ediate, that souls
are consubstantial with God, dissevered fragments of Him, sent
into bodies. But, in actual effect, the chief recommendation of
this view has probably been the variety of analogies and images
under which it admits of presentation. The annual developments of
vegetable life from the bosom of the earth, drops taken from a
fountain and retaining its properties in their removal, the
separation of the air into distinct breaths, the soil into
individual atoms, the utterance of a tone gradually dying away in
reverberated echoes, the radiation of beams from a central light,
the exhalation of particles of moisture from the ocean, the
evolution of numbers out of an original unity, these are among the
illustrations by which an exhaustless ingenuity has supported the
notion of the emanation of souls from God. That "something cannot
come out of nothing" is an axiom resting on the ground of our
rational instincts. And seeing all things within our comprehension
held in the chain of causes and effects, one thing always evolving
from another, we leap to the conclusion that it is precisely the
same with things beyond our comprehension, and that God is the
aboriginal reservoir of being from which all the rills of finite
existence are emitted.

Against this doctrine the current objections are these two. First,
the analogies adduced are not applicable. The things of spirit and
those of matter have two distinct sets of predicates and
categories. It is, for example, wholly illogical to argue that
because the circuit of the waters is from the sea, through the
clouds, over the land, back to the sea again, therefore the
derivation and course of souls from God, through life, back to
God, must be similar. There are mysteries in connection with the
soul that baffle the most lynx eyed investigation, and on which no
known facts of the physical world can throw light. Secondly, the
scheme of emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to the
infancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with some
necessary truths. It implies that God is separable into parts, and
therefore both corporeal and finite. Divisible substance is
incompatible with the first predicates of Deity, namely,
immateriality and infinity. Before the conception of the
illimitable, spiritual unity of God, the doctrine of the emanation
of souls from Him fades away, as the mere figment of a dreaming
mind brooding over the suggestions of phenomena and apparent
corr