But what they experienced, proud and noble cities of the past have experienced likewise.  Grace and ornament, art and grandeur, beauty, love, and manly strength have been swept away time and again by the bursting of the treacherous doors that lead into the heart of the earth!

Change marks the footsteps of the Creator.  The solid mountain, the firm, unyielding earth, which to the unthinking mind seem durable and eternal in their strength, like mankind carry within themselves the seeds of their own dissolution.

Yet the day will come when man, by the aid of science, will, through these premonitory symptoms, foresee the coming events, even as the wise physician can discern the time when his patient’s soul will leave its body.

Nature misunderstood is a fearful mystery; but understood, she is a simple and beautiful piece of mechanism; and the earthquake may not be more disastrous than the flood or the avalanche when science and experience have taught men to avoid the localities of danger, and to watch the hour of its approach, that they may flee before it.

Nature is never abrupt in her actions.  She heralds her intentions long before she enacts them, but as it requires the quick ear of the savage—­the child of nature—­to detect the far-off prey, so it requires the student of nature to discover the distant tread of the earthquake.

SIR DAVID BREWSTER

NATURALNESS OF SPIRIT LIFE.

The human mind is subject to false and specious reasoning, and time after time opinions which have been held and argued upon with seeming logical acumen, have, by further developments and discoveries, been proven fallacious.  And yet of so elastic a nature is the mind of man that he is not crushed nor discouraged by his mistakes, but immediately commences to build new theories; but as he establishes them by specialties instead of generalities, he is again defeated.

The European mind has adopted a certain line of thought respecting the future state of existence, which it substantiates by narrow reasonings and isolated facts.

Of the future we can only judge by analogy of the past with the present.

Nature ever shadows forth her new developments upon the old.

The many periods or stages through which the earth has passed in reaching her present state of refinement, have been stamped one upon the other so that the Geologist can determine definitely what would be the result of a certain period from the characteristics of the foregoing.

Now it is educible:  if the Creator of the race of men who inhabit the terrestrial globe had intended for them a future state or destination differing in every respect from their present one, he would have prepared their minds for different pursuits, and ordained them for other occupations than those they follow to the very grave.

Take man in his most natural condition—­examine those nations that are most ancient, and unmixed with other races—­and you will perceive that their ideas of a future state were in accordance with the life they were living on earth.