ore to its chimes,
he suddenly, with his scissors, severed a single small wire, and the
wonderful performances were closed forever. No artist thereafter could
be found to restore the work, for none other than the inventor was
acquainted with its mechanism, or could discover the secret of its
operation. And so it remained a silent monument to the ingratitude of a
sovereign and the revenge of a victim of the most barbarous cruelty. And
yet the principle was still there uninjured, and as capable of operation
as ever before, yet forever dead to that complicated mechanism, since
the single connecting rod was severed which bound the idea to its only
means of action--the immaterial to the material--the soul to the body.
The mechanism too was as perfect as ever, in all its constituent parts,
but forever silent and inoperative from lack of connection with the idea
upon which it depended. Side by side lay the principle and its means of
manifestation, separated only by the infinitesimal portion of space
which divided the parts of the broken wire, yet as effectually separated
as if worlds had rolled between them. Unite again these slender
fragments, and both would again spring to life, unimpaired in their
workings, and as brilliant as ever; but without this restoration both
must remain forever dead.

Even such is the connection between the soul and body. A system of
slender wires--more slender by far than the most attenuated thread of
human construction--connects the more than ethereal spirit with the
wonderful mechanism of the human body. And so long as this intimate
connection is maintained intact we have the living, breathing,
reasoning being, the image of his Creator, the most wonderful
manifestation of Almighty power. But once these slender wires are
parted, and the soul separated from the body by death, the relation of
that man's spirit with the material world is dissolved forever. The
senses of the body are the only medium through which the soul can act
upon or receive impressions from the world of matter, and between them
and it, once so intimately associated, there is now a great gulf
fixed--the gulf which separates time from eternity. Henceforth the body,
deprived of the lifegiving principle, its end accomplished, which was
only to serve as a temporary dwelling for the soul in its time of trial
and probation, goes swiftly to decay, and returns to its original dust.
But the soul lives on for another world and a different s