I could not triumph to think that my soul, with its vast aspirations after the Everlasting Good and Fair and Great-its memory and affection, its hopes, its reason grasping after imperishable truth, its thoughts that wander through eternity-its faith and love that have gone forth toward an imagined Holy One, and its moral nature capable of wearing immortal glory and beauty, was soon to lie down on the breast of corruption and cease to be-that HEAVEN, the mourner's dream, the mar-、 tyr's goal, the pilgrim's home, the life-hope of suffering virtue, had become to me a dull meaningless word-a beautiful mirage vanished from the illimitable desert of being-that the loved ones, that have faded away from my side, who still rise in the dreams of memory and sleep, are utterly perished-that the mighty, and gifted, and holy dead of past time are now nothing. Methinks, if I could come to such a conclusion, it would be in silence and sorrow. I would keep the awful secret in my own breast-I would not whisper it to my dearest friend-I would not breathe it in the ear of solitude and darkness. I would take my Bible and sit down for one more beautiful and happy dream, and then in mercy hand it over to mankind, and wait in mute despair till Almighty Accident or Tyranny should lay me in everlasting sleep with the brutes."

But such is not the language of Nature with reference to God and the soul. Strange and horrible perversion must have passed on the human mind before, when reflecting on God its Maker and its Fountain, it could come to a conclusion that the soul is thus mocked by Him. "Were it not so I would have told you," was the language of Christ; and Nature says the same -or at least, that God, if not designing man's immortality, would not in so many ways have mocked him with delusive promises of it.

Thus Nature argues intelligibly and convincingly, if we would listen to her, for a future life, in the same way that she does for the existence and reasonableness, justice, benevolence, and truth of God. But in neither case does she force her voice on man. These two doctrines are also mutually inter-dependent. God rightly believed, is the basis of all argument from nature for the soul's immortality; while the soul's immortality denied, reflects darkness over the attributes and the being itself of a God.

The argument from nature being thus founded on a true idea. of God, perished necessarily with that idea. Men "changing the glory of God into a lie," changed that of the human soul

also for God being misconceived, all reasoning from him became perverted, and darkness gathered alike over the present and future world. The great central orb being put out, the central attraction destroyed, reason and conscience wandered in twilight-the forces of the moral system were broken, and the universe was chaos. The present and the future were no longer a moral and reasonable whole, banded together by moral law and all-pervading reason. Darkness thick and palpable was gathering in the horizon of time, through which had glimpsed eternity. Death was a mighty and rayless chasm, over which no rainbow of Divine Love bridged to another life, and no flaming sword of justice pointed to a world of doom. All beyond was emphatically "a land of darkness and shadow of death where the light was as darkness."

Such had, to a great extent, become the condition of the ancient world. Socrates alone, of its philosophers, placed his argument on the right ground-the true idea of God. The Academics, Peripatetics, Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans, in discussing this question, attempted, from the physical nature of the soul, to prove its natural and necessary immortality or death. Of all these the Pythagoreans and Academics alone teach clearly the personal immortality of the soul, while the Epicureans, from a different theory of the substance of the soul, assured with equal want of proof, argue its necessary perishableness. The face of God was in eclipse, and philosophy groping without His light could only throw over the mighty question "dimness of anguish."

Thus for ages was the world living and dying under the darkening of the face of God, and consequently the destiny of the human soul. But this darkening of the future world was throwing back meanwhile its baleful shadow over the present. The clouds which before, gathering around the sunset of life, had been kindled by the light reflected from another sphere into forms of celestial glory and beauty, or those angry and portentous, and shedding on man a salutary awe, were now becoming a lifeless blackness. Not even the life of the lightning and thunder was there, but an utter stillness and darkness, more fearful than either, was throwing its chilling death-shade over human hearts. The moral interests of man were perishingvirtue was losing its incentives, vice its determents; appetite and sensualism, the clamors of present passion, the power of

the immediate and the physical were fast prevailing over the flickering glimpses of another life.

One was needed to come from heaven to reveal God anew. But heaven opened not her gates of light. One was needed to come as a witness from the grave, but death was too stronghe unbarred not the doors of his prisoners. The world had waited long, but none returned. Age after age, the brave, the mighty, the gifted, the good, the beautiful, had gone down to him, but none came back. Long had the earth held down her ear to the grave and listened, but no voice came from its silent realms. Nor the wail and prayer of stricken millions, "nor hero's lyre or lover's lute," nor the posthumous acclaim of nations that shook the skies above, could startle a whisper in that lower world-an infinite, awful stillness; a dark, dead, unbottomed, illimitable emptiness, into which life's successive millions, its glory of majesty, and power, and beauty, and genius, and eloquence, and song, and bannered battalia of noisy war, fell without an echo.

Long had the earth waited and listened, but none returned, and human nature was gathering itself up in agony to die, when lo! in that hour of her despair, One mightier than death appears with vesture dipped in blood up the dark vale he comestravailing in the greatness of his strength. In his hand he bears the gates of the grave and the vanquished sting of death. He brings to light immortality. He comes its conqueror and living witness. Of a future existence "God hath now given assurance to all men, in that he hath raised Jesus Christ from the dead."

Such are the relations of nature and revelation to this doctrine. Their testimony harmonizes, yet that of neither is superfluous. Revelation is a reaffirmance of Nature in a more direct and explicit manner, rendered necessary, not by a defect in the original declaration of God, but by the moral pravity of man. There is a "nodus, deo vindice dignus," but it is of man's own creating. By this view, the relations of nature to revelation in this, is harmonized with their relative position in other parts of the revealed system. The common view jars with it, and that most disastrously. It shocks a sense of moral fitness, and cannot fail to stagger faith, to be told, on the one hand, that man's obligations to moral law are written by nature on the heart, and revelation is but a republication of what was before in the human constitution; but, on the other, hat there is preindicated by nature no future tribunal where

this law shall be vindicated-nor future being where its natural and moral retributions can take effect. Indeed it seems almost an absurdity in terms to speak of a moral law under a moral God, with no judgment or world of retribution to vindicate the law. The former seems necessarily to imply the latter. Could one of these be disjoined from the other in God's revelation to man, it would be a monstrous discrepancy, distorting and destroying the whole system. The continued existence of the soul seems so indispensable a basis of a moral system relating to man, that one could hardly be disclosed or authenticated apart from the other. It could hardly seem possible that moral distinctions themselves, should they not be annihilated, could 'fail at least to lose their authority, when the soul in which they inhere, might at any moment utterly perish alike from all retribution and all consciousness. The natural language of the heart would be, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die;" and we cannot suppose wise moral governor would have disclosed a moral system in such a fragmentary, unsymmetrical, and powerless state. The common view, as it violates the fitness of things and the general analogy of natural and revealed religion, must tend to universal skepticism; while the one we have endeavored to present, approving itself to a philosophic analysis of the human mind, and agreeing with the uniform testimony of the faith, if not the philosophy of heathenism, and harmonizing the natural and revealed systems, must tend powerfully to corroborate the latter. Especially it may arrest the madness of the infidel to find that, could he silence the voice of revelation, he gains nothing. Still in himself a prophet of evil utters its fearful vision, though the word that blends mercy with justice were forever stifled. Still the grasp of moral law is on him forever, and an eternity of retribution is treasured up in the eternity of his moral existence. Though the revealed doom were only a hideous dream, still the tendencies of character move on eternally, and causes guiltily originated here accomplish their consequence hereafter. Still lives Remorse, "the undying worm"

still drags Despair her endless chain- and Memory pours out her fiery lake-and Conscience brandishes her scorpion sting. Still undying sin, "the second death," her hideous shade waited on by the pale armies of fear, and hate, and sorrow, and shame, stalks down the ever-thickening darkness of an immortal ruin.

This view, too, while it justifies the God of nature, glorifies the God of revelation. It shows us what we owe to Christ.

Appearing as he did to man in this eclipse of God and of the human soul, he stands virtually in the attitude of the Original Revealer of immortality. To this he adds, that through the agonies of death he has wrought out for us the testimony of experience, and has given to what was before prediction, the assurance of a witnessed fact. To Christ we owe it, that we know we are to live forever-that we may lay our loved and our beautiful in the dust, and know that they are not perished. We can now permit the mighty and overwhelming certainty of immortality to come in and enravish the soul. How changed thereby this whole universe! How changed our attitude in it! No longer a child of corruption, and brother of the worm, man is now the only abiding thing beneath the stars. A moral significancy inheres in him, which is everlasting. No longer is he overpowered and crushed to earth by the amplitude and duration of the material universe-no longer does he wander amid its frail and flower-like delights, its scenes of fading light and loveliness, and list the swift flight of the hours as they forever pass, with the sorrowful thought, "I am still frailer and briefer than ye-I pass, to come not again-one thrill of youth, the morn, the moonlight, the balmy spring, the glory of thought, and the raptured vision of truth, alike warn me as they pass'so much we take from the capital of thy existence."" He knows that "He who alone hath immortality," hath breathed on him, and Christ has opened to him, beyond the seen and perishable, the new heavens and the new earth--where the mountain lifts its everlasting masses from the heart of the earth to the sky, the grave-stone of elder worlds-where the cataract pours forth its mighty anthem from the birth of time-where the hoar ocean peals its solemn organ-tone since the song of the morning stars; he no longer crouches, awe-crushed, trembling, earthward, creature of an hour. No longer does he shrink with agony into dark and desolate nothingness, as the sense of eternity descends upon him from the shining universe of night. Through the mighty agony and triumph of Christ, opens on him a destiny that shall outlive, outsing, outshine them all. He knows there is that within him which shall abide, when the fast-bound mountain has fled-which shall sing the hymn of life, and reflect the unapproachable brightness, when the organ of Ocean is mute, and Niagara has given up her harp to God, and the shadow of Death shall stretch through the starry infinite. Beyond the sun's fading beam-beyond the storm's waning beauty-beyond