He remembered seeing the dark figure on horseback rise in the saddle and something leap from its hand.  He remembered the thrill he felt as the coil settled on his shoulders, and the sudden impulse which led him to fire as he did.  With the report of the pistol all became blank, until he found himself in a strange, bewildered state, groping about for the weapon, which he had a vague consciousness of having dropped.  But, according to Abel’s account, there must have been an interval of some minutes between these recollections, and he could not help asking, Where was the mind, the soul, the thinking principle, all this time?

A man is stunned by a blow with a stick on the head.  He becomes unconscious.  Another man gets a harder blow on the head from a bigger stick, and it kills him.  Does he become unconscious, too?  If so, when does he come to his consciousness?  The man who has had a slight or moderate blow comes to himself when the immediate shock passes off and the organs begin to work again, or when a bit of the skull is pried up, if that happens to be broken.  Suppose the blow is hard enough to spoil the brain and stop the play of the organs, what happens then?

A British captain was struck by a cannon-ball on the head, just as he was giving an order, at the Battle of the Nile.  Fifteen months afterwards he was trephined at Greenwich Hospital, having been insensible all that time.  Immediately after the operation his consciousness returned, and he at once began carrying out the order he was giving when the shot struck him.  Suppose he had never been trephined, when would his intelligence have returned?  When his breath ceased and his heart stopped beating?

When Mr. Bernard said to Helen, “I have been dead since I saw you,” it startled her not a little; for his expression was that of perfect good faith, and she feared that his mind was disordered.  When he explained, not as has been done just now, at length, but in a hurried, imperfect way, the meaning of his strange assertion, and the fearful Sadduceeisms which it had suggested to his mind, she looked troubled at first, and then thoughtful.  She did not feel able to answer all the difficulties he raised, but she met them with that faith which is the strength as well as the weakness of women,—­which makes them weak in the hands of man, but strong in the presence of the Unseen.

“It is a strange experience,” she said; “but I once had something like it.  I fainted, and lost some five or ten minutes out of my life, as much as if I had been dead.  But when I came to myself, I was the same person every way, in my recollections and character.  So I suppose that loss of consciousness is not death.  And if I was born out of unconsciousness into infancy with many family-traits of mind and body, I can believe, from my own reason, even without help from Revelation, that I shall be born again out of the unconsciousness of death with my individual traits of mind and body.  If death is, as it should seem to be, a loss of consciousness, that does not shake my faith; for I have been put into a body once already to fit me for living here, and I hope to be in some way fitted after this life to enjoy a better one.  But it is all trust in God and in his Word.  These are enough for me; I hope they are for you.”