ghly alienating very friends. Such fundamental
alterations of character may occur in us, or in our friend, before
we meet in the unseen state, that we shall no more recognise each
other's spirits than we should know each other on earth after a
separation in which our bodily appearances and voices had been
entirely changed. These considerations would induce us to think
that recognition hereafter is not sure, but turns on the condition
that we preserve a remembrance, desire, and adaptedness for one
another.

If now the critical inquirer shall say there is no evidence, and
it is incredible, that the body will be restored to a future life,
or that the soul has any resemblance to the body by which it may
be identified, furthermore, if he shall maintain that the doctrine
of the revelation and recognition of the souls of friends in
another life by an instinctive feeling, a mysterious attraction
and response, is fanciful, an overdrawn conclusion of the
imagination, not warranted by a stern induction of the average
realities of the subject, and if he shall then ask, how are we to
distinguish our former acquaintances among the hosts of heaven?
there is one more fact of experience which meets the case and
answers his demand. When long absence and great exposures have
wiped off all the marks by which old companions knew each other,
it has frequently happened that they have met and conversed with
indifference, each being ignorant of whom the other was; and so it
has continued until, by some indirect means, some accidental
allusion, or the agency of a third person, they have been suddenly
revealed. Then, with throbbing hearts, in tears and rapture, they
have rushed into each other's arms, with an instantaneous
recurrence of their early friendship in all its original warmth,
fulness, and flooding associations. Many such instances are
related in books of romance with strict truth to the actual
occurrences of life. Several instances of it are authenticated in
the early history of America, when children, torn from their homes
by the Indians, were recovered by their parents after twenty or
thirty years had elapsed and they were identified by circumstantial
evidence. Let any parent ask his heart, any true friend ask his heart,
if, discovering by some foreign means the object of his love,
he would not embrace him with just as ardent a gratitude and
devotion as though there were no outward change and they had
known one another at sight. S