y spirits, victims of disease and penury,
drag out their years in agony, neglect, and tears. Some bold
minions of selfishness, with seared consciences and nerves of
iron, pluck the coveted fruits of pleasure, wear the diadems of
society, and sweep through the world in pomp. The virtuous suffer
undeservedly from the guilty. The idle thrive on the industrious.
All these things sometimes happen. In spite of the compensating
tendencies which ride on all spiritual laws, in spite of the
mysterious Nemesis which is throned in every bosom and saturates
the moral atmosphere with influence, the world is full of wrongs,
sufferings, and unfinished justice.16 There must be another world,
where the remunerating processes interiorly begun here shall be
openly consummated. Can it be that Christ and Herod, Paul and
Nero, Timour and Fenelon, drop through the blind trap of death
into precisely the same condition of unwaking sleep? Not if there
be a God!

15 M. Jules Simon, La Religion Naturelle, liv. iii.:
l'Immortalite.

16 Dr. Chalmers, Bridgewater Treatise, chap. 10.

There is a final assemblage of thoughts pertaining to the
likelihood of another life, which, arranged together, may be
styled the moral argument in behalf of that belief.17 These
considerations are drawn from the seeming fitness of things,
claims of parts beseeching completion, vaticinations of
experience. They form a cumulative array of probabilities whose
guiding forefingers all indicate one truth, whose consonant voices
swell into a powerful strain of promise. First, consider the
shrinking from annihilation naturally felt in every breast. If man
be not destined for perennial life, why is this dread of non
existence woven into the soul's inmost fibres? Attractions are co
ordinate with destinies, and every normal desire foretells its own
fulfilment. Man fades unwillingly from his natal haunts, still
longing for a life of eternal remembrance and love, and confiding
in it. All over the world grows this pathetic race of forget me
nots. Shall not Heaven pluck and wear them on her bosom? Secondly,
an emphatic presumption in favor of a second life arises from the
premature mortality prevalent to such a fearful extent in the
human family. Nearly one half of our race perish before reaching
the age of ten years. In that period they cannot have fulfilled
the total purposes of their creation. It is but a part we see, and
not the whole. The destinies here seen segmentary wil