“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”,

so also in death, the Roman said, though in other words: 

  “Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
  Which brought us hither”.

Believe not then, says Cicero, those old wives’ tales, those poetic legends, the terrors of a material hell, of the joys of a sensual paradise.  Rather hold with Plato that the soul is an eternal principle of life, which has neither beginning nor end of existence; for if it were not so, heaven and earth would be overset, and all nature would stand at gaze.  “Men say they cannot conceive or comprehend what the soul can be, distinct from the body.  As if, forsooth, they could comprehend what it is, when it is in the body,—­its conformation, its magnitude, or its position there....  To me, when I consider the nature of the soul, there is far more difficulty and obscurity in forming a conception of what the soul is while in the body,—­in a dwelling where it seems so little at home,—­than of what it will be when it has escaped into the free atmosphere of heaven, which seems its natural abode".[1] And as the poet seems to us inspired, as the gifts of memory and eloquence seem divine, so is the soul itself, in its simple essence, a god dwelling in the breast of each of us.  What else can be this power which enables us to recollect the past, to foresee the future, to understand the present?

[Footnote 1:  I. c. 22.]

There follows a passage on the argument from design which anticipates that fine saying of Voltaire—­“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer; mais toute la nature crie qu’il existe”.  “The heavens”, says even the heathen philosopher, “declare the glory of God”.  Look on the sun and the stars; look on the alternation of the seasons, and the changes of day and night; look again at the earth bringing forth her fruits for the use of men; the multitude of cattle; and man himself, made as it were to contemplate and adore the heavens and the gods.  Look on all these things, and doubt not that there is some Being, though you see him not, who has created and presides over the world.

“Imitate, therefore, the end of Socrates; who, with the fatal cup in his hands, spoke with the serenity of one not forced to die, but, as it were, ascending into heaven; for he thought that the souls of men, when they left the body, went by different roads; those polluted by vice and unclean living took a road wide of that which led to the assembly of the gods; while those who had kept themselves pure, and on earth had taken a divine life as their model, found it easy to return to those beings from whence they came”.  Or learn a lesson from the swans, who, with a prophetic instinct, leave this world with joy and singing.  Yet do not anticipate the time of death, “for the Deity forbids us to depart hence without his summons; but, on just cause given (as to Socrates and Cato), gladly should we exchange our darkness for that light, and, like men not breaking prison but released by the law, leave our chains with joy, as having been discharged by God”.