have another: now, if a human soul has its first beginning here, nothing is more certain than that it will have an end somewhere. But the soul is mind—mind is God: and God is eternal. He ever existed, and ever will; and the monads, the germ-souls here developed, and hereafter perfected, are also eternal; they existed in all times past, and can never cease to be, for their very nature is Permanency. All bodies here, or elsewhere, are but accompaniments—instruments, tools of the royal spirit in one or more of its multitudinous phases of existence—that is to say, it creates, uses, and puts them on to serve its purposes, till it can afford to dispense with them: for human existence is a synonym of Eternal Duration—is an immense circle: a circle is but an infinite polygon: and bodily vehicles serve the soul's purposes during its passage over a very few of the straight lines whereof this polygon is composed. And, beyond all doubt, the period will arrive—it may be away in the far-off eternities—but nevertheless will arrive, wherein the soul will dispense with all these characteristics of its juvenility. No one associates legs, arms, eyes, stomach, or sexual organs, with the idea of God: why then should such things be eternally predicated of man, who is fashioned after the model of the Infinite God Himself?
The body of a man is a greater thing than any object on earth beside; is far greater than even the physical world in which he lives, because it is the master production of all the elements and forces in that world. The spiritual form that man assumes, and to which he may be said to transmigrate after the physical decease, is of far more importance, and altogether greater than is his previous physical and material structure. A
