ending song? And if the light of the after-scene were turned full upon the fore-scene, should we not know better what to do and how to do it? and would not the fore-scene be elevated into new importance and grandeur, its smallest things be rescued from meanness and insignificance, and should we not feel as never before the dignity and beauty of our daily life?

If all this be so, can a second suggestion fail to occur to the non-believer,- that some means are probably at hand of gaining a knowledge sufficiently clear and distinct of what the after-scene is? Since it is probable that such knowledge will have a bearing on all our doings now, is it likely that the knowledge is withheld? If some have missed of it, is it not probably their fault, and not that of the great Revealer? and may not the sects have lost it through their own janglings, and because they would not be hushed before the Eternal Reason? And if we rise out of the sphere of their noises and stand and listen, shall we not be in a position to hear with sufficient clearness, not what the synods, but what the Spirit saith unto the churches? Yea, among all the churches, do not thirsting and honest minds obtain, under variant forms of statement, so much of the substance of truth as serves to illumine their steps, and is not the agreement more perfect than you suppose among all those who have

been separated from the disputings, and caught inward towards the eternal melodies?

These considerations, we think, ought to gain for our theme a candid hearing, even from those who have excluded all such topics from their daily thought. They ought to convince the practical man that it may be the most practical subject that can possibly engage him, even as the calculations and formulas of Bowditch in his study were of more practical importance than the figures of any merchant's ledger to the sailor tossing at his helm upon the seas.

2

CHAPTER III.

THE THEORY OF METAPHYSICS.

If we rise out of non-belief to positive affirmation, our thoughts must take one of three forms of conception. There are only three possible theories to be applied to the future life. If we think about it at all, we shall adopt one of them, either consciously or unconsciously, for none other has ever been conceived of by the mind or expressed in language. It is an important point gained, when modes of belief can be so distinctly classified that we can see clearly the range within which our choice must lie.

The first is the faintest possible departure from non-belief. It asserts that the state after death is one of mind without body, or, in other words, of "disembodied spirits"; and its mode of induction is to abstract all the qualities of body, and take what is left as our knowledge of the life hereafter. You must first go through the process of subtraction, and then look after your re

mainder; and by this careful ciphering you have all that you may affirm of immortality. Thus:Body has form, color, extension, and divisibility into parts. Take these away, and you have left pure spirit, without form, without color, without extension, and without parts. Body is conditioned in space. Take away this condition, and you have mind or spirit out of space. Very well. Having denuded us to this extent, please tell us what there is left of us. We get for an answer, "the thinking principle," "pure essence," "a metaphysical entity," "a substance uncompounded and without parts," "pure simplicity," "a substance so simple that nothing can be simpler, and which may be likened to a point which is of no dimension," "a substance which has no parts and no extension, and is circumscribed by no place," "a monad, indivisible and unextended, and therefore immaterial." It must be a "substance," for what is not a substance is nothing. But the substance must not have any form, for that would look so much like a body that metaphysical hairsplitting could hardly show the difference. The substance must not be extended, for extension re

*

*Such definitions of disembodied spirit are made by Lord Monboddo, author of "Ancient Metaphysics," by Archbishop Secker, by Lord Brougham (see Discourse of Natural Theology), by Bishop Newton, by Dean Sherlock, by Dr. Good, author of the Book of Nature, and by many others.

quires space to be extended in, and you are now supposed to be out of space; and it must be extended, if at all, either up and down, laterally or lengthwise, and then you would expand into dimensions, and that would be body again; and you are supposed to have left your body behind you. So, having lost your body, remember that you have become pure simplicity, or a mathematical point, from which you must neither be extended nor expanded a hair's breadth; for then you would expand into a heresy which so great a metaphysician as Lord Monboddo has pronounced "as absurd and impious as can well be imagined," and which Dr. Mosheim thinks endangers a very important doctrine of the Christian Church, namely, the resurrection of the material body.

The remainder, therefore, after our subtraction, is uncompounded substance compressed to a mathematical point, and without parts. If the reader should be disposed to ask, If there are no parts, how can there be any whole? let him remember that, in metaphysics, not only the whole is not always made up of parts, but that two and two do not by any means make four. And if he should be disposed to burnish his faculties in order to get at the profound meaning of these philosophers, we beg that he will spare himself that trouble; for we assure him, on their own aver