in any alembic nor discerned with any glass. The man who goes into
the dark crimson dripping halls of physiology seeking proofs of
immortality, and, failing to find them, abandons his faith in it,
is like that hapless traveller who, groping in the catacombs under
Rome, was buried by the caving in of the sepulchral roof, and thus
lost his life, while all the time, above, the great vault of
heaven was stretching, blue and breezy, filled with sunshine and
sentient joy!

When we contemplate men in a mass, like a swarm of bees or a hive
of ants, we find ourselves doubting their immortality. They melt
away, in swiftly confused heaps and generations, into the bosom of
nature. On the other hand, when we think of individuals, an almost
unavoidable thought of personal identity makes us spontaneously
conclude them immortal. It rather requires the effort then to
think them otherwise. But obviously the real problem is never of
the multitudinous throng, but always of the solitary person. In
reference

to this question it is sophistry to fix our thoughts on a Chinese
city as crowded with nameless and indistinguishable human
inhabitants as a decayed cheese is with vermin. Fairness requires
that our imaginations and reasonings upon the subject fasten upon
an individual, set apart and uplifted, like a king, in the
incommunicable distinctness and grandeur of selfhood and
responsibility.

From looking about this grave paved star, from painful and
degrading contemplations of dead bodies, "the snuff and loathed
part of nature which burns itself out," let a man turn away, and
send his interior kingly glance aloft into ideal realms, let him
summon up the glorious sentiments of freedom, duty, admiration,
the noble experiences of self sacrifice, love, and joy, and his
soul will extricate itself from the filthy net of material decay,
and feel the divine exemption of its own clean prerogatives,
dazzling types of eternity, and fragments of blessedness that
"Promise, on our Maker's truth, Long morrow to this mortal youth."
Martyrdom is demonstration of immortality; for self preservation
is the innermost, indestructible instinct of every conscious
being. When the soul, in a sacred cause, enthusiastically rushes
upon death, or in calm composure awaits death, it is irresistibly
convinced that it cannot be hurt, but will be blessed, by the
crisis. It knows that in an inexpressibly profound sense whosoever
would ignobly save his life loses it, bu