ll always be a grateful ground of reliance and
trust. And the verdict thus revealed is unequivocally in favor of
the doctrine of immortality.

There can be no changes independently of something which is
changed. Amidst all the changeable in us which passes and is
forgotten, there is something which stays and is inexpugnable. It
is our identity. That which appears in consciousness first, which
recurs oftenest, and which persists longest, is the most valid
object of belief. And what is that but the very consciousness, or
the subject as its own object? Surely, the one invariable
accompaniment of all the shifting states of consciousness is the
bare essential consciousness itself: this is, so to speak, the
unitary vessel containing all their varieties. This unquestionably
exists now. The burden of proof, then, as Bishop Butler long ago
showed, is on those who affirm its destruction in the article of
death. Consciousness is purely immaterial, as every one who has
passed beyond the most ignorant and childish stages of thought
must see. Merely because it is, in our present experience,
associated in time and space with a material organism, therefore
to declare that it is a dependent production of matter, or a
transient concomitant of the transient body, is a gratuitous
assertion with not one scintilla of evidence.

Even, for the moment, admitting it to be true that no argument of
irresistible cogency has yet been advanced to prove the
immortality of the soul, it is certain that no proof has ever
been given of its mortality. The very utmost that can be claimed
by any skeptic who fairly understands the whole case, is that the
different arguments, for and against, offset one another, and
leave the question in a neutral balance of suspense, just where it
was before the debate began. Many persons hold that the counter
reasonings do thus balance and annul one another. For them the
problem remains to be decided on other grounds than those of the
logical disputation which has proved inadequate to its settlement.
These other grounds are considerations of congruity, probability,
the prophetic preparations and demands of present experience. What
sort of a figure would the segments which we now see, compose, if
they were completed? What in the hidden future portions of our
destiny would be harmonic and complementary as related with the
parts here experienced? When the other modes of inquiry are
abandoned this mode remains. Its teachings