th with satiety," and
the mortal circuits of earth and time are a round of griefs and
pangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead.
Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is that
grovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfish
instincts, crawling on brutish grounds,

8 The Zincali, part ii. ch. i.

cannot awaken the creative force of spiritual wants slumbering
within, nor lift its head high enough out of the dust to see the
stars of a deathless destiny; and a fifth group of disbelievers
deny immortality because their degraded experience does not
prophesy it. Many a man might say, with Autolycus, "For the life
to come, I sleep out the thought of it." A mind holy and loving,
communing with God and an ideal world, "lighted up as a spar grot"
with pure feelings and divine truths, is mirrored full of
incorporeal shapes of angels, and aware of their immaterial
disentanglement and eternity. A brain surcharged with fires of
hatred, drowsed with filthy drugs, and drenched with drunkenness,
will teem, on the contrary, with vermin writhing in the meshes of
decaying matter. Cleaving to evanescent things, men feel that they
are passing away like leaves on waves; filled with convictions
rooted and breathing in eternity, they feel that they shall abide
in serene survival, like stars above tempests. Turn from every
obscene sight, curb every base propensity, obey every heavenly
vision by assimilation of immortal things, sacred self denials and
toils, disinterested sympathies and hopes, accumulate divine
treasures and kindle the mounting flame of a divine life, and at
the same time consciousness will crave and faith behold an
illimitable destiny. Experiences worthy of being eternal generate
faith in their own eternity. But the ignorant and selfish
sensualist, whose total experience is of the earth earthy, who has
no realization of pure truth, goodness, beauty, is incapable of
sincere faith in immortal life. The dormancy of his higher powers
excludes the necessary conditions of such a faith. His ignoble
bodily life does not furnish the conscious basis and prophecy of a
glorious spiritual life, but shudderingly proclaims the cessation
of all his experience with the destruction of his senses. The
termination of all the functions he knows, what else can it be but
his virtual annihilation? When to the privative degradations of an
uncultivated and earthy experience, naturally accompanied by a
passiv