longing to be immortal, and that therefore he is sure to be immortal.  Rubbish!  It is not true that any longing after immortality exists in the heart of a hundredth portion of the race.  And if it were true, it would prove immortality no more than the manifold signatures of SMITH, C., proved that Smith was indeed to be Chancellor.  No:  we cling to the doctrine of a Future Life; we could not live without it; but we believe it, not because of undefined longings within ourselves, not because of reviving plants and flowers, not because of the chrysalis and the butterfly,—­but because “our Saviour, Jesus Christ, hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”

There is something very curious, and very touching, in thinking how clear and distinct, and how often recurring, were our early anticipations of things that were never to be.  In this world, the fact is for the most part the opposite of what it should be to give force to Plato’s (or Cato’s) argument:  the thing you vividly anticipate is the thing that is least likely to come.  The thing you don’t much care for, the thing you don’t expect, is the likeliest.  And even if the event prove what you anticipated, the circumstances, and the feeling of it, will be quite different from what you anticipated.  A certain little girl three years old was told that in a little while she was to go with her parents to a certain city, a hundred miles off,—­a city which may be called Altenburg as well as anything else.  It was a great delight to her to anticipate that journey, and to anticipate it very circumstantially.  It was a delight to her to sit down at evening on her father’s knee, and to tell him all about how it would be in going to Altenburg.  It was always the same thing.  Always, first, how sandwiches would be made,—­how they would all get into the carriage, (which would come round to the door,) and drive away to a certain railway-station,—­how they would get their tickets, and the train would come up, and they would all get into a carriage together, and lean back in corners, and eat the sandwiches, and look out of the windows, and so on.  But when the journey was actually made, every single circumstance in the little girl’s anticipations proved wrong.  Of course, they were not intentionally made wrong.  Her parents would have carried out to the letter, if they could, what the little thing had so clearly pictured and so often repeated.  But it proved to be needful to go by an entirely different way and in an entirely different fashion.  All those little details, dwelt on so much, and with so much interest, were things never to be.  It is even so with the anticipations of larger and older children.  How distinctly, how fully, my friend, we have pictured out to our minds a mode of life, a home and the country round it, and the multitude of little things which make up the habitude of being, which we long since resigned ourselves to knowing could never prove realities!  No doubt, it is all right and well.  Even Saint Paul, with all his gift of prophecy, was not allowed to foresee what was to happen to himself.  You know how he wrote that he would do a certain thing, “so soon as I shall see how it will go with me.”