t any intelligible theory of the world and life into which
it was destined soon to emerge. But it would surely be bad logic
to infer, because the embryo could not, from want of materials
within its experience, ascertain the how, the when, the where, and
the what, of the life awaiting it, that there was no other life
reserved for it. An acorn buried and sprouting in the dark mould,
if endowed with intelligent consciousness, could not know any
definite particulars of its maturer life yet to be in the upper
light and air, with cattle in its shade and

15 Lib. iii. ll. 503-508.

singing birds in its branches. Ignorance is not a ground of
argument, only of modest suspense. We can only reason from what we
know. And the wondrous mysteries or natural miracles with which
science abounds, myriads of truths transcending all fictions, melt
and remove from the path of faith every supposed difficulty. Any
quantity of facts have been scientifically established as real
which are intrinsically far more strange and baffling to belief
than the assertion of our immortality is. Indeed, "there is no
more mystery in the mind living forever in the future than in its
having been kept out of life through a past eternity. The
authentic wonder is the fact of the transition having been made
from the one to the other; and it is far more incredible that,
from not having been, we are, than that, from actual being, we
shall continue to be." 16

The unbounded possibilities of life suggested by science and open
to imagination furnish sufficient reply to the objection that we
cannot conceive the precise causes and modes of a future state.
Had one little partitular been different in the structure of the
eye, or in the radiation and media of light, we should never have
seen the stars! We should have supposed this globe the whole of
creation. So some slightest integument or hindering condition may
now be hiding from us the sublime reality and arrangements of
immortality which in death's disenveloping hour are to burst into
our vision as the stellar hemisphere through the night. Shut up
now to one form of being and one method of experience, how can we
expect an exhaustive knowledge of other and future forms and
methods of being and experience? It is a contradiction to ask it.
But the soul is warranted in having faith, like a buried mustard
seed which shall yet mount into its future life. A sevenfold
denser mystery and a seven times narrower ignorance w