ll. Guiding our imaginations by that omniprevalent law of laws,
the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in
entertaining a belief--let us say, rather, in indulging a hope--that the
processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever,
and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and
then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?

And now--this Heart Divine--what is it? _It is our own._

Let not the merely seeming irreverence of this idea frighten our souls
from that cool exercise of consciousness--from that deep tranquillity of
self-inspection--through which alone we can hope to attain the presence
of this, the most sublime of truths, and look it leisurely in the face.

The _phaenomena_ on which our conclusions must at this point depend, are
merely spiritual shadows, but not the less thoroughly substantial.

We walk about, amid the destinies of our world-existence, encompassed by
dim but ever present _Memories_ of a Destiny more vast--very distant in
the by-gone time, and infinitely awful.

We live out a Youth peculiarly haunted by such dreams; yet never
mistaking them for dreams. As Memories we _know_ them. _During our
Youth_ the distinction is too clear to deceive us even for a moment.

So long as this Youth endures, the feeling _that we exist_, is the most
natural of all feelings. We understand it _thoroughly_. That there was a
period at which we did _not_ exist--or, that it might so have happened
that we never had existed at all--are the considerations, indeed, which
_during this youth_, we find difficulty in understanding. Why we should
_not_ exist, is, _up to the epoch of our Manhood_, of all queries the most
unanswerable. Existence--self-existence--existence from all Time and to
all Eternity--seems, up to the epoch of Manhood, a normal and
unquestionable condition:--_seems, because it is_.

But now comes the period at which a conventional World-Reason awakens us
from the truth of our dream. Doubt, Surprise and Incomprehensibility
arrive at the same moment. They say:--"You live and the time was when you
lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than
your own; and it is only through this Intelligence you live at all."
These things we struggle to comprehend and cannot:--_cannot_, because
these things, being untrue, are thus, of necessity, incomprehensible.

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous