Science tells us that each type is prophetic of a higher one.  The whale has bones prophetic of a human hand.  Has man reached perfection?  Is there no prophecy in him?  Not in his body, perhaps; but how his whole soul yearns for greater beauty.  As soon as he has found food, the savage begins to carve his paddle, and make himself gorgeous with feathers.  How man yearns for strength, subduing animal and cosmic forces to his will!  How he fights against darkness and death, and strives for perfection and holiness!  These prophecies compel us to believe there is a world where powers like those of electricity and luminiferous ether are ever at hand; where its waters are rivers of life, and its trees full of perfect healing, and from which all unholiness is forever kept.  What we infer, Scripture affirms.

Science tells us there has been a survival of the fittest.  Doubtless this is so.  So in the future there will be a survival of the fittest.  What is it?  Wisdom, gentleness, meekness, brotherly kindness, and charity.  Over those who have these traits death hath no permanent power.  The caterpillar has no fear as he weaves his own shroud; for there is life within fit to survive, and ere long it spreads its gorgeous wings, and flies in the air above where once it crawled.  Man has had two states of being already.  One confined, dark, peculiarly nourished, slightly conscious; then he was born into another—­wide, differently nourished, and intensely [Page 244] conscious.  He knows he may be born again into a life wider yet, differently nourished, and even yet more intensely conscious.  Science has no hint how a long ascending series of developments crowned by man may advance another step, and make man isaggelos—­equal to angels.  But the simplest teaching of Scripture points out a way so clear that a child need not miss the glorious consummation.

When Uranus hastened in one part of its orbit, and then retarded, and swung too wide, men said there must be another attracting world beyond; and, looking there, Neptune was found.  So, when individual men are so strong that nations or armies cannot break down their wills; so brave, that lions have no terrors; so holy, that temptation cannot lure nor sin defile them; so grand in thought, that men cannot follow; so pure in walk, that God walks with them—­let us infer an attracting world, high and pure and strong as heaven.  The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is a roll-call of heroes of whom this world was not worthy.  They were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection.  The world to come influenced, as it were, the orbits of their souls, and when their bodies fell off, earth having no hold on them, they sped on to their celestial home.  The tendency of such souls necessitates such a world.