Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: " Learn the mystery of progression duly, Call not each successive change decay; But know we only hold our treasures truly When it seems as if they passed away; "Nor dare to blame God's gifts for incompleteness; In that want their safety lies; they roll Toward some infinite depth of love and sweetness, Bearing onward the reluctant soul." — A. A. Procteb. CHAPTER VI Just what is it which overweighs to-day the hope of future life ? When reduced to its simplest terms, is it not that we have found mind to be much more closely bound up with matter than had been supposed ? Underlying the popular belief in a resurrection and future life, there have been heretofore a set of notions, partly scientific and partly theological, which are surely becoming untenable under the influence of increasing knowledge. The uneducated and unthinking man still believes, no doubt, that we are all the descendants of a first man whose body God fashioned mechanically out of the earth's matter, not more than four or five thousand years ago, that this body was lifeless and inert until God by a second specific act placed within it an immortal soul. His soul was to his body very much what live steam is to a motionless engine. It was created apart from the body, and complete in itself. It possessed the maximum of intellectual vigor, and was morally faultless. The man thus constituted was perfect, and would have been undying had he not by a wanton choice forfeited his immortality by an act of disobedience. This conception is so nai've and simple, so easily presented before the mind, and has been so long optative, that it is very difficult indeed to disengage it. Many a man who has long since dismissed it as impossible still believes it when he is off his guard. But the intelligent world generally has... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.