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less certain as to their experience concerning spiritual things than Bacon, Newton, Faraday, with regard to physical science. We admit the distinction between things hoped for, and the evidence of those seen, but faith is the basis of our action as to both; and scientists, who appeal to physical experiments which are only of value when accepted by intelligence, are not more certain than the great and good men whose sacred experimental research and emotion are verified by the most advanced use of reason. The prophets and apostles, with eminent holy men now, possess the high and well-developed spiritual powers which can and do obtain that precise certainty, that assured strength of proof, as to immortality and future worlds; which physical scientists have concerning the marks of order and adaptation in nature. Scientific attainments, both as to space and time and the existences therein, would be very uncertain; did not the spiritual faculties of the inner aid the outer man. He who, like Moses, enters the darkness where God is, presently emerges with the lustre of Divine Glory.

During modern time we have extended our knowledge of physical processes; but concerning higher functions, we are as far below the great ancients as is a street parody the true rendering of a fine melody. This ought to be amended. Men who commend the pursuit of physical science, as that only thing which enlarges human welfare; do, as by "a mocking travesty wrought by impish finger," charge Christians with "a self-interested desire to escape from punishment." It is sufficient denial, though a partial confession, to say, "Whatever be our pursuit, we must have hope set

before us, to call out our noblest powers in obtainment of that good which God is seeking to convey."

There are many strands of experience, lying side by side in men, which are never compared; consequently, they suffer loss; nevertheless, history is not a record of worn-out things, but a windowed room whence successive events, outward and inward, may be seen greatly tingeing and determining all the future. We do not draw the lines which separate lost souls from the saved; but we know that the influence of truth cannot be limited, and that it certainly concerns all the future. Those who neglect this view of physical standpoints, however long-benumbed may be their consciousness, will find a new and hostile sense arise to overturn their feeble reasoning. Let every man remember that even the ideal has the side of reality; that reality means circumstantial surroundings in space and time; and take this to heart

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Rev. James Gylby Lonsdale, La Santa Madre Teresa.

RESEARCH XXXII.

DEATH VIEWED SCIENTIFICALLY.

"What degrades man? Death-annihilation degrades him to the reptile that is to devour him. What exalts him? A future existence; a more glorious and more lasting state of being to succeed.”—Earl of Rosse, The Truth of the Christian Revelation, p. 23.

"We shall tempt with wandering feet

The dark, unbottomed, infinite abyss ;

And through the impalpable obscure find out
Our uncouth way; or spread our airy flight
Over the vast abrupt, ere we arrive

The happy isle !"

MILTON, Paradise Lost (slightly altered).

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We do not accurately know what death is, or what life is. If we say, "Life is the continual adjustment of internal relations to external relations; we may state the same of death; it is an adjustment of internal things with external. The dead body of a horse, internally and externally, is so adjusted to circumstances that far-off vultures hasten to feed thereon. Every dead organism is in such correspondence with the environment that it undergoes oxidation; or is preserved, as when embedded in snow. The forces and ministers of death. are all associated with life. Every natural tendency is also a natural tendency to life further on.

Our living forces are suspended, yet recruited, in sleep

To die, is that to sleep? perchance to dream? and then again to wake? That is the question. In a swoon, we die to feeling and memory, but life is not suspended; and there are states in which no force of life is found, no breath, no heart-throb, yet the man exists. Are we to say, when, through longer want of breath and work of heart, the flesh corrupts, there is no life? That is the puzzle.

"Before my God, I might not this believe,
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of mine own eyes."

Hamlet, act i. sc. I.

Of what lasting good is man? or how is reason noble ? or how are the faculties infinite? how is he like an angel, or a god? why look before and after with such capability of reason?—if feeding and sleeping be rounded off with bestial oblivion? Our large discourse has no true part of wisdom, if the chief good and market of our time be but to sleep and feed-a beast no more. Is it craven scruple, or that their natural gifts are poor, or that like fat weeds they would rot in ease, makes men prey on garbage, though linked to radiant angels? Or is it that they have no faith, because dread of wrongs, done in days of nature, could tell secrets of the prison-house and a tale unfold

"Whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part

Like quills upon the fretful porcupine ;

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood."

So reasoned the greatest genius our literature has

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known; and, as for science, it knows not the secret either of death or life. As to every kind of matter and rock-masses we may say they are "due to the tendency of unstable mineral combinations to pass into stable ones." A sort of life pushes them into being; akin to that sort of life which, in the so-called embryology of crystals, ranges, according to mathematical laws, globulites into "skeleton-crystals," by the clothing of which the perfect crystal structures arise-" the choice flowers of the mineral kingdom." Every mineral, like every plant and animal, possesses its own individuality; and with this individuality science has to deal. This speciality and individuality of life in low forms is used as a fact of first importance to show "that cycles of change exactly similar in almost every respect to those occurring in the animal and vegetable kingdoms are equally characteristic of the mineral kingdom."2 In reality that means there is no essential difference between dead matter and living matter; for all matter, in a certain sense, lives.

One would think that this extension of a sort of life to everything would lift it into the rank of an essential; and as all the phenomena of the universe are living special and individual representatives of power, that power must be living; and, thus, we arrive at the greatest of all facts a Living, Individual, Eternal Creator; from Whom and by Whom and for Whom are all things.

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In that sense, we accept the extension, are willing to regard life as a manifestation of Divine Energy; and

1 Professor J. W. Judd, F. R.S., "Address before the Geological Society of London," 1887, p. 54.

2 Ibid., p. 36.

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