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to be combined anew, and so its hopes are treasured up in charnel-houses. Christ is to have a new incarnation on the earth, which is to be burned over and furnished for the risen saints; and here under the reign of natural law is to be the kingdom of Christ, amid the gorgeous flora of a sensuous paradise. Heaven and hell are not modes and realms of being above the natural degree of life, and freed of its conditions, but localities somewhere among the planetary and stellar spaces, whose precise position eludes for the present our poor optics and clumsy telescopes. Though the pains of hell are not physical altogether, yet the sufferings of the body, and its unpropitious and dismal surroundings, are the chief things that strike the imagination with dread. The Divine. Being himself is naturalized and brought down to the plane of these conceptions. He is the supreme natural man. The creation and government of the world are a more stupendous mechanism, and its final destruction will be a mere tremendous exercise of natural strength on the crashing or crackling timbers of the universe. And so on. There is not a subject in the whole range of religious thought which has not been, so to say, completely carnalized by this mode of conceiving and representing spiritual things. The real future, the eternity towards which we travel and which is soon to fold us in, lies as completely

void and formless to religious naturalism as to non-religious, and not an echo comes back to either as it sends its shout into the abyss. For them there is no hereafter which is above the plane of natural things. It is very true that theologizers of the school we describe complain loud enough of naturalistic tendencies leading to doubts of immortality; but they themselves go down and swamp in naturalism, the moment they attempt to spread their sails on that mystic and solemn sea.

CHAPTER II.

NON-BELIEF.

Ir is generally a waste of effort to reason against hard and stubborn Denial, and fortunately that is not the state of mind we usually meet with when we discourse of a life to come. There is, however, a wide-spread conviction, that this is a subject that lies beyond the reach of human ken. It is well to admit that we are to live again. Probably we shall. But when we ask how, when, and where, we trend upon forbidden topics, which will yield us nothing but vain conjecture. No one has come back from the land of mystery; the language of revelation itself is indeterminate and variously understood. Let us confine ourselves to what we know, and do the work of this world instead of speculating about another. Such is the attitude of a mind by which this class of subjects is very commonly ignored. Probably a distaste for them has been increased by the fact that the sects have disputed about

them and agreed in nothing, and so thousands outside of the sects attend only to their present business and "jump the life to come."

We would conciliate this class of minds if possible, and gain from them an attentive hearing. There are two suggestions, we think, which will not fail to get an audience with them at last. The first is, that, if there be a future life, it has probably some very important connection with the present. It is not likely-no candid mind will so affirm-that the after-scene, could we discern it, has nothing to do in shaping the end for which we live now; that two realms of being lie closely proximate, and men pass daily from one to the other, and yet have no inter-connection which it becomes us to know. Men do not reason thus respecting other periods of their existence. They do not think it of no consequence that childhood should have some preconceptions of the period of youth, and indicate what its studies are to be; that youth shall have some forecast of its manhood, and be educated for its work; that manhood shall comprehend in its view the period of age, and prepare to go down the stream sheltered from the storms. But what if childhood and youth, manhood and age, are only successive waves in the river of years, that rolls onward its mighty waters till they stir the vast ocean-waves whose throbs beat on for ever,

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though they never touch the shore? Is it likely that any period of an endless life is to begin de novo, that any one of its ever-moving billows is independent of the rest, and not rather the resultant of all the antecedent forces? Does not everything about us and within us indicate that this life is preliminary and preparatory, a segment, and not a circle; and do not all its consenting voices make up one grand prophecy of something to be hereafter? Can it fail, then, to occur, at least to him who admits the possibility of a future life, that what it is, and how, and where, are questions of momentous bearing on what the present life ought to be, and that hence the most insignificant occurrence may be fitted in to a vast and endless economy? If we are preparing for something, shall we not ask what? If we are afloat, and the shores move from us, and farewells are wafted from the banks, shall we not ask whither? Does not even the material universe indicate very distinctly an end beyond itself? Was it prepared with so much splendid garniture only for beings who perish and return to the earth to be "rolled round with its stones and trees"? Was all this lavishment of the Divine wisdom designed only to educate man for that, or is it not rather for a worthier and more lasting result that the worlds with rhythmic step travel the celestial highways and pour together their un

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