of it is so rational, the region of
contemplation into which it lifts the mind is so grand, the
prospects it opens are of such universal reach and import, that
the study of it brings us into full sympathy with the sublime
scope of the idea of immortality and of a cosmopolitan vindication
of providence uncovered to every eye. It takes us out of the
littleness of petty themes and selfish affairs, and makes it
easier for us to believe in the vastest hopes mankind have ever
known. It causes the most magnificent conceptions of human destiny
to seem simply proportional to the native magnitude and beauty of
the powers of the mind which can conceive such things. After
traversing the grounds here set forth we feel that if the view
based on them be not the truth, it must be because God has in
reserve for us a sequel greater and lovelier, not meaner than our
brightest dream hitherto. The worthiest theory of the fate of man
which the spirit of man can construct must either be a revelatory
divination of the truth, or an inadequate attempt to grasp the
design of the Creator in its true glory. It is impious and absurd
to hold that man can think out a scheme superior to the one God
has decreed. And it seems equally unreasonable to suppose that the
scheme of God for the future stages of our career is one which has
no hints in our present experience. Certainly it appears more
likely that the sequel will be discovered by the logical
completion of the inwrought order which has been slowly unfolding
from the first. And what do history and prophecy show more plainly
than the tendency to a convergence of all humanity in every man?
Spreading consanguinity in descent and growth of sympathetic
knowledge both point to this. Perfect this in each man, and
illuminate his whole organism and its relations with adequate
intelligence, and we have a true resurrection, not indeed of
decayed bodies from the grave, but of historic states of
consciousness from their latent embedment in the nervous system,
and their undulatory record in the dynamic medium of the creation.
Our senses now convert certain sets of undulations of the ethereal
medium into perceptions of light, heat, sound, and so interpret
their contents and extract their tidings. It is not impossible
that in a coming stage of development we may obtain additional
senses; our spirits may command the means of translating into
correspondent states of consciousness all the other modes of
vibration o