th. The objections
urged by unbelievers belong to an open discussion of the question
of immortality, not to an illustrative statement of the suggesting
grounds on which the popular belief rests. When, after sufficient
investigation, we ask ourselves from what causes the almost
universal expectation of another life springs, and by what
influences it is nourished, we shall not find adequate answer in
less than four words: feeling, imagination, faith, and reflection.
The doctrine of a future life for man has been created by the
combined force of instinctive desire, analogical observation,
prescriptive authority, and philosophical speculation. These are
the four pillars on which the soul builds the temple of its hopes;
or the four glasses through which it looks to see its eternal
heritage.

First, it is obvious that man is endowed at once with
foreknowledge of death and with a powerful love of life. It is not
a love of being here; for he often loathes the scene around him.
It is a love of self possessed existence; a love of his own soul
in its central consciousness and bounded royalty. This is an
inseparable element of his very entity. Crowned with free will,
walking on the crest of the world, enfeoffed with individual
faculties, served by vassal nature with tributes of various joy,
he cannot bear the thought of losing himself, of sliding into the
general abyss of matter. His interior consciousness is permeated
with a self preserving instinct, and shudders at every glimpse of
danger or hint of death. The soul, pervaded with a guardian
instinct of life, and seeing death's steady approach to destroy
the body, necessitates the conception of an escape into another
state of existence. Fancy and reason, thus set at work, speedily
construct a thousand theories filled with details. Desire first
fathers thought, and then thought woos belief.

Secondly, man, holding his conscious being precious beyond all
things, and shrinking with pervasive anxieties from the moment of
destined dissolution, looks around through the realms of nature,
with thoughtful eye, in search of parallel phenomena further
developed, significant sequels in other creatures' fates, whose
evolution and fulfilment may haply throw light on his own. With
eager vision and heart prompted imagination he scrutinizes
whatever appears related to his object. Seeing the snake cast its
old slough and glide forth renewed, he conceives, so in death man
but sheds his fleshly