimates eternity to man.”

"If," says Socrates, "upon her release the soul be found pure and free from all that appertains to the body *** she goes to the world which is invisible like herself; to the world divine and immortal and full of thought; there set free from error, folly, fears, and the fierce passions and other evils of humanity, her lot is a

happy one indeed; * * * but if upon her release she be found unclean and polluted by her intercourse with the body, *** do you think that a soul in this condition will be found pure and uncon· taminated when she is set free?”

Goethe declared that man is entitled to believe in immortality; such belief is agreeable to his nature; and his instincts in this direction are confirmed by religious assurances.. "My belief" he says, "in the immortality of the soul springs from the idea of activity; for when I persevere to the end in a course of restless activity I have a sort of guarantee from Nature that, when the present form of my existence proves itself inadequate for the energizing of my spirit, she will provide another form more appropriate. When a man is seventy-five years old he cannot avoid now and then thinking of death. This thought, when it comes, leaves me in a state of perfect peace, for I have the most assured conviction that our soul is of an essence absolutely indestructible; an essence that works on from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun, which to our earthly eyes sinks and sets, but in reality never sinks, but shines on unceasingly.” "Where is the other world?" inquires Charlotte Broute. "In what will another life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the grand mystery is likely to burst prematurely on me? Great Spirit, in whose goodness I confide, whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and morning from early infancy, help the weak creation of thy hands! Sustain me through the ordeal I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! Give me patience! Give me-oh, give me faith!”

"The human soul," says Dorner, "is by its very idea imperishable. No force of nature reaches to the spirit. Nor can the soul be the author of its own death."

"We do not believe immortality," observes Martineau, “because we have proved it, but we forever try to prove it because we believe it."

"Love is real,” postulates a modern writer. "The spirit-life is eternal. Affections are strengthened by the exercise thereof. Human love develops our capacity for loving God. We can never realize the strength of love until we meet with afflictive dispensations. Love

is life. Let him who doubts the reality of spiritual things learn to love. Let him lay away his heart's treasures, and see how the love lives on when flesh and blood are gone. Are his heart's yearnings experienced then less real than his caresses used to be? Is it the face, the hands, the feet, the form of our departed that we wait to find, or their undying souls wherewith our love would be requited? 'God is a spirit,' and we are spirits, and the life which we now live in the flesh is fleeting. Oh to be clothed upon with thoughts of our immortality!"

The poet had a similar conception of eternal things:

"There are feelings that gather, and brood o'er the soul,
Forbidding the current of passion to roll.

When the mute spirit gazes with awe and delight
On vague formless outlines that flit o'er its sight,
And sees, in the visions that dimly pass by,

A glimpse of its own Eternity.

"There's a yearning that's felt in the heart's deepest cell,
And silently, vainly within doth it swell;

And scorning the hopes of the children of earth,

Aspires to the home of its loftier birth;

And that yearning, unquenched, in the heart will e'er lie,
Till refreshed by a draught of Eternity.

"As the young eagle pants for the glorious light,
And flutters its yet unfledged pinions for flight,-
Its mountain-built eyry disdainfully scans,

While the broad azure heaven its glowing eye spans,-
So struggles the earth-fettered spirit to fly,

And bathe in the light of Eternity.

"As that noble bird soars when its thraldom is done,

Soars swiftly and steadily on to the sun,

So shall the immortal, when spreading her wings,

Glance lightly beneath on terrestrial things:

And on God, her bright Source, firmly fixing her eye,
For ever exult in Eternity."

That grand old patriot and poet, Victor Hugo, once observed: "It is the misfortune of our time to place everything in this life. In giving to man for his sole end and aim the life of earth you

aggravate all his miseries by the final negatur. And that which was only suffering-that is to say, the law of God—is changed to despair, the law of hell. The duty of us all, legislators, bishops, poets, is to help raise all faces toward heaven, to direct all souls toward the future life. Let us say with high confidence that no one has suffered unjustly, or in vain. Death is restitution. God appears at the end of all. It would not be worth while to live if we were to die entirely. That which alleviates labor and sanctifies toil is to have before us the vision of a better world through the darkness of this life. That world is to me more real than the chimera which we devour and which we call life. It is forever before my eyes. It is the supreme certainty of my reason, as it is the supreme consolation of my soul." And elsewhere he vehemently protests: "It is idle for you, my friends, to say that to-morrow or thereafter I shall be laid in the grave. The grave shall not hold me. Your six feet of earth will not hide me in darkness. Your earth-worms may devour all that is perishable of me, but nothing can prevail over my spiritual intelligence."

That great soldier and statesman, Bismarck, has not been credited as a man of faith; but his literary amanuensis, Dr. Busch, reports a conversation in which the renowned Prussian remarked: "I do not understand how people can live without a belief, and without a public confession of faith, without believing in God as the Judge Superior, in a future life and the duty of fulfilling one's mission on earth. If I were not a Christian, I would not remain at my post a single hour. If I did not believe in God, I would do nothing for human masters. Take away my faith, and you take away my

love of country."

"The dead, and the living," nicely observes Dr. Alexander Mac Laren, "are not names of two classes which exclude each other. Much rather, there are none who are dead. The dead are simply the living who have died. While they were dying they lived, and after they were dead they lived more fully. All live unto God. 'God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.' Oh, how solemnly sometimes the thought comes up before us, that all those past generations which have stormed across this earth of ours, and then have fallen into still forgetfulness, live yet. Somewhere, at

.

this very instant, they now verily are! have been! There are no have beens!

We say they were, they Life is life for ever! To

be is eternal being. Every man that has died is at this instant in full possession of all his faculties, in the intensest exercise of all his capacities, standing somewhere in God's great universe, ringed with a sense of God's presence, and feeling in every fibre of his being that life which comes after death is not less real but more real, not less great but more great, not less full or intense, but more full and intense, than the mingled life which, lived here on earth, was a centre of life surrounded with a crust and circumference of mortality. The dead are the living. They lived while they died and after they die they live on forever."

Dean Stanley once gave his conception of what the soul realizes in the grand birth-hour of immortal life in these beautiful words: "There the soul finds itself alone on the mountain ridge overlooking the unknown future. * * * We are left alone with God. We know not in the shadow of the night who it is that touches us-we feel only that the Everlasting Arms are closing us in; the twilight of the morning breaks, we are bid to depart in peace, for by a strength not our own we have prevailed, and the path is made clear before us.” Dr. Lyman Beecher, in one of his lectures on mental activity in the future life, eloquently discoursed like this:

"Next to the blessedness of being free from sin, is that of intense, untiring activity in the service of God. Does the eye of Moses sleep? Does the harp of David hang unstrung and silent in the courts of heaven, like the shields of the mighty in the halls of the dead? Are Watts, Payson, Baxter, Whitfield, Brainard, Dwight, dreaming away the ages of eternity, or spending them merely in psalm-singing? In heaven, as elsewhere, benevolent action is the life of the soul. I could hardly be content to go there, only to sit by purling streams, on beds of roses, fanned by fragrant breezes, and lulled to rest by soft music. The nature and laws of the mind must be reversed before mental inaction can constitute the blessedness of heaven. There is rest there;-but it is the rest of high, untiring, untrammelled, persistent energy in the worship and service of God. Has Paul ceased to itinerate those heavenly regions, flaming like a comet in the work of his Saviour? Has the mind