to overturn the weightiest structures.  Nothing can be farther from my meaning than to attempt any definition on this subject, nor would I ever embrace or give authority to that idea of Newton, who supposes that the immediate cause of sensation may be in undulations of an ethereal medium.  It does not, however, appear improbable to me that some of the more refined machinery of thought may adhere, even in another state, to the sentient principle; for, though the organs of gross sensation—­the nerves and brain—­are destroyed by death, yet something of the more ethereal nature, which I have supposed, may be less destructible.  And I sometimes imagine that many of those powers, which have been called instinctive, belong to the more refined clothing of the spirit; conscience, indeed, seems to have some undefined source, and may bear relation to a former state of being.

Eub.—­All your notions are merely ingenious speculations.  Revelation gives no authority to your ideas of spiritual nature; the Christian immortality is founded upon the resurrection of the body.

The Unknown.—­This I will not allow.  Even in the Mosaic history of the creation of man his frame is made in the image of God—­that is, capable of intelligence; and the Creator breathes into it the breath of life, His own essence.  Then our Saviour has said, “of the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.”  “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”  St. Paul has described the clothing of the spirit in a new and glorious body, taking the analogy from the living germ in the seed of the plant, which is not quickened till after apparent death; and the catastrophe of our planet, which, it is revealed, is to be destroyed and purified by fire before it is fitted for the habitation of the blest, is in perfect harmony with the view I have ventured to suggest.

Eub.—­I cannot make your notions coincide with what I have been accustomed to consider the meaning of Holy Writ.  You allow everything belonging to the material life to be dependent upon the organisation of the body, and yet you imagine the spirit after death clothed with a new body; and, in the system of rewards and punishments, this body is rendered happy or miserable for actions committed by another and extinct frame.  A particular organisation may impel to improper and immoral gratification; it does not appear to me, according to the principles of eternal justice, that the body of the resurrection should be punished for crimes dependent upon a conformation now dissolved and destroyed.

The Unknown.—­Nothing is more absurd, I may say more impious, than for man, with a ken surrounded by the dense mists of sense, to reason respecting the decrees of eternal justice.  You adopt here the same limited view that you embraced in reasoning against the indestructibility of the sentient principle in man from the apparent division of the living principle in the polypus, not recollecting that to prove a quality