ould bring no
real argument against the survival of the soul. For in an
omnipotent infinitude of possibilities one line of ignorance
cannot exhaust the avenues and capacities of being. Escaping the
flesh, we may soar into heaven

"Upon ethereal wings, whose way
Lies through an element so fraught
With living Mind that, as they play,
Their every movement is a thought."

Ignorance of the scientific method avails nothing against moral
proofs of the fact. The physiologist studying the coats of the
stomach, the anatomist dissecting the convolutions of the brain,
could never tell that man is capable of sentiment, faith, and
logic. No stethoscope can discern the sound of an expectation, and
no scalpel can lay bare a dream; yet there are expectations and
dreams. No metaphysical glass can detect, no prognosis foresee,
the death of the soul with the dissolution of its organs: on
empirical grounds, the assertion of it is therefore unwarranted.
But though no amount of obscurity enveloping the subject, no
extent of ignorance disabling us now to grasp the secret, is a
legitimate basis of disbelief, yet actually, there can be no
doubt, in multitudes of instances, the effectual cause of
disbelief in immortality is the impossibility of vividly
conceiving its conditions and scenery; "for," as one of the
subtlest of thinkers has remarked, "however far faith may go
beyond experience, it

16 Martineau, Sermon on Immortality, in Endeavors after the
Christian Life.

must always be chained down by it at a distance." But if there are
good grounds for anticipating another life, then man should
confide in it, no matter how incompetent he is to construct its
theatre and foresee its career. A hundred years ago, one might
have scouted the statement that the most fearful surgical
operations would be performed without inflicting pain, because it
was impossible to see how it could be done. Or if a person had
been informed that two men, one in Europe and one in America,
should converse in lightning athwart the bed of the Atlantic, he
might have rejected it as an absurdity, because he could not
conceive the mode. If destined to a future life, all we could
reasonably expect to know of it now would be through hinting germs
and mystic presentiments of it. And there we do experience to the
fullest extent: their ceaseless prophecies are everywhere with us,

"Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not
realized."

The last weapon of