orld are to us
remote, misty, and half-fabulous; but as we advance in our journey, and
voice after voice is hushed, and form after form vanishes from our side,
and our shadow falls almost solitary on the hillside of life, the soul,
by a necessity of its being, tends to the unseen and spiritual, and
pursues in another life those it seeks in vain in this.

For with every friend that dies, dies also some especial form of social
enjoyment, whose being depended on the peculiar character of that
friend; till, late in the afternoon of life, the pilgrim seems to
himself to have passed over to the unseen world in successive portions
half his own spirit; and poor indeed is he who has not familiarized
himself with that unknown, whither, despite himself, his soul is
earnestly tending.

One of the deepest and most imperative cravings of the human heart, as
it follows its beloved ones beyond the veil, is for some assurance that
they still love and care for us. Could we firmly believe this,
bereavement would lose half its bitterness. As a German writer
beautifully expresses it, "Our friend is not wholly gone from us; we see
across the river of death, in the blue distance, the smoke of his
cottage;" hence the heart, always creating what it desires, has ever
made the guardianship and ministration of departed spirits a favorite
theme of poetic fiction.

But is it, then, fiction? Does revelation, which gives so many hopes
which nature had not, give none here? Is there no sober certainty to
correspond to the inborn and passionate craving of the soul? Do departed
spirits in verity retain any knowledge of what transpires in this world,
and take any part in its scenes? All that revelation says of a spiritual
state is more intimation than assertion; it has no distinct treatise,
and teaches nothing apparently of set purpose; but gives vague, glorious
images, while now and then some accidental ray of intelligence looks
out,--

"----like eyes of cherubs shining
From out the veil that hid the ark."

But out of all the different hints and assertions of the Bible we think
a better inferential argument might be constructed to prove the
ministration of departed spirits than for many a doctrine which has
passed in its day for the height of orthodoxy.

First, then, the Bible distinctly says that there is a class of
invisible spirits who minister to the children of men: "Are they not all
ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to th