rld, all set on the one hope of future union, and who then can
believe that God will coldly blast them all? They are innocent,
they are holy, they are meritorious, they are unspeakably dear. We
would not destroy them; and God will not.

Man's life is the true fable of that beautiful youth, Narcissus,
who had a twin sister of remarkable loveliness, strongly
resembling himself, and to whom he was most tenderly attached. She
dies young. He frequents fountains to gaze upon his own image
reflected in the waters, it seeming to him the likeness of her he
has lost. He is in pity transformed into a flower on the border of
a stream, where, bending on his fragile stem, he seeks his image
in the waters murmuring by, until he fades and dies. Has not God,
the all loving Author who composed the sweet poem of Man and
Nature, written at the close a reconciling Elysium wherein these
pure lovers, the fond Narcissus and his echo mate, shall wander in
perennial bliss, their embracing forms mirrored in unruffled
fountains?

Looking now for the conclusion of the whole matter, we find that
it lies in three different aspects, both of inquiring thought and
of practical morality, according to the lights and modes in which
three different classes of minds approach it. To the consistent
metaphysician, reasoning rigidly on grounds of science and
philosophy, every thing pertaining to the methods and circumstances
of the future life is an affair of entire uncertainty and hypothesis.5
If in the future state the soul retains its individuality as an
identical force, form, life, and memory, and if associates in the
present state are brought together, it is probable that old friends
will recognise each other. But if they are oblivious of the past,
if they are incommunicably separated in space or state, if one
progresses so much farther that the other can never overtake him,
if the personal soul blends its individual consciousness with the
unitary consciousness of the Over Soul, if it commences a new career
from a fresh psychical germ, then, by the terms, there will be no
mutual recognition. In that case his comfort and his duty are to
know that the anguish and longing he now feels will cease then; to
trust in the benignity of the Infinite Wisdom, who knows best what
to appoint for his creatures; and to submit with harmonizing
resignation to the unalterable decree, offering his private wish a
voluntary sacrifice on the altar of natural piety. That he sha