he present or the coming
futurity. Now, but for the doctrine of immortality, Man would be an
exception to this law,-he would stand forth as an anomaly in Nature,
with aspirations in his heart for which the universe had no antitype
to offer, with capacities of understanding and thought that never
were to be followed by objects of corresponding greatness through the
whole history of his being!

............

"'With the inferior animals there is a certain squareness of
adjustment, if we may so term it, between each desire and its
correspondent gratification. The one is evenly met by the other, and
there is a fulness and definiteness of enjoyment up to the capacity
of enjoyment. Not so with Man, who, both from the vastness of his
propensities and the vastness of his powers, feels himself chained
and beset in a field too narrow for him. He alone labours under the
discomfort of an incongruity between his circumstances and his
powers; and unless there be new circumstances awaiting him in a more
advanced state of being, he, the noblest of Nature's products here,
would turn out to be the greatest of her failures.'(8)

"This, then, I take to be the proof of Soul in Man, not that he has a
mind--because, as you justly say, inferior animals have that, though
in a lesser degree--but because he has the capacities to comprehend, as
soon as he is capable of any abstract ideas whatsoever, the very truths
not needed for self-conservation on earth, and therefore not given to
yonder ox and opossum,--namely, the nature of Deity, Soul, Hereafter.
And in the recognition of these truths, the Human society, that excels
the society of beavers, bees, and ants, by perpetual and progressive
improvement on the notions inherited from its progenitors, rests its
basis. Thus, in fact, this world is benefited for men by their belief
in the next, while the society of brutes remains age after age the same.
Neither the bee nor the beaver has, in all probability, improved since
the Deluge.

"But inseparable from the conviction of these truths is the impulse of
prayer and worship. It does not touch my argument when a philosopher of
the school of Bolingbroke or Lucretius says, 'that the origin of prayer
is in Man's ignorance of the phenomena of Nature.' That it is fear or
ignorance which, 'when rocked the mountains or when groaned the ground,
taught the weak