best which nature alone can supply the spirit to help it bear its infirmities and heal its sicknesses. What we want - and this only is that sweet vision of Faith kneeling before the Cross along the dim pathway, which Palmer has hung up in our memory on the pure marble, to be a joy forever; and which Tennyson himself has elsewhere sung in that noble invocation beginning

"Strong Son of God, immortal Love!"

ARTICLE III.

IMMORTALITY AND ANNIHILATION.

Debt and Grace, as related to the Doctrine of Future Life. By C. F. HUDSON. 1857-1861. pp. 497.

Christ our Life. The Scriptural Argument for Immortality through Christ alone. By C. F. HUDSON. 1861. pp. 168. La Mort n'est qu'un Sommeil Éternel. Pere la Chaise. 1793.

PRYING up foundations is a favorite work of the present generation. But this always involves the question whether the stone shall move or the lever be broken. We are quite sure that it will take a tougher bar of iron than has yet been forged to loosen the great rock of the Immortality of the Soul and topple it over into the black and bottomless abyss of Annihilation. We hold this assurance as well concerning the just now vigorously advocated assumption of the limited existence of the unforgiven wicked, as against the general affirmation of the materialists, that all human spirits are perishable like the brutes.

That this topic should need re-arguing almost compels one to ask, if there is anything settled under the sun? The dream and the study of mankind since the creation, it has evolved in its defence a large variety of reasons. These have moulded themselves to the peculiar characteristics of their authors; now exhibiting the deductions of a severe logic, and now taking on

the softer hues of sentiment, and giving utterance to the impassioned demands of the moral consciousness for a ceaseless life. To many, the intuitional persuasion is sufficient: "We know that the soul is immortal, as we know there is a God." Can any one affirm the contrary, with the same intelligent, devout, self-vindicating positiveness?

What is a human soul? An elementary, uncomposed, undecomposable unity or entity. Simple substances are permanent. Destruction is only a relative change in compounds, merging one form of combination into another. The cessation of being is merely apparent, not real. The elementary parts sustain no loss amid whatever transmutations. Thus, in the combustion of wood or coal, in the evaporation of fluids, and the like, a specific organization disappears; but its components undergo no extinction. This does not prove (as we are told) that atoms must have always existed. "He who made all things is God" the sole "from everlasting." Nor does this demand their necessary indestructibility. That depends on their Maker's ordination. "Un-creation" is as possible as creation, if God wills. But what is the law which He has established here? That is just now the inquiry; and we are stating its answer.

Man's spiritual nature is a simple unit. We infer this from its resemblance to God's being. That is the perfect type of uncreated simplicity. Hence the old theological formula - that "God is the simplest being in the universe." Ours is the finite form of the same quality. Not that in both there are not blended many different attributes. The divine and the human soul have each the powers of intellection, sympathy, conscience; each is a marvellous collection of susceptibilities and capabilities. Yet neither was ever collected as a bouquet is made up from a flower garden, or a casket of jewels from a lapidary's shop. Gold is a simple substance reducible to nothing more radical; yet any given piece of it has its various description of weight, color, shape. The soul is one, though of many properties. Certain things belong to it, are latent in it, came with it into being, constitute its identity. It comes an original creation from God's hand entire in its natural, though as yet undeveloped capacities. It enters into no union with the body which disturbs its condition as thus defined. It works through the

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medium of its muscular and nervous habitation, but it is separate from this and can act without it. Flesh and spirit are two wholly distinct facts. Said the prophet Elijah; "O Lord my God, I pray thee, let this child's soul come into him again; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived.” Disunited awhile, the entireness of neither was marred. Death consequently does not touch the immaterial portion of us with any disorganizing, destroying force. This passes its crucible as silver through the fire, unconverted into aught else, unreduced to nought. "The dust returns to the dust as it was, and the spirit unto God who gave it." So we find the simple, elementary quality of the mind discriminated and protected, as a permanent essence. But we are at a loss to discover why this obliges us to "welcome all living creatures to immortal life." The immortality is not in the necessity of the case, but in the pleasure of God, even with regard to the highest forms of spiritual being. It is not of "debt" in any sense; and here, once for all, we object to the antithesis in the title of one of these volumes, as conveying an untrue conception of the common faith. This imposes no such claim on the Creator. Suppose that the brutal nature is an exception to the law of living organisms; and for this reason that it is an irrational, irresponsible nature constitutionally, and therefore devoid of any powers or adaptations for the uses of immortality? We give ourselves no trouble about the futurity of the brutes which perish. We do not at all concede that, "if this argument is conclusive, it must be granted that whatever has felt and acted spontaneously must live again and forever." Brutal spontaneity is not spiritual rationality. Were the issue, however, this to accept the future duration of the brute mind (if so it can be termed) or to let go our faith in the immortality of our entire race; we should promptly set to work to stretch our belief over the whole of the required ground, rather than to contract it to the meagre and (we must add) the miserable narrowness of the annihilationcreed. But no such issue is legitimately presented. The automatic theory of the inferior animal life, indorsed by eminent physiologists, would save us from this alternative; and certainly, as an hypothesis, this offers as good a solution of the problem in that direction as the annihilationists can demand.

But words enough have been expended upon this captious objection.

The powers and adaptations of the soul point unmistakably to the perpetuity of its being. The author of the "Night Thoughts" has not put this fact more strongly than the general consciousness will justify:

"Who reads his bosom reads immortal life:

Or Nature there, imposing on her sons,
Has written fables; man was made a lie."

We are able to comprehend the true, the perfect, the universal, the everlasting. Is the idea nothing better than the "somewhat Gnostic" of a recent criticism—that intelligences of an order high enough to grasp such truths must have, in their native organism, a cast of spirit which answers to the mould of these grand and limitless conceptions, thus partially at least appropriated as its own? We just drop the query, in passing. An old thought is not therefore false. But the argument has other and more popular bearings.

Besides the capacity which we have to debate this great question of our own endless existence, we find within ourselves a preconfigured fitness for its possession, as an original law of our being. This is our position that under the constitution given to humanity by the Creator, and irrespective of its moral character and destiny, immortality as much inheres in it as does. conscience or reason or memory. It is sensible of an elastic force pressing outwardly against enclosing barriers. It feels a vital energy which needs only a freer condition of life to exchange its thus far infantile steps for the tread of a giant, the soarings of a seraph. It is like a princely ship with her sails taken aback and fluttering in a contrary wind. She rocks on the wave, nor can she leave her port for distant seas though thoroughly equipped for her ocean voyage. But when the breezes favor, her white canvas will swell to their breath, and bending to the pressure, she will glide swiftly upon her watery path. Shall we say that yon vessel, freighted with costly merchandise, manned with an active crew, with every rope and sail and spar in place, with charts and compass on board, but fast

held to the bottom by a foul anchor, was built and rigged just for this purpose to swing there like a buoy over a sunken rock? Then why this outlay and this outfit? These tell that her business is across the deep on worldwide courses; that she was not made to ride and rot within sight of the spot where she was launched. Adaptation predicts employment. But not more positively in material than in spiritual constructions. What the soul is conscious that it can be and do, it will have an opportunity to essay; it will fail of, if it fails, by no natural incapacitation. "Wherefore," asks Jean Paul, “were we placed upon this ball of earth, creatures with light wings; if, instead of soaring with our wings of ether, we are to fall back into the earth-clods of our birth ?”

Man finds within himself faculties of comprehension, attachment, emotion, passion, which here only begin to put forth the strength which is in them. These are the occasions of numberless desires which crave their gratification in ranges of knowledge not now to be well explored; in a depth and permanency and perfectness of sympathy and love here never to be realized. What is more universally characteristic of our race than the dissatisfaction and the regrets of defeated endeavors, blighted hopes? The human heart is as restless as an imprisoned bird. Especially does it sigh over the fruitlessness of its purer aspirations, its nobler wishes. It is not that, under these impulses, it would have a more complete possession of any merely earthly good. This, however abundant, is not what the spirit most craves that it may be truly blest. Its deeper wants covet not more of this world, but the experience of something radically unlike these worldly gifts. The animal in us has its content in appropriate enjoyments. The soul is not content with that food. It needs and asks a different. For, as Richter writes:

"The eternal hunger in man, the unappeased longing of his heart demands not richer but other nourishment. Thus our indigence is not satisfied with the quantity, but depends on the species of the food. The imagination can paint itself a degree of satisfaction, but it is not happy in the accumulation of all possessions, if they are other than truth, beauty, and goodness."

The observation is morally and intellectually just

that this