l appear full
circle beyond the grave.

The argument is hardly met by asserting that this untimely
mortality is the punishment for non observance of law; for,
denying any further life, would a scheme of existence have been
admitted establishing so awful a proportion of violations and
penalties? If there be no balancing sphere beyond, then all should
pass through the experience of a ripe and rounded life. But there
is the most perplexing inequality. At one fell swoop, infant,
sage, hero, reveller, martyr, are snatched into the invisible
state. There is, as a noble thinker has said, an apparent "caprice
in the dispensation of death strongly indicative of a hidden
sequel." Immortality unravels the otherwise inscrutable mystery.

Thirdly, the function of conscience furnishes another attestation
to the continued existence of man. This vicegerent of God in the
breast, arrayed in splendors and terrors, which shakes and
illumines the whole circumference of our being with its thunders
and lightnings, gives the good man, amidst oppressions and woes, a
serene confidence in a future justifying reward, and transfixes
the bad man, through all his retinue of guards and panoplied
defences, with icy pangs of fear and with a horrid looking for
judgment to come. The sublime grandeur of moral freedom, the
imperilling dignities of probation, the tremendous
responsibilities and hazards of man's felt power and position, are
all inconsistent with the supposition that he is merely to cross
this petty stage of earth and then wholly expire. Such momentous
endowments and exposures imply a corresponding arena and career.
After the trial comes the sentence; and that would be as if a
palace were built, a prince born, trained, crowned, solely that he
might occupy the throne five minutes! The consecrating, royalizing
idea of duty cannot be less than the core of eternal life.
Conscience is the sensitive corridor along which the mutual
whispers of a divine communion pass and repass. A moral law and a
free will

17 Crombie, Natural Theology, Essay IV.: The Arguments for
Immortality. Bretschneider, Die Religiose Glaubenslehre, sect.
20-21.

are the root by which we grow out of God, and the stem by which we
are grafted into him.

Fourthly, all probable surmisings in favor of a future life, or
any other moral doctrine, are based on that primal postulate
which, by virtue of our rational and ethical constitution, we are
authorized and bound to acce