It feels through all this fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.

These are difficulties which attend every attempt to form definite conceptions as to the details of this question. Mr Greg is wise when he says of the belief in immortality, 'Let it rest in the vague, if you would have it rest unshaken.'

A farther point, however, is to be noted. Although we may validly object to have the roots of our convictions exhibited to view, as we decline to expose the rootlets of a plant to 'the nipping and the eager air' of winter, it is a signal gain to integrity of belief that the scientific spirit of our age demands the removal of all presuppositions which cannot be verified, and insists that those which remain shall be luminous from root to branch. It does this with even more force and rigor, than Descartes employed, in his new method of research. So much intellectual mist has been allowed to gather and settle over this question of the soul's destiny, that when a breath of the east wind raises it, and shows how little is known or can be intelligently surmised, many desire that the obscuring curtain should speedily fall again. But in discussing the question of immortality it is above all things necessary that we keep modestly within the lines of veritable evidence; that we lean on no broken (if possible on no breakable) reed; and that, distinguishing between what we know and what we may only hope for, we mark the alternatives of the controversy, and the consequences that follow our premises, alike of affirmation and denial. If we reject the doctrine of preexistence, for example, we must either believe in nonexistence, or fall back on one or other of the two

opposing theories of creation and traduction and, as we reject extinction, we may find that pre-existence has fewer difficulties to face than the rival hypotheses. Creation or creationism, as it has sometimes been named is the theory that every moment of time multitudes of new souls are simultaneously born, not sent down from a celestial source, but freshly made out of nothing, and placed in bodies prepared for them by a process of natural generation. It is curious to observe how vehemently the Cambridge Platonists recoiled from the notion of a pure spirit fresh from the hand of Deity being placed by him in such a body as would presently defile his image.' The idea of the Creator being compelled to add a spirit to the body, however and whenever a body might arise, according to natural law and process, seemed to them a monstrous infraction of Divine liberty. The theory of traduction seemed to them even worse, as it implied the derivation of the soul from at least two sources- -from both parents; and a substance thus derived was apparently composite and quasi-material.

It is easy to criticise the doctrine of Pre-existence, as held in the Pythagorean brotherhood, and taught by the mystic sage of Agrigentum, or even by Plato. The fantastic folly of the Brahminical teaching (as in the twelfth book of the laws of Manu) and the absurdity of Buddha's transmigrations are apparent. But it is easier to follow Lucretius in his satire of it, than to appreciate the difficulty which gave it birth. As reproduced by Virgil and by Cicero, the genius of the Greek poets and philosophers lost the charm of its original setting and I question if the surmises of Plato were fully appraised, till the Phædo itself experi

:

It

enced metempsychosis in Wordsworth's 'Ode.' But stripped of all extravagance, and expressed in the modest terms of probability, the theory has immense speculative interest, and great ethical value. It is much to have the puzzle of the origin of evil thrown back for an indefinite number of cycles of lives, to have a workable explanation of nemesis, and of what we are accustomed to call the moral tragedies, and the untoward birth of a multitude of men and women. is much, also, to have the doctrine of immortality lightened of its difficulties; to have our immediate outlook relieved, by the doctrine that, in the soul's eternity, its pre-existence and its future existence are one. The retrospect may assuredly help the prospect. And if 'this grey dogma, fairly clear of doubt,' as Glanvill describes it, seems strange in the absence of all remembered traces of past existence, it is worth considering that in a future state a point will be reached when pre-existence will be true. If we are to be immortal, immediately after death metempsychosis will have become a realised experience; and our present lives will stand in the same relation to the future, on which we shall then have entered, as that in which the past now stands to our present life.

Henry More said that he produced his golden key of pre-existence only at a dead lift, when no other method would satisfy him, touching the ways of God, that by this bypothesis he might keep his heart from sinking.' Whether we make use of it or not, we ought to realise its alternatives. They are these. Either all life is extinguished and resolved, through an absorption and reassimilation of the vital principle everywhere or a perpetual miracle goes on, in the incessant

and rapid increase in the amount of spiritual existence within the universe; and, while human life survives, the intelligence and the affection of the lower animals perish everlastingly.

Man's life is like a Sparrow, mighty King!

That-while at banquet with your Chiefs you sit
Housed near a blazing fire-is seen to flit
Safe from the wintry tempest. Fluttering,
Here did it enter; there, on hasty wing,
Flies out, and passes on from cold to cold;
But whence it came we know not, nor behold
Whither it goes. Even such, that transient Thing,
The human Soul; not utterly unknown

While in the Body lodged, her warm abode;
But from what world She came, what woe or weal
On her departure waits, no tongue hath shown ;
This mystery if the Stranger can reveal,

His be a welcome cordially bestowed.

Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part i., § 15.

THEISM-DESIDERATA IN THE THEISTIC

ARGUMENT.

(The British Quarterly Review, July 1871.)

IT is a philosophical commonplace that all human questioning leads us back to certain ultimate truths or facts which cannot be further analysed, and of which no other explanation can be given than that they are, or that they exist. Every explanation of the Universe rests and must rest on the inexplicable. The borders of the known are fringed with mystery, the limits of the knowable are bounded by it, and all the data of our knowledge recede into it, by longer or shorter pathways. Thus, while it is the very mystery of the universe that has given rise to human knowledge, by quickening the curiosity of man, the same mystery prescribes a limit to his insight, continues to overshadow him in his researches, and to girdle him, in his latest discoveries, with its veil. In wonder all Philosophy is born; in wonder it always ends; and, to adopt a well-known illustration, our knowledge is a stream, of which the source is hid, and the destination unknown, although we may surmise regarding both.

But the mystery, which thus envelopes the origin and the destination of the Universe, is not absolutely overpowering; nor does it lay an arrest on the human faculties in their efforts to understand the universe

as a whole. Man has always striven to penetrate farther and farther into the shrine of nature, and to