exuvia, while the spirit emerges,
regenerate. He beholds the beetle break from its filthy sepulchre
and commence its summer work; and straightway he hangs a golden
scarsbaus in his temples as an emblem of a future life. After
vegetation's wintry deaths, hailing the returning spring that
brings resurrection and life to the graves of the sod, he dreams
of some far off spring of Humanity, yet to come, when the frosts
of man's untoward doom shall relent, and all the costly seeds sown
through ages in the great earth tomb shall shoot up in celestial
shapes. On the moaning sea shore, weeping some dear friend, he
perceives, now ascending in the dawn, the planet which he lately
saw declining in the dusk; and he is cheered by the thought that

"As sinks the day star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his
drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new spangled
ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky, So Lycidas, sunk
low, shall mount on high."

Some traveller or poet tells him fabulous tales of a bird which,
grown aged, fills its nest with spices, and, spontaneously
burning, soars from the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a
thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a
miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from
the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove
its cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until
at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a
winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a
new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in the
fulness of time, disentangle itself from the imprisoning meshes of
this world of larva, a thing of spirit beauty, to sail through
heavenly airs; and henceforth he engraves a butterfly on the
tombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizing
observation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for an
existence beyond death.

Thirdly, the prevailing belief in a future life is spread and
upheld by the influence of authority. The doctrine of the soul's
survival and transference to another world, where its experience
depends on conditions observed or violated here, conditions
somewhat within the control of a select class of men here, such a
doctrine is the very hiding place of the power of priest craft, a
vast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight of
priesthoods has often devised and the cunning policy of states
subsidized. In most