willing to resign the comfort afforded by these delightful assurances, coming, as they do, directly from God Himself,—and fall back upon the cold and uncertain speculations of human reasoning, unsustained by Divine Beyelation? What would the great ancients, Cicero, or Socrates, or Plato, have given for the treasures of such a Revelation as that we now possess! Behold them—the best and wisest of those ancient philosophers—painfully groping their way to a belief in God and the immortality of the soul. In that twilight of the intellectual day, what mists and gloom hung everywhere over the mental landscape, and not only bounded and narrowed the view of earthly things, but quite covered over the heavens above as with a thick cloud. Hear Cato,—as Addison has represented him to us,—when about to put an end to himself, with a Roman's barbarous idea of courage, and in ignorance of that sentiment of true bravery,
The coward sneaks to death: the brave lives on"—
soliloquizing, with his sword lying before him, on the possibility of there being another state of existence, after the close of this:—
"It must be so: Plato, then reaaonest well!
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread and inward horror
Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself and startles at destruction?
'Tis the Divinity that stirs within us;
'Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.
Eternity, thou pleasing, dreadful thought!
Through what variety of untried being,
Through what new scenes and changes must we pass?
The wide, th' unbounded prospect lies before me,
