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our purpose here to argue for or against the immortality of the soul: we shall leave this as a deduction from our treatise, and speak briefly here of the necessary nature of that immortality, wherever or whenever supposed.

In what sense the soul is distinct from God in its being—how we can live through his life, in a being of which he is the only and constant light, it is vain to conjecture. And if we cannot analyze the divine connection now, it is equally vain to conjecture how we may dwell in any other essence more rationally. We easily conceive ourselves invested in bodies or spheres of palpitating, ethereal lightness, which may fly, at will, around the pendant world; yet the sense in which we were independent of God's consciousness in our own would be as mysterious as now. However we exist, doubtless we shall feed only upon his bounty, and shall never inspire ourselves.

The first thought we wish to urge is the eternal finitude of the soul. If the finite cannot comprehend the infinite now, no progress can ever bring it nearer to that comprehension. Nothing that God has created can ever behold him, nor ever learn the secret force of its existence. No angel, nor saint, nor prophet was ever admitted to the council of God. We muse of departed spirits—we think the dead have found out something. Truly they have,—but not all they expected. They have not found out the Almighty unto perfection. They dreamed, perhaps, that death would bring them into some clear being which should teach them the mystery of life. But doubt not, as they bloom up through the youth of their second life.

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