And I believe that there is no other way of salvation than through the merits of his atonement.-Daniel Webster. WEBSTER (DANIEL) DICTATES HIS OWN EPITAPH. This is the inscription to be placed on my monument. I want to have somewhere a declaration of my belief in Christianity. I do not wish to go into any doctrinal distinctions as to the person of Jesus, but I wish to express my belief in his divine mission: Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. Philosophical Argument, especially that drawn from the Vastness of the Uni verse in Comparison with the Apparent Insig nificance of this Globe, has sometimes shaken my Reason for the Faith which is in me; but my Heart has always assured and reassured me that the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be a Divine Reality. The Sermon on the Mount cannot be merely a Human Produc tion. This Belief enters into the very Depth of my WILCOX (ELLA WHEELER)-CHRIST'S NATIVE TONGUE. The wise men ask, "What language did Christ speak?" you seek: WILLIAM I. (EMPEROR) COMMENDS CHRIST. May all the alumni of this institution (Cathedral College) find this (Jubilee) day so blest to them that the knowledge of God and his only begotten Son Jesus Christ, as the only source of true salvation, may advance to them. PART V. IMMORTALITY. ADDISON DREAMS OF A FUTURE STATE. Why will any man be so impertinently officious as to tell me that all prospect of a future state is only fancy and delusion? Is there any merit in being the messenger of ill news? If it is a dream, let me enjoy it, since it makes me both the happier and better man.-Joseph Addison. ADDISON SINGS OF THE SOUL'S SECURITY. The soul, secure in her existence, smiles The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and nature sink with years; The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds. (For Addison again, see Cato.) AGASSIZ-THE IMMORTALITY OF ANIMALS. Most of the arguments of philosophy in favor of the immortality of man apply equally to the permanency of the immaterial principles in other living beings.—Essay on Classification. ALGER NAMES SOME NOTED BELIEVERS. The greatest philosophers, the pre-eminently imperial thinkers Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Anselm, Hegel, et al.have asserted the eternal substantiality of the soul. To accept the doctrine on the authority of the wisest philosophers and the purest saints is perfectly in keeping with what the human race does in all other provinces of thought.-A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future State, pp. 744, 745. ARNOLD (EDWIN) CONSIDERS DEATH A BIRTH. There is a significance like a perpetual whisper from Nature in the way in which the theme of his own immortality haunts a man. . . . It is not on account of the incredibility of a conscious life after death that sensible people should doubt it. . . . It is reasonable to believe that she (Nature) commences afresh with her delicately developed treasures, making them the groundwork and stuff for splendid farther living, by process of death, which, even when it seems premature, is probably as natural and orderly as birth, of which it is the complement; and wherefrom, it may well be, the newborn dead arises to find a fresh world ready for his pleasant and novel, but sublimated body, with gracious and willing kindred ministrations awaiting it, like those which provided for the human babe the guarding arms and nourishing breasts of its mother.-Death-and Afterwards, pp. 12, 16, 32, 33. ARNOLD (MATTHEW)—MOUNTING TO ETERNAL LIFE. No, no! the energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagged not in the earthly strife- BARNES'S IMMORTAL HUMMING-BIRD. The moment that you attach the idea of immortality to anything, no matter how insignificant it may otherwise be, that moment you invest it with unspeakable importance. Nothing can be mean and unworthy of notice which is to exist forever. The little humming-bird that on a May morning poises itself over the opening honeysuckle in your garden, and which is fixed a moment and then gone, is lovely to the eye, but we do not attach to it the idea of great importance in the scale of being. But attach to that now short-lived beautiful visitant of the garden the word "immortality," and you invest it at once with unspeakable dignity. Let it be confined forever in a cage, or let it start off on rapid wing, never to tire or faint, beyond the reach of Neptune, or where the comet flies, or where Sirius is fixed in the heavens, to continue its flight when the heavens shall have vanished away, and though with most diminutive consciousness of being, you make it an object of the deepest interest. The little, lonely, fluttering, eternal wanderer! The beautiful little bird on undying wing among the stars! Who can track its way? What shall we think of its solitariness and eternal homelessness? What, then, shall we think of an immortal soul? A soul to endure forever!... a soul capable of immortal happiness or pain! My careless, thoughtless reader; that soul, immortal and eternal, is yours.-Albert Barnes, The Way of Salvation, p. 64. BEECHER-GRAIN THAT GROWS EVERYWHERE. Take the existence of the soul in heaven; . . . that is full of obscurities. But let it hang in the realm of the imagination, and it is not only the product of the imagination of one man, but of all the nations through the growth of time. It is the imagination that has been reaped and threshed and winnowed and grown into the very bread of life. It is not any poem or notion; it is the work, the final work of the imagination of the human race speaking all languages, under all governments; it is the result to which men come: that death does not stop human life; it goes on unending.-Henry Ward Beecher, Comments on Robert Ingersoll's Discourse at the Grave of his Brother, E. C. Ingersoll. BOARDMAN-THE SOULS OF BRUTES. If the Scripture is to be believed, animals have "souls;" and having souls, who knows but that animals, at least some of them, are immortal? . . . Ah, this mystery of life, this Vital Principle common to man and animal, this riddle of the Psyche, this enigma of the Soul! I do not wonder that men in all ages of the world have bowed down before it. I do not wonder that in that far-off age, when intellectual Egypt was mapping out the heavens and rearing her own mighty pyramids, she knelt before her Sacred Bull and Ibis and Beetle, because she believed them endowed with souls and instinct with immortality.-George Dana Boardman, The Creative Week, pp. 163, 166. BOLINGBROKE THE BELIEF'S BEGINNINGLESSNESS. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has been inculcated from time immemorial. BROOKS (BISHOP)—SERIAL SCULPTURE-WORK. Shall not the sculptor sleep one hundred times before the statue which he begins to-day is finished, and wake one hundred times more ready for his work, bringing with one. hundred new mornings to his work the strength and the visions that have come to him in his slumbers?-Sermons, Vol. I., p. 221. BROWNING IS COMING OUT SOMEWHERE. Though I stoop Into a dark, tremendous sea of cloud, It is but for a time. I press God's lamp Close to my breast; its splendor, soon or late, Will pierce the gloom; I shall emerge somewhere. BRYANT'S HYMN TO IMMORTALITY. I who essayed to sing in earlier days Yet once again, oh man, come forth and view She shall teach thee that the dead have slept But to awaken in more glorious forms, And that the mystery of the seed's decay Is but the promise of the coming life. Aye, learn the lesson: Though the worm shall be Thy brother in the mystery of death, And all shall pass, humble and proud and gay Together to earth's mighty charnel-house, |