ak and are gone, and only the dark flood remains
still flowing forward. They are like tones of music, commencing
and ending with the unpurposed breath that makes them. Nature is a
vast congeries of mechanical substances pervaded by mindless
forces of vitality. Consciousness is a production which results
from the fermentation and elaboration of unconscious materials;
and after a time it deceases, its conditions crumbling into their
inorganic grounds again.

From the abyss of silence and dust intelligent creatures break
forth, shine, and sink back, like meteor flashes in a cloud. The
generations of sentient being, like the annual growths of
vegetation, by spontaneity of dynamic development, spring from
dead matter, flourish through their destined cycle, and relapse
into dead matter. The bosom of nature is, therefore, at once the
wondrous womb and the magnificent mausoleum of man. Fate, like an
iron skeleton seated at the summit of the world on a throne of
fresh growing grass and mouldering skulls, presides over all, and
annihilation is the universal doom of individual life. Such is the
atheistic naturalist's creed. However indefensible or shocking it
is, it repeatedly appears in the annals of speculation; and any
synopsis of the possible conclusions in which the inquiry into
man's destiny may rest that should omit this, would be grossly
imperfect.

This scheme of disbelief is met by insuperable objections. It
excludes some essential elements of the case, confines itself to a
wholly empirical view; and consequently the relentless solution it
announces applies only to a mutilated problem. To assert the
cessation of the soul because its physical manifestations through
the body have ceased, is certainly to affirm without just warrant.
It would appear impossible for volition and intelligence to

1 Lalande, Dictionnaire des Athees Anciens et Modernes.

originate save from a free parent mind. Numerous cogent evidences
of design seem to prove the existence of a God by whose will all
things are ordered according to a plan. Many powerful impressions
and arguments, instinctive, critical, or moral, combine to teach
that in the wreck of matter the spirit emerges, deathless, from
the closing waves of decay. The confirmation of that truth becomes
irresistible when we see how reason and conscience, with delighted
avidity, seize upon its adaptedness alike to the brightest
features and the darkest defects of the present life, whose