t whosoever would nobly
lose his life saves it. Martyrdom demonstrates immortality.

"Life embark'd out at sea, 'mid the wave tumbling roar, The poor
ship of my body went down to the floor; But I broke, at the bottom
of death, through a door, And, from sinking, began forever to
soar."

The most lamentable and pertinacious doubts of immortality
sometimes arise from the survey of instances of gross wickedness,
sluggishness, and imbecility forced on our attention. But, as
these undeniably are palpable violations of the creative
intention, it is not just to reason from them. In fairness the
argument demands that we select the noblest, healthiest specimens
of completed humanity to reason from. Should we not take a case in
which God's will is so far plainly fulfilled, in order to trace
that will farther and even to its finality? And regarding on his
death bed a Newton, a Fenelon, a Washington, is it difficult to
conceive him surviving the climax and catastrophe of his somatic
cell basis and soaring to a more august range of existence?
Remembering that such as these have lived and died, ay, and even
the godlike Nazarene, can we believe that man is merely a white
interrogation point lifted on the black margin of matter to ask
the answerless secret of the universe and be erased?

Such a conclusion charges God with the transcendent crime of
infanticide perpetrated in the most deliberate manner and on the
most gigantic scale. Who can bear, by thus quenching the hope of
another life, to add death to death, and overcast, to every
thoughtful eye, the whole sunny field of life with the melancholy
shadow of a bier? There is a noble strength and confidence,
cheering to the reader, in these words of one of the wisest and
boldest of thinkers: "I should be the very last man to be willing
to dispense with the faith in a future life: nay, I would say,
with Lorenzo de'Medici, that all those are dead, even for the
present life, who do not hope for another. I have the firm
conviction that our soul is an existence of indestructible nature,
whose working is from eternity to eternity. It is like the sun,
that seems indeed to set, but really never sets, shining on in
unchangeable splendor." 49 Such a view of our destiny incomparably
inspires and ennobles us. Man, discovering under all the poor,
wretched accidents of earth and sense and hard fortune the
immortality of his soul, feels as that king's son who, lost in
infancy, and growing up unde