to borrow a happy
expression from Flugge, have made "Resurrection a younger sister
of Immortality."

Nature, the old, eternal snake, comes out afresh every year in a
new shining skin. What then? Of course this emblem is no proof of
any doctrine concerning the fate of man. But, waiving that, what
would the legitimate correspondence to it be for man? Why, that
humanity should exhibit the fresh specimens of her living
handiwork in every new generation. And that is done. Nature does
not reproduce before us each spring the very flowers that perished
the previous winter: she makes new ones like them. It is not a
resurrection of the old: it is a growth of the new. The passage of
the worm from its slug to its chrysalis state is surely no symbol
of a bodily resurrection, but rather of a bodily emancipation, not
resuming a deserted dead body, but assuming a new live one. Does
the butterfly ever come back to put on the exuvia that have
perished in the ground? The law of all life is progress, not
return, ascent through future developments, not descent through
the stages already traversed. "The herb is born anew out of a
seed, Not raised out of a bony skeleton. What tree is man the seed
of? Of a soul."

Sir Thomas Browne, after others, argues for the restoration of
man's body from the grave, from the fancied analogy of the
palingenesis or resurrection of vegetables which the magicians of
the antique East and the mystic chemists of the Middle Age boasted
of effecting. He having asserted in his "Religion of a Physician"
that "experience can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant,
and from its cinders recall it into its stalk and leaves again,"
Dr. Henry Power wrote beseeching "an experimental eviction of so
high and noble a piece of chemistry, the reindividuality of an
incinerated plant." We are not informed that Sir Thomas ever
granted him the sight. Of this beautiful error, this exquisite
superstition, which undoubtedly arose from the crystallizations of
certain salts in arborescent forms which suddenly surprised the
early alchemists in some of their experiments, we have the
following account in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature:" "The
semina of resurrection are concealed in extinct bodies, as in the
blood of man. The ashes of roses will again revive into roses,
though smaller and paler than if they had been planted
unsubstantial and unodoriferous, they are not roses which grew on
rose trees, but their delicate apparit