racter, and are never more intense and active than on the near approach of death, when every cherished name of the living and the departed mounts to the lips, and the last strength of dissolving nature is expended in words of love and consolation for those that are to survive. If these affections are to slumber forever in the grave, why are they suffered thus to grow through life and to live in death? We receive their permanence as a pledge of immortality. If not, what else does it mean? how else is it to be accounted for? why this distinguishing attribute of human love in contrast with all else that bears the semblance of love?

All the phenomena of disease and dissolution present insuperable difficulties, unless man be immortal. If that which thinks and loves is part and parcel of the bodily frame, why does it live in undiminished and growing vigor with the mutilation and decay of that frame? How can the tongue, the hand, the foot be palsied, and the mind unimpaired? How can the body waste to the shadow of its former self, and the soul that tenants it seem more luminous and majestic than when its tabernacle was entire and sound? If the soul has not a separate life of its own, how can it be so clear and bright, so self-collected and earnest, so keen of apprehension, so rapid in action, as it often is up to the very moment of dissolution? Why is it that the process which Christians call disembodi ment frequently enhances, to an amazing degree, the quantity of mental and spiritual life, so that the feeble grow strong, the timid bold, the slow of tongue eloquent, the lame of counsel wise, the dull of fancy rich in lofty and gorgeous imaginings? These things look not like the death of the soul. If it dies with the body, they are mysterious, incomprehensible, and constitute a most serious difficulty, for which the unbeliever in immortality is bound to give account. They attach an intense improbability to the death of the soul, far greater than can belong, under the government of omnipotence, to its resurrection and renewed life.

There are also grave difficulties, connected with the New Testament, in the way of annihilation at death. That the first Christian preachers of immortality suffered every form of loss, ignominy, and torture, that most of them encountered

an agonizing death as felons, in attestation of what they taught, is an undoubted historical fact. And what they taught was not mere theory, in which they might have been deluded, but events of which they professed to be eye-witnesses. That they knew the person of the living Jesus, and that they were fully aware of his crucifixion, death, and burial, there can be no question; and equally little, that they professed to have seen the same Jesus alive again, to have examined the wound-marks of the nails and the spear, to have had repeated and familiar interviews with him, and to have witnessed his ascent to heaven from the last of those interviews. It is equally certain that they professed to have known persons, whom his word or touch recalled alive from the deathbed, the bier, and the sepulchre, and that they connected with these narratives, and reported, as attested by them, the confident assurance of the same Jesus that all men should live after death and forever. That they told these things, that they knew whether they were true, there can be no doubt. They were not facts that admitted of being falsely imposed upon their credence. Delusion is out of the question; for they said that they not only saw Lazarus come out of the tomb, but were at table with him afterwards that they not only met Jesus near his sepulchre, in the dim morning twilight, but talked with him, walked with him, eat with him. If they knew these things to be false, and yet suffered and died in attestation of them, their conduct presents a series of miracles far more stupendous than those which they asserted to have been wrought by the omnipotence of God. Their imposture stands alone in the history of humanity, as its most improbable and unaccountable chapter; and the unbeliever in immortality is bound to suggest some rational method of accounting for it, before he lays any stress on the improbability of a life beyond the grave.

Now, in view of these multiplied improbabilities, the inconceivableness of the mode in which life is to be renewed after the dissolution of the body constitutes no valid objection. All the processes of creation and of life are similarly obscure as to their theory and mechanism. Birth is as mysterious as immortality - the formation of the visible world as the organ

ization of the spiritual universe. But in what is patent to our observation, we see power adequate to the production of any imaginable result, wisdom inexhaustibly fertile in the adaptation of means to ends, love unbounded and unwearied in the diffusion of gladness and happiness,-power, wisdom, and love, amply competent to detach the vital principle from its present tenement, to keep it unscathed by the touch of death, unchilled by the damps of the grave, and to clothe it again in whatever form may best suit its renewed life in another realm of being. GOD is the word that makes all things possible. With omnipotence outrayed in the whole creation, why need we question what can be, or how? Except through our annual experience of nature, it would seem impossible that the decomposed seed-corn should reappear in the harvest sheaf, and that the verdure that once passes from field and forest should ever clothe it again. We know not how; but God gives the seed its resurrection body, he renews the face of the year, he wakes the slumbering germs of grass and flowers from their winter's grave. Then, "why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the dead?"

Our author, in the person of F. B., virtually carries his skeptical hero over the ground which we have thus surveyed, and brings out his skepticism as an antagonist force to his religious unbelief. But through the greater part of the volume, Harrington is balancing improbabilities between Christianity and the most recent forms of pseudo-Christianity, and renders it manifest that all the latter demand more of the skeptic than the former, so that he who would escape the charge of excessive credulity, can find no resting place between the utter denial of all religion and the assent to a positive revelation miraculously attested and transmitted through authentic scriptures. He first assails the Newman and Parker school. One salient error of the speculators of this school is, that they mistake the spontaneous consent of the human mind to the leading truths of Christianity for the native power to discover those truths. The doctrines of the divine paternity, human brotherhood, immortality, and a righteous retribution, as also the ethical code of the New Testament, commend themselves to the intuitive reason and the moral taste

of cultivated and virtuous men of the nineteenth century, who have derived their descent through a long line of Christian ancestry. Therefore (and there is no middle term to bridge over the logical hiatus) these doctrines and precepts are not dependent on communication or tradition, but form a part of the mental and moral heritage given to every human soul by its Creator, and it is competent for any and every pure and truth-loving mind to arrive at them by the unaided action of its own powers. The following would be a strictly parallel inference. The last results of modern science command the assent of every man of ordinary intelligence; and the arts which contribute to the comfort and ornament of life are admirably adapted to the needs and the progress of society. Therefore it is within the power of any mind, that will put its faculties into vigorous exercise, to frame for itself the scientific systems, and to work out for itself the mechanical and economical improvements, which it has cost the labor of centuries to bring to perfection. Did not this reasoning refute itself, it has its ample refutation in one simple historical fact. Man had existed complete in all his capacities for some thousands of years before Christ, and yet had made only the feeblest approximations to the religious and ethical doctrines of the Gospel. It is impossible to trace any process of anteChristian development. The age immediately preceding the Christian era gave not the faintest promise of it, unless it be that the darkest hour of night is the hour before day-dawn. Researches into rabbinical literature, so far from revealing the sources of Christianity, only convince us that, if its Founder were illiterate, he stood nearer the fountain of truth than if he had been imbued with the best Jewish literature of his age. Most aptly is the Messiah termed by the prophet "a root out of a dry ground."

Another sophistry of this school is in the use which they make of the term "absolute religion." It is announced as a marvellous discovery, that "Christianity is as old as the creation." In a most important sense we believe this, else we should not be Christians. The fundamental principles of the Gospel are not contingent, but absolute truth. They did not begin to be true at any epoch of time, but are coeternal with

the Almighty. Christ did not help to make them true; but they would have been equally true, had he never lived. We can trace back the workings of these principles in the entire history of paganism, and can assure ourselves that the whole administration of human affairs has been guided and governed by them. The true question is, not whether Christianity was old or new when promulgated by him whose name it bears, but whether the discovery of its truths was made to man at a definite epoch and through supernatural agency. The law of gravitation presided when the universe emerged from chaos, and its workings had been before the eyes of men from Adam 'downward, yet was undiscovered until Newton detected, analyzed, and proclaimed it; and the plea against the claims of Christ on the score of the "absoluteness" of his doctrines, is just as rational as would be the denial of Newton's title to be regarded as the discoverer of universal gravitation, on the ground that it is a fundamental law of the material creation. In the use of the word "revelation," we imply the prior and independent validity of the truths revealed; for revelation means unveiling, uncovering, bringing to light what previously existed, not the creation or origination of new truth.

The alleged impossibility of revelation, except to the soul of each individual, is a prominent point in the teaching of the writers under discussion; and it is their special aim to pour contempt on the very idea of a book-revelation. Yet their own conduct is an explicit denial of this postulate. They profess to have received from the Almighty superior measures of light on the great themes of religion and morality; and with the most zealous propagandism they are endeavoring to diffuse the light that is in them to transmit the revelation that has been made to them, and they depend for their success on imparting to other minds alleged truths which God has not revealed directly to those other minds. They reveal to the world, in ponderous volumes, the impossibility of a book revelation. Their assumption, in plain terms, as comprehensively stated by Mr. Rogers, is, "That may be possible with man, which is impossible with God." We quote the following passage from the argument on this head. Harrington is talking with Fellowes, a devotee of Newman and Parker.