the world
necessarily presents to youth and age. In such cases, no doubt, could the
series of persons constituting the individual be brought together, a
scene of inexpressibly tender and intimate communion would ensue.

"But, though no magic may bring back our past selves to earth, may we not
hope to meet them hereafter in some other world? Nay, must we not expect
so to meet them if we believe in the immortality of human souls? For if
our past selves, who were dead before we were alive, had no souls, then
why suppose our present selves have any? Childhood, youth, and manhood
are the sweetest, the fairest, the noblest, the strongest of the persons
who together constitute an individual. Are they soulless? Do they go down
in darkness to oblivion while immortality is reserved for the withered
soul of age? If we must believe that there is but one soul to all the
persons of an individual it would be easier to believe that it belongs to
youth or manhood, and that age is soulless. For if youth, strong-winged
and ardent, full of fire and power, perish, leaving nothing behind save a
few traces in the memory, how shall the flickering spirit of age have
strength to survive the blast of death?

"The individual, in its career of seventy years, has not one body, but
many, each wholly new. It is a commonplace of physiology that there is
not a particle in the body to-day that was in it a few years ago. Shall
we say that none of these bodies has a soul except the last, merely
because the last decays more suddenly than the others?

"Or is it maintained that, although there is such utter diversity--
physical, mental, moral--between infancy and manhood, youth and age,
nevertheless, there is a certain essence common to them all, and
persisting unchanged through them all, and that this is the soul of
the individual? But such an essence as should be the same in the babe
and the man, the youth and the dotard, could be nothing more than a
colourless abstraction, without distinctive qualities of any kind--a
mere principle of life like the fabled jelly protoplasm. Such a fancy
reduces the hope of immortality to an absurdity.

"No! no! It is not any such grotesque or fragmentary immortality that God
has given us. The Creator does not administer the universe on so
niggardly a plan. Either there is no immortality for us which is
intelligible or satisfying, or childhood, youth, manhood, age, and all
the other persons who make up an individual, live