o their deities, and were proud to deem that in guarding them the
gods stooped to watch over a race of kings, a puissant and
immortal stock,

"Whose glories stream'd from the same clond girt founts
Whence their own dawn'd upon the infant world."

After all the researches that have been made, we yet find the
secret of the beginning of the soul shrouded among the fathomless
mysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth to
the Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythical
epochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity of
skepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this modern
time, there are still stricken and yearning depths of wonder and
sorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of night and fear
enough, to make us recognise, in the golden joys that visit us
rarely, in the illimitable visions that emancipate us often, in
the unearthly thoughts and dreams that ravish our minds,
enigmatical intimations of our kinship with God, prophecies of
a super earthly destiny whose splendors already break through the
clouds of ignorance, the folds of flesh, and the curtains of
time in which our spirits here sit pavilioned.

Augustine pointedly observes, "It is no evil that the origin of
the soul remains obscure, if only its redemption be made
certain."13 Non est periculum si origo animoe lateat, dum
redemptio clareat. No matter how humanity originates, if its
object be to produce fruit, and that fruit be immortal souls. When
our organism has perfected its intended product, willingly will we
let the decaying body return into the ground, if so be we are
assured that the ripened spirit is borne into the heavenly garner.
Let us, in close, reduce the problem of the soul's origin to its
last terms. The amount of force in the universe is uniform.14
Action and reaction being equal, no new creation of force is
possible: only its directions, deposits, and receptacles may be
altered. No combination of physical processes can produce a
previously non existent subject: it can only initiate the
modification, development, assimilation, of realities already in
being. Something cannot come out of nothing. The quickening
formation of a man, therefore, implies the existence, first, of a
material germ, the basis of the body; secondly, of a power to
impart to that germ a dynamic impulse, in other words, to deposit
in it a spirit atom, or monad of life force. Now, the fresh body
is originally a deta