that its separation from its mother would introduce
it to a new and independent life. He would rather conclude that it
would perish, like a twig wrenched from its parent limb. So it may
be in the separation of the soul from the body. Further, as our
latent or dimly groping senses were useless while we were
developing in embryo, and then implied this life, so we now have,
in rudimentary condition, certain powers of reason, imagination,
and heart, which prophesy heaven and eternity; and mysterious
intimations ever and anon reach us from a diviner sphere,

"Like hints and echoes of the world To spirits folded in the
womb."

The Persian poet, Buzurgi, says on this theme,

"What is the soul? The seminal principle from the loins of
destiny. This world is the womb: the body, its enveloping
membrane: The bitterness of dissolution, dame Fortune's pangs of
childbirth. What is death? To be born again, an angel of
eternity."

Fifthly, many cultivated thinkers have firmly believed that the
soul is not so young as is usually thought, but is an old stager
on this globe, having lived through many a previous existence,
here or elsewhere.7 They sustain this conclusion by various
considerations, either drawn from premises presupposing the
necessary eternity of spirits, or resting on dusky reminiscences,
"shadowy recollections," of visions and events vanished long ago.
Now, if the idea of foregone conscious lives, personal careers oft
repeated with unlost being, be admitted, as it frequently has been
by such men as Plato and Wordsworth, all the

6 Bretschneider, Predigten uber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, und
Anferstehung.

7 James Parker, Account of the Divine Goodness concerning the
Pre existence of Souls.

connected analogies of the case carry us to the belief that
immortality awaits us. We shall live through the next transition,
as we have lived through the past ones.

Sixthly, rejecting the hypothesis of an anterior life, and
entertaining the supposition that there is no creating and
overruling God, but that all things have arisen by spontaneous
development or by chance, still, we are not consistently obliged
to expect annihilation as the fate of the soul. Fairly reasoning
from the analogy of the past, across the facts of the present, to
the impending contingencies of the future, we may say that the
next stage in the unfolding processes of nature is not the
destruction of our consciousness, but issues in a purer life,
elevat