finity with the moral qualities of God; on the assumed inviolability of abstract but personified laws; on the difficulty of conceiving of eternal duration, or of any person who is increate; on the fallacy of reasoning from what is finite to what is infinite; and last and chiefly, on the absence of demonstration itself, which, it is taken for granted, is quite as essential in this case as for establishing a proposition in geometry. To take away the whole basis of these objections, by showing that they are no more pertinent to the subject in hand than to the doctrines of physical science, is to contribute most effectually to the argument of the theist. If it be proved that reasoning from such premises is nugatory and inapplicable, the very groundwork of the systems of Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Fichte, and other modern infidels, is removed, and the superstructure falls. The philosophy which attempts to define and demonstrate all things necessarily leads to fatalism. In the posthumous work of Spinoza may be found the perfect type of these demonstration-seeking systems, systems which can never really transcend the sphere of the abstractions on which they are founded, and therefore never can consistently admit a Deity, except in that pantheistic sense which regards God as a pure idea that is necessarily involved in all existence, and ends in an avowed identification of the Divinity with the material universe. The title of his book, "Ethics reduced to a Geometrical System, and proved by the Geometrical Method," answers to its contents; as he begins with a list of axioms and definitions, and proceeds by a series of theorems and proofs to that doctrine of atheistic fatalism which has been the seminal principle of the infidel philosophy of Germany down to the present day.

I have no fears for the security of the theist's faith, when it rests on the same basis with all the doctrines of natural science, and with all the conclusions which govern the daily conduct of men. To distrust such evidence, or to be incapable of acting upon it, is the common test of the folly that borders upon idiocy; and to such an unbeliever, therefore, may be literally applied the words of Scripture, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is

no God." The infidel systems of modern philosophy agree very nearly with the mythology of the ancients, which admitted. "Fate, Chance, Nature, Time, Space, to be real beings,―nay, even gods." “Mankind in all ages," says Mr. Mill, "have had a strong propensity to conclude that wherever there is a name, there must be a distinguishable separate entity corresponding, and every complex idea which the mind has formed for itself by operating upon its conceptions of individual things was considered to have an outward objective reality answering to it." "This misapprehension," he goes on to say, "of the import of general language constitutes Mysticism, a word so much oftener written and spoken than understood. Whether in the Vedas, the Platonists, or the Hegelians, mysticism is neither more nor less than ascribing objective existence to the subjective creations of the mind's own faculties, to mere ideas of the intellect; and believing that by watching and contemplating these ideas of its own making, it can read in them what takes place in the world without."* In religion, it may be added, this mysticism leads. to the most subtile of all forms of idolatry, the only one, indeed, that is now practicable among a civilized people, - the deification of an idea, the apotheosis of an abstraction.

The proposition, that all the fundamental truths of religion relate to matters of fact, and must be established, if at all, by moral reasoning, leads us to look beyond the belief in the being of a God, and to inquire if it holds true, also, of the doctrine of immortality. I pass over the evidences of the moral government of the Deity, as unnecessary to be considered here; since it is obvious that they must consist in a copious induction of examples, to prove that the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice are the great objects of all the general laws by which the world is governed. The only argument brought against this doctrine, being an enumeration of cases of a seemingly promiscuous distribution of happiness and misery in this life, is an application of the rules of physical inquiry, so that abstract reasoning

* J. S. Mill's Logic, Am. ed., p. 464.

is admitted to be out of place on either side. These apparent exceptions, this allotment of good and evil in a measure which often does not correspond with our sense of merit and demerit, create a presumption, it is said, that the scheme of moral government, which has only its beginning here, will be completed in a future state.

If the immortality of the soul did not open so attractive a field for general disquisition, it would be difficult to conceive of it as supported by abstract arguments, or as clouded by metaphysical doubts and difficulties. "If a man dies, shall he live again?" The question here relates to a fact of the second order, to an event which is to take place, a future occurrence; if the present or actual existence of the mind or person is a fact, so also is its future existence. Our means of answering the question, too, are more limited and imperfect in this case than would suffice for the establishment of any fact in physical science. As it relates to the future, we can have no sensible evidence of it; and as the grave confessedly does not give up its dead to our bodily apprehension, the testimony of others, except so far as they speak of a revelation, is also set aside. The axiom respecting the uniformity of nature, which is the usual foundation of our reasonings from the past to the future, cannot aid us here, because we are not asking now whether it is probable that an observed law of nature will continue in force; the question is, whether there has ever been such a law, whether a messenger has ever come back to us from that invisible bourne. Accordingly, it is distinctly admitted by the most judicious writers on natural theology, that the argument, after all, is but a series of presumptions, which we indulge the more readily because the conclusion to which they point is one in which all persons willingly acquiesce; it agrees. with the involuntary shrinking of the rational mind from the idea of utter extinction. Most of these presumptions were as well stated by the ancient philosophers, by Socrates, and Plato, and Cicero,as by the moderns. The use of such speculations is not to establish the truth of the point in question, but to refute the objections which have been urged against the possibility of

the event. It can be shown that the dissolution of the body does not necessarily lead us to infer the extinction of the soul, but that the presumption lies the other way. It is in this moderate form that the argument from the light of nature is stated by Butler, and it would have been well if Clarke had imitated his reserve. Immortality is no part of the positive teachings of nature; to revelation alone can we look for light and life beyond the grave.

I take no account of those extraordinary speculations which suppose the soul of man to be a ray or emanation from the Deity, which, at the dissolution of the body, will again be absorbed into its source. "This seems," says Mr. Stewart, "to have been the opinion of many of the ancient Stoics; and a similar idea has been adopted by some philosophers in modern times, who have compared the soul, when joined to the body, to a small portion of the sea inclosed in a vial; and when separated from it, to the same water, confounded and intermixed, by the breaking of the vial which contained it, with the ocean from which it was first taken." This is but one of the applications of the doctrine of pantheism, and those who can give up the belief in a personal God may be satisfied with this conception of the soul's futurity. But to others, the loss of distinct consciousness and personal identity or individuality, which is implied in this theory, will cause the doctrine to appear little more consoling than a belief in the termination of all things at the grave. The admitted physical fact, that of all the material particles which constitute the body at the instant of death not one is lost, but all enter into new combinations, and pass through a ceaseless round of growth and decay, gives us an idea of the perpetuity of our corporeal frames which answers exactly to this pantheistic notion of the immortality of the soul. To speak of different minds being blended together and lost in one general mass of being is to employ a form of words which is only not injurious to sound doctrine because it is unintelligible and absurd. Existence is an abstract idea; there is no such thing as existence in general, apart from individual beings, any more than there is such a thing

as this audience existing separately from the men and women who compose it. To speak of the annihilation of these persons in their individual capacity, leaving their presence as a general assembly, is nonsense. To such an absurdity are we reduced by confounding abstractions with realities, or employing terms without attaching definite and distinct meaning to them.

Yet we have been told, that it is "written legibly in Nature that man is an undying being," and every thing justifies us in saying, that, "if man were made to live for ever, the impress of that intention must be distinctly visible in his very structure." Science, it is accordingly said, must decipher the marks which indicate this intention, and spell out the natural language in which every rational creature is labelled with the promise of immortality, just as it infers from a mere fragment of a fossil bone "the whole fashion of the animal to which it belonged, its food, its mode and sphere of existence." But the history which is deciphered by the geologist and the comparative anatomist is that of the past; and not even in their boldest speculations do they attempt to pry into the secrets of the future,-far less, to speak confidently of an endless duration to come. Science can read the annals of former ages, but it cannot "look into the seeds of time, and see what grain will grow and what will not." The astronomer hesitates about pronouncing upon the future stability of the system of which our earth is but a part, even on the supposition that the laws which now seem to control its action shall continue for ever in force, without restraint, limit, or interference from the omnipotent hand which first established them. But who shall say when His purpose shall be accomplished? or who shall scan the designs of the Almighty? The naturalist may declare, if he can, that the flower shall droop and die at the end of a single season; but he finds no evidence that the secret principle which now vivifies it, after it has ceased to hold these material particles together, shall yet continue to be, either animating other forms, or existing apart till time shall be no more. And mental science is equally barren of any distinct promise of the future; the sharpest scrutiny of the phenomena of mind, unguided by special revelation,