of his dreams, half seeing what
he thinks, half believing what he wishes. His desires pass through
unconscious volition into supposed facts. Before the miraculous
power of his grief wielded imagination the world is fluent, and
fate runs in the moulds he conceives. The adored form on which
corruption now banquets, he sees again, animated, beaming, clasped
in his arms. He cries, It cannot be that those holy days are
forever ended, that I shall never more realize the blissful dream
in which we trod the sunny world together! Oh, it must be that
some time God will give me back again that beloved one! the
sepulchre closed so fast shall be unsealed, the dead be restored,
and all be as it was before! The conception thus once born out of
the delirium of busy thought, anguished love, and regnant
imagination, may in various ways win a fixed footing in faith.

Thirdly, the notion which we are now contemplating is one link in
a chain of thought which, in the course of time and the range of
speculation, the theorizing mind could not fail to forge. The
concatenation of reflections is this. Death is the separation of
soul and body. That separation is repulsive, an evil. Therefore it
was not intended by the Infinite Goodness, but was introduced by a
foe, and is a foreign, marring element. Finally God will vanquish
his antagonist, and banish from the creation all his thwarting
interferences with the primitive perfection of harmony and
happiness. Accordingly, the souls which Satan has caused to be
separated from their bodies are reserved apart until the fulness
of time, when there shall be a universal resurrection and
restoration. So far as reason is competent to pronounce on this
view considered as a sequel to the disembodying doom of man, it is
an arbitrary piece of fancy. Philosophy ignores it. Science gives
no hint of it.

6 Baumgarten, Beantwortung des Sendschreibens Heyns vom Schlafe
der abgeschiedenen Seelen. Chalmers. Astronomical Discourses, iv.

It sprang from unwarranted metaphors, perverted, exaggerated,
based on analogies not parallel. So far as it assumes to rest
on revelation it will be examined in another place.

Fourthly, after the notion of a great, epochal resurrection, as a
reply to the inquiry, What is to become of the soul? a dogma is
next encountered which we shall style that of a local and
irrevocable conveyance. The disembodied spirit is conveyed to some
fixed region,7 a penal or a blissful abode, where it