“it stood
All beautiful in naked purity,
The perfect semblance of its bodily frame,
Instinct with inexpressible beauty and grace,
Each stain of earthliness
Had passed away, it re-assumed
Its native dignity, and stood
Immortal amid ruin.”

It must appear impossible to any rational mind, that, with the full evidence before their eyes, materialists can attempt to claim Shelley as endorsing their doctrines, for even in the “Queen Mab,” which has been considered by those not understanding it as a most atheistical poem, he speaks of—­

“the remembrance
With which the happy spirit contemplates
Its well-spent pilgrimage on earth.”

Positive dogmatists are tyrannically endeavoring to crush the belief in a soul, that All which makes the-present life happy on earth, the hope of our heritage in a future state.  To them the fact that the race from the dawn of history, and through the ages has knelt down in abnegation before this inscrutable truth is nothing.  This glorious belief evolved from the primaeval Cabala, taught in ancient Egypt, found contemporaneously in India, enunciated by scholarly Rabbis, ever present before the Chaldaean and Assyrian Magi, and laid down as axioms in the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome, not only to be discovered a fundamental in the Egyptian, the Hebraistic, the Brahminical, the Buddhistic, the Vedic, but also in all the sacred books of every nation, and handed down and perpetuated to these days as a sacred legacy from the past, by both Mohammed and Christ.  This, the great co-mystery of all the ancient mysteries, shall remain ever present through all futurity like “the existing order of the Universe, or rather, of the part of it known to us,” to use the phraseology of John Stuart Mill.  Nations may rise and fall, theologies may flourish and decay, but this glorious and divine inheritance shall never pass away.  Let pseudo-scientists avail themselves of stale and exploded arguments, and urge that there is no invisible world, and therefore no immortality for man, but honest scientists, like Professors Tait and Stewart, in the “Unseen Universe,” will agree with the Illuminati:  “in the position assigned by Swedenborg, and by the Spiritualists, according to which they look upon the invisible world not as something absolutely distinct from the visible universe, and absolutely unconnected with it, as is frequently thought to be the case, but rather as a universe that has some bond of union with the present;” and like Tyndall, will be obliged in abject humility to acknowledge, unlike the initiated occultist, that:  “When we endeavor to pass from the phenomena of physics to those of thought, we meet a problem which transcends any conceivable expansion of the powers we now possess.  We may think over the subject again and again—­it eludes all intellectual presentation—­we stand at length face to face with the incomprehensible.”