se
with timeless simultaneity. It is in entire keeping with
everything else in the workings of God, as demonstrated by
science, on every hand, both in nature and history. The atomic
theory and the nebular hypothesis, the chemical crucible and the
mathematical calculus, the microscope and the telescope discover
to our senses and our reason, wherever we look, facts as
mysterious to the understanding, and as baffling to the
imagination as any of the foregoing implications; showing us, in
every department of nature and experience, the bewildering
miracles of the infinitely little and the infinitely great exactly
balanced and perpetually passing into one another.

There is a third way, in addition to the ghost world of the
primitive faith of barbarians, and the resurrection climax of the
Christian and Parsee and Hebrew and Moslem creeds, in which the
imagination of man, moved by his instinct and reason, has
concreted the idea of a future life; namely, by the doctrine of
transmigration. A striking feature and no slight recommendation of
the foregoing view of the true meaning of the dogma of the
resurrection is that it reconciles these two chief forms of the
belief in immortal life. For resurrection and transmigration agree
in the central point of a restoration of the disembodied soul to a
new bodily existence, only the former represents this as a single
collective miracle wrought by an arbitrary stroke of God at the
close of the earthly drama, the latter depicts it as constantly
taking place in the regular fulfillment of the divine plan in the
creation. This difference is certainly, to a scientific and
philosophical thinker, who reasons on the data of nature and
experience and not on the dicta of theologians, strongly in favor
of the Oriental theory. We have no experience whatever of any
general resurrection, but all experience is full of the constant
appearances of souls in freshly created bodies throughout the
scale of sentient being. If our final future life is to be a
bodily one there surely is a world of presumptive evidence,
therefore, in behalf of transmigration as opposed to resurrection.
Besides the various distinctive arguments of its own, every reason
for the resurrection holds with at least equal force for
transmigration. The argument from analogy is especially strong. It
is natural to argue from the universal spectacle of incarnated
life that this is the eternal scheme everywhere, the variety of
souls finding