we are taught those truths concerning our capacity for light and love, which will not suffer us to be satisfied through the agency of our present restricted senses, but induce us to aspire to an everlasting enlargement of our powers of perception through more refined organisation than this inferior bodily arrangement admits. Thus our sense of limit, that allows not our energies of mind, awakened by the pains and pleasures of this state of being, to be fully exercised and satisfied, refers us to the Author of our existence as the only sufficient object of our hope, and who can alone supply us with means of becoming intimate with all the manifestations of His attributes. What we know already of matter and ether warrants our belief that by an instantaneous change* the forces of this material body may become those of a spiritual body, through which we may be able to perceive the secrets of all power, and see causes as clearly as we now discern effects. We know God's purpose;

for has He not Himself become embodied in our humanity to prove His sympathy, and readiness to meet all the demands of our souls upon His heart? He shows us that the way of eternal life and enlargement is now through death. That is the approved, appointed, and unavoidable pathway, where the Maker of the soul meets each of us alone, to conduct us with His own hand into that mansion of the Father's dwelling prepared by our Divine Precursor for all who are His kindred. He who clothed us with this flesh to fit us for the fellowships of earth, will clothe us with a glorious body like His own, appropriate to a will that cannot wander from His love, and to a capacity of thought receiving all His truth. Thus shall we ever stand related and localised in adaptation to all that is perfect in man, and draw life and enlightenment directly from the

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment.'-1 Cor. xv. 51.

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everlasting Source of wisdom and of joy. The human mind was made for all that can be known, and philosophy sees no limits to the range of perception with due means. It is manifest that the materials of knowledge, as well as the faculties of knowing, are immensely more extensive than to the unassisted senses they appear. 'The vast extensions of our means of knowledge that have accrued from the improvement of the merely mechanical aids of the senses' forcibly illustrate this subject; but every conceivable mode of aiding the mind which uses the senses is equally applicable. As Isaac Taylor, in his clear and close reasoning on the Physical Theory of another Life,' beautifully shows, there are possibilities of organic accommodation through which the soul may attain thorough intimacy with all the materials and the movements of all the worlds. And we may well believe that the complement of the human faculties shall be filled up, and the body be put in symmetry with the range of the mind.' However we may theorise, in reasoning from analogy concerning the constitution of other worlds in relation to embodied intelligences, we cannot but conclude that the perceptive faculties of the soul are here bound to the body not because those faculties need this limit to the five senses, but because this is the appropriate mode of man's connection with the teachings to be derived from this material creation, to the principles of which those senses are adapted. But the power of the soul to perceive is limitless, and admits of ten thousand other modes of operation; and as we can conceive no limit to that power, nor believe for a moment that man's mind is made to be circumscribed for ever by this initial order of embodiment, we rationally anticipate a future familiarity with all the hosts of heaven, in bodies suited to their natures, because to possess mind capable of knowing God can be for no other purpose than to become acquainted with all the

modes by which He manifests His perfection.

When in

'God's light we shall see light,' our mental and moral nature will be perfected; love and reverence will reign over every faculty and affection; the 'audacity of reason' will need no check, and 'we shall know even as we are known.'

Then rouse thee from desponding sleep,
Nor by the wayside lingering weep,

Nor fear to seek Him further in the wild,

Whose love can turn earth's worst and least
Into a conqueror's royal feast:

Thou wilt not be untrue, thou shalt not be beguil'd.

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CHAPTER IV.

THE ORGANS OF SENSATION AND OF ACTION ARE THE

INSTRUMENTS OF THE SOUL.

We cannot conceive it to be the prerogative of any created mind to act without being acted on by the influences amid which it is conditioned. This implies embodiment and abode in a defined space. That our souls require bodies as media of connection with the physical world is proved by the fact that they are embodied. Thus, facts appear to demonstrate that the human spirit has no originating power, but is moved only as it is impressed by circumstances and extraneous influences. Hence the necessity of its being supplied with instruments and senses, organised in keeping with the sphere which it inhabits, in order that its capacity for action might be elicited and manifested by agents appropriate to its innate functions and endowments. The soul is active in will but passive in means, and it learns its power in its place; or, in other words, we are altogether dependent on the exquisite adaptation of our bodily organisation to our spiritual faculties for capacity to receive impressions from other beings, and to express their influence on our own nature.

We We are accustomed to say the eye sees, the ear hears, the finger feels, and so forth; but such language is admissible only because we are accustomed to the error, and our expression is necessarily accommodated to ignorance, or not equal to our knowledge. The eye itself no more sees than the telescope which we hold before

it to assist our vision. The ear hears not any more than the trumpet of tin which the deaf man directs towards the speaker to convey the sound of his voice; and so with regard to all the organs of sense. They are but instruments which become the media of intelligence to the being that uses them when excited by outward agents; that is to say, they bear such relations to the condition of the materials which surround us, as, in the healthy state of their functions, always to present true intimations of circumstances within the range of their faculty or formation. The power bestowed on the soul resides in the soul, which is so constituted and conditioned by its connection with the body as to act when acted on through that medium only. Thus, we experience states of will, thought, faith, feeling, in relation to the realities around us, and with which we are formed and fashioned to be impressed.

A person just beginning to think might say: If I prick my finger does it not feel? A second thought suggests that a finger is a finger, whether alive or dead. It must be connected with some being that feels, in order to be an organ of feeling. What feels? Is it the brain? No, the physiologists inform us, the brain does not feel. What does? Yourself, a being influencing and influenced through the body, and yet not of the body. You cannot point to any part of your body and say, Here I am, this is myself. Why not? Merely because you are a spirit, and a spirit does not visibly occupy space, even when acting with the nerves. You are conscious of successive and consequent impressions and actions. You are a power localised and fixed, as every power is, on a centre. How this is we can no more understand, than we can the nature of an atom, or of the universe itself. We know, but cannot explain the fact, that every force acts and reacts from a centre. Thus, the soul evidently operates according to its nature