sechster Brief.

14 Ulrici, Unsterblichkeit der menschlichen Seele aus dem Wesen
Gottes erwiesen.

dissatisfied from every feast, craving, with divine hunger and
thirst, the ambrosia and nectar of a fetterless and immortal
world. Were we fated to perish at the goal of threescore, God
would have harmonized our powers with our lot. He would never have
set such magnificent conceptions over against such poor
possibilities, nor have kindled so insatiable an ambition for so
trivial a prize of dust to dust.

Fourthly, one of the weightiest supports of the belief in a future
life is that yielded by the benevolence of God. Annihilation is
totally irreconcilable with this. That He whose love for his
creatures is infinite will absolutely destroy them after their
little span of life, when they have just tasted the sweets of
existence and begun to know the noble delights of spiritual
progress, and while illimitable heights of glory and blessedness
are beckoning them, is incredible. We are unable to believe that
while his children turn to him with yearning faith and gratitude,
with fervent prayer and expectation, he will spurn them into
unmitigated night, blotting out those capacities of happiness
which he gave them with a virtual promise of endless increase.
Will the affectionate God permit humanity, ensconced in the field
of being, like a nest of ground sparrows, to be trodden in by the
hoof of annihilation? Love watches to preserve life. It were
Moloch, not the universal Father, that could crush into death
these multitudes of loving souls supplicating him for life, dash
into silent fragments these miraculous personal harps of a
thousand strings, each capable of vibrating a celestial melody of
praise and bliss.

Fifthly, the apparent claims of justice afford presumptive proof,
hard to be resisted, of a future state wherein there are
compensations for the unmerited ills, a complement for the
fragmentary experiences, and rectification for the wrongs, of the
present life.15 God is just; but he works without impulse or
caprice, by laws whose progressive evolution requires time to show
their perfect results. Through the brief space of this existence,
where the encountering of millions of free intelligences within
the fixed conditions of nature causes a seeming medley of good and
evil, of discord and harmony, wickedness often triumphs, villany
often outreaches and tramples ingenuous nobility and helpless
innocence. Some saintl