cious. Another man gets a harder blow on the head from a bigger
stick, and it kills him. Does he become unconscious, too? If so, when
does he come to his consciousness? The man who has had a slight or
moderate blow comes to himself when the immediate shock passes off and
the organs begin to work again, or when a bit of the skull is pried up,
if that happens to be broken. Suppose the blow is hard enough to spoil
the brain and stop the play of the organs, what happens them?

A British captain was struck by a cannon-ball on the head, just as
he was giving an order, at the Battle of the Nile. Fifteen months
afterwards he was trephined at Greenwich Hospital, having been
insensible all that time. Immediately after the operation his
consciousness returned, and he at once began carrying out the order
he was giving when the shot struck him. Suppose he had never been
trephined, when would his consciousness have returned? When his breath
ceased and his heart stopped beating?

When Mr. Bernard said to Helen, "I have been dead since I saw you," it
startled her not a little; for his expression was that of perfect good
faith, and she feared that his mind was disordered. When he explained,
not as has been done just now, at length, but in a hurried, imperfect
way, the meaning of his strange assertion, and the fearful Sadduceeisms
which it had suggested to his mind, she looked troubled at first, and
then thoughtful. She did not feel able to answer all the difficulties he
raised, but she met them with that faith which is the strength as well
as the weakness of women,--which makes them weak in the hands of man,
but strong in the presence of the Unseen.

"It is a strange experience," she said; "but I once had something like
it. I fainted, and lost some five or ten minutes out of my life, as much
as if I had been dead. But when I came to myself, I was the same person
every way, in my recollections and character. So I suppose that loss
of consciousness is not death. And if I was born out of unconsciousness
into infancy with many family-traits of mind and body, I can believe,
from my own reason, even without help from Revelation, that I shall be
born again out of the unconsciousness of death with my individual
traits of mind and body. If death is, as it should seem to be, a loss of
consciousness, that does not shake my faith; for I have been put into
a body once already to fit me for living here, and I hope to be in some
way fitted after thi