Regarded merely as a day of rest from labor, the Sunday has been of great value to us. Considering the intense character of the nation, our tendency to material things, and our restless love of work, it seems as if a Moses of the nineteenth century, legislating for us, would enact two rest-days in the week, rather than one. It is a good thing that a man once a week pauses from his work, arrays himself in clean garments, and is at rest.

Regarded in its other aspects, Sunday has aided the intellectual culture of the people to a degree not often appreciated. To many a man, yes, to most men, it is their only reading day, and they will read "secular" books, spite of the clerical admonition. Many a poor boy in New England, who has toiled all the week, and would gladly have studied all the night, did not obstinate Nature forbid, has studied stealthily all Sunday, not Jeremiah and the prophets, but Homer and the mathematics, and risen at length to eminence amongst cultivated men;—he has to thank the Sunday for the beginnings of that manly growth.

The moral and religious effect of the day is yet more important. One seventh part of the time was to be devoted to moral and religious culture. The clergy watched diligently over Sunday, as their own day. Work was then the accident; religion was the business. Every thing with us becomes earnest; Sunday as earnest as the week. It must not be spent idly. Perhaps no body of clergymen, for two hundred years, on the whole, were ever so wakeful and active as the American. They also are earnest and full of intensity, especially in the more serious sects. I think I am not very superstitious; not often inclined to lean on my father's staff rather than walk on my own feet; not over-much accustomed to take things on trust because they have been trusted to all along: but I must confess that I see a vast amount of good achieved by the aid of these two institutions, the Sunday and preaching, which could not have been done without them. I know I have my prejudices; I love the Sunday; a professional bias may warp me aside, for I am a preacher—the pulpit is my joy and my throne. Judge you how far my profession and my prejudice have led me astray in estimating the value of the Sunday, its preaching, and the good they have achieved for us in New England. I know what superstition, what bigotry, has been connected with both; I know it has kept grim and terrible guard about these institutions. I look upon that superstition and bigotry, as on the old New England guns which were fought with in the Indian wars, the French wars, and the Revolution;—things that did service when men knew not how to defend what they valued most with better tools and more Christian. I look on both with the same melancholy veneration, but honor them the more that now they are old, battered, unfit for use and covered with rust; I would respectfully hang them up, superstition and the musket, side by side; honorable, but harmless, with their muzzles down, and pray God it might never be my lot to handle such ungodly weapons, though in a cause never so humane and holy.

Let us look a little at the ill effects of these notions of the Sunday and the observance which they led to. It is thought an act of religion to attend church and give a mere bodily presence there. Hence the minister often relies on this circumstance to bring his audience together; preaches sermons on the duty of going to church, while ingenuous boys blush for his weakness, and ask, "Were it not better to rely on your goodness, your piety, your wisdom; on your superior ability to teach men, even on your eloquence, rather than tell them it is an act of religion to come and hear you, when both they and you are painfully conscious that they are thereby made no wiser, no better, nor more Christian?" This notion is a dangerous one for a clergyman. It flatters his pride and encourages his sloth. It blinds him to his own defects, and leads him to attribute his empty benches to the perverseness of human nature and the carnal heart, which a few snow-flakes can frighten from his church, while a storm will not keep them from a lecture on science or literature. No doubt it is a man's duty to seek all opportunities of becoming wiser and better. So far as church-going helps that work, so far it is a duty. But to count it in itself, irrespective of its consequences, an act of religion, is to commit a dangerous error, which has proved fatal to many a man's growth in goodness and piety. Let us look to the end, not merely at the means.

This notion has also a bad effect on the hearers. It is thought an act of religion to attend church, whether you are edified or not by sermon, by psalm, or prayer; an act of religion, though you could more profitably spend the time in your own closet at home, or with your own thoughts in the fields. Of course, then, he who attends once a day is thought a Christian to a certain degree; if twice, more so; if thrice, why that denotes an additional amount of growth in grace. In this way the day is often spent in a continual round of meetings. Sermon follows sermon; prayer treads upon the footsteps of prayer; psalm effaces psalm, till morning, afternoon, evening, all are gone. The Sunday is ended and over; the man is tired—but has he been profited and made better thereby? The sermons and the prayers have cancelled one another, been heard and forgot. They were too numerous to remember or produce their effect. So on a summer's lake, as the winds loiter and then pass by, ripple follows ripple, and wave succeeds to wave, yet the next day the wind has ceased and the unstable water bears no trace left there by all the blowings of the former day, but bares its incontinent bosom to the frailest and most fleeting clouds.

Another ill effect follows from regarding attendance at church as an act of religion in itself:—It is forgotten that a man cannot teach what he does not know. If you have more manhood than I, more religion; if you are the more humane and the more divine, it is idle for me to try and teach you divinity and humanity; idle in you to make believe you are taught. The less must learn of the greater, not the greater directly of the less. It is too often forgotten by the preacher that his hearers may be capable of teaching him; that he cannot fill them out of an emptiness, but a fulness. Hence, it comes to pass that no one, how advanced soever, is allowed to graduate, so to say, from the church. Perhaps it may do a great man, mature in Christianity, good to sit down with his fellows and hear a little man talk who knows nothing of religion; it may increase his sympathy with mankind. It can hardly be an act of religion to such a man so advanced in his goodness and piety; perhaps not the best use he could make of the hour.

The current opinion hinders social tendencies. A man must not meet with his friend and neighbor, or if he does, he must talk with bated breath, with ghostly countenance, and of a ghostly theme. From this abuse of the Sunday comes much of the cold and unsocial character which strangers charge us with. As things now go, there are many who have no opportunity for social intercourse except the hours of the Sunday. Then it is forbidden them. So they suffer and lose much of the charm of life; become ungenial, unsocial, stiff, and hard, and cold.

This notion hinders men, also, from intellectual culture. They must read no book but one professedly religious. Such works are commonly poor and dull; written mainly by men of little ability, of little breadth of view; not written in the interest of mankind, but only of a sect—the Calvinists or Unitarians. A good man groans when he looks over the immense piles of sectarian books written with good motives, and read with the most devout of intentions, but which produce their best effect when they lead only to sleep. Yet it is commonly taught that it is religion to spend a part of Sunday in reading such works, in listening, or in trying to listen, or in affecting to try and listen, to the most watery sermons, while it is wicked to read some "secular" book, philosophy, history, poem, or tale, which expands the mind and warms the heart. Our poor but wisdom-seeking boy must read his Homer only by stealth. There are many men who have no time for intellectual pursuits, none for reading, except on Sunday. It is cruel to tell them they shall read none but sectarian books or listen only to sectarian words.

But there are other evils yet. These notions and the corresponding practice tend to make religion external, consisting in obedience to form, in compliance with custom; while religion is and can be only piety and goodness, love to God and love to man. To keep the Sunday idle, to attend church, is not being religious. It is easy to do that; easy to stop there, and then to look at real, manly saints, who live in the odor of sanctity, whose sentiment is a prayer, their deeds religion, and their whole life a perpetual communion with God, and say, "Infidel! Unbeliever."

Then, as one day is devoted to religion, it is thought that is enough; that religion has no more business in the world than the world in religion. So division is made of the territory of mortal life, in which partition worldliness has six days, while poor religion has only the Sunday, and content with her own limits, feels no salient wish to absorb or annex the week! It is painful to see this abuse of an institution so noble. No commonness of its occurrence renders it less painful. It is painful to be told that men of the most scrupulous sects on Sunday, are in the week the least scrupulous of men.

But even in religious matters it is thought all things which pertain directly to the religious welfare of men are not proper to be discussed on Sunday. One must not preach against intemperance, against slavery, against war, on Sunday. It is not "evangelical;" not "preaching the gospel." Yet it is thought proper to preach on total depravity, on eternal damnation; to show that God will damn forever the majority of mankind; that the apostle Peter was a Unitarian. The Sunday is not the time, the pulpit not the place, preaching not the instrument, wherewith to oppose the monstrous sins of our day, and secure education, temperance, peace, freedom, for mankind. It is not evangelical, not Christian, to do that of a Sunday! Yet wonderful to say, it is not thought very wicked to hold a political caucus on Sunday for the merest party purposes; not wicked at all to work all day at the navy-yards in fitting out vessels, if they are only vessels of war; not at all wicked to toil all Sunday, if it is only in aiming to kill men in regular battle. Theological newspapers can expend their cheap censure on a member of Congress for writing a letter on Sunday, yet have no word of fault to find with the order which sets hundreds to work on Sunday in preparing armaments of war; not a word against the war which sets men to butcher their Christian brothers on the day which Christians celebrate as the anniversary of Christ's triumph over death! These things show that we have not yet arrived at the most profitable and Christian mode of using the Sunday; and when I consider these abuses I wonder not that the cry of "Infidel" is met by the unchristian taunt, yet more deserved and biting, "Thou hypocrite!" I wonder not that some men say, "Let us away with the Sunday altogether; and if we have no place for rest, we will have none for hypocrisy."

The efforts honestly made by good and honest men, to Judaize the day still more; to revive the sterner features of ancient worship; to put a yoke on us which neither we nor our fathers could bear; to transform the Christian Sunday into the Jewish Sabbath, must lead to a reaction. Abuse on one side will be met by abuse on the other; despotic asceticism by license; Judaism by heathenism. Superstition is the mother of denial. Men will scorn the Sunday; abuse its timely rest. Its hours that may be devoted to man's highest interests will be prostituted to low aims, and worldliness make an unbroken sweep from one end of the month to the other; and then it will take years of toil before mankind can get back and secure the blessings now placed within an easy reach. I put it to you, men whose heads time has crowned with white, or sprinkled with a sober gray, if you would deem it salutary to enforce on your grandchildren the Sabbath austerities which your parents imposed on you? In your youth was the Sunday a welcome day; a genial day; or only wearisome and sour? Was religion, dressed in her Sabbath dress, a welcome guest; was she lovely and to be desired? Your faces answer. Let us profit by your experience.

How can we make the Sunday yet more valuable? If we abandon the superstitious notions respecting its origin and original design, the evils that have hitherto hindered its use will soon perish of themselves. They all grow out of that root. If men are not driven into a reaction by pretensions for the Sunday which facts will not warrant; if unreasonable austerities are not forced upon them in the name of the law, and the name of God; there is no danger in our day that men will abandon an institution which already has done so much service to mankind. Let Sunday and preaching stand on their own merits, and they will encounter no more opposition than the common school and the work-days of the week. Then men will be ready enough to appropriate the Sunday to the highest objects they know and can appreciate. Tell men the Sunday is made for man, and they will use it for its highest use. Tell them man is made for it, and they will war on it as a tyrant. I should be sorry to see the Sunday devoted to common work; sorry to hear the clatter of a mill, or the rattle of the wheels of business on that day. I look with pain on men engaged needlessly in work on that day; not with the pain of wounded superstition, but a deeper regret. I would not water my garden with perfumes when common water was at hand. We shall always have work enough in America; hand-work, and head-work, for common purposes. There is danger that we shall not have enough of rest, of intellectual cultivation, of refinement, of social intercourse; that our time shall be too much devoted to the lower interests of life, to the means of living and not the end.

I would not consider it an act of religion to attend church: only a good thing to go there when the way of improvement leads through it; when you are made wiser and better by being there. I am pained to see a man spend the whole of a Sunday in going to church,—and forgetting himself in getting acquainted with the words of the preachers. I think most intelligent hearers, and most intelligent and Christian preachers, will confess that two sermons are better than three, and one is better than two. One need only look at the afternoon face of a congregation in the city, to be satisfied of this. If one half the day were devoted to public worship, the other half might be free for private studies of men at home, for private devotion, for social relaxation, for intercourse with one's own family and friends. Then Sunday afternoon and evening would afford an excellent opportunity for meetings for the promotion of the great humane movements of the day, which some would think not evangelical enough to be treated of in the morning. Would it be inconsistent with the great purposes of the day, inconsistent with Christianity, to have lectures on science, literature, and similar subjects delivered then? I do not believe the Catholic custom of spending the Sunday afternoon in England, before the Reformation, was a good one. It diverted men from the higher end to the lower. I cannot think that here and now we need amusement so much as society, instruction, refinement, and devotion. Yet it seems to me unwise to restrain the innocent sports of children of a Sunday, to the same degree that our fathers did; to make Sunday to them a day of gloom and sadness. Thoughtful parents are now much troubled in this matter; they cannot enforce the old discipline, so disastrous to themselves; they fear to trust their own sense of what is right;—so, perhaps, get the ill of both schemes, and the good of neither. There are in Boston about thirty thousand Catholics, twenty-five thousand of them, probably, too ignorant to read with pleasure or profit any book. At home, amusement formed a part of their Sunday service; it was a part of their religion to make a festive use of Sunday afternoon. What shall they do? Is it Christian in us by statute to interdict them from their recreation? With the exception of children and these most ignorant persons, it does not appear that there is any class amongst us who need any part of the Sunday for sport.

I am not one of those who wish "to give up the Sunday;" indeed there are few such men amongst us; I would make it yet more useful and profitable. I would remove from it the superstition and the bigotry which have so long been connected with it; I would use it freely, as a Christian not enslaved by the letter of Judaism, but made free by an obedience to the law of the spirit of life. I would use the Sunday for religion in the wide sense of that word; use it to promote piety and goodness, for humanity, for science, for letters, for society. I would not abuse it by impudent license on the one hand, nor by slavish superstition on the other. We can easily escape the evils which come of the old abuse; can make the Sunday ten times more valuable than it is even now; can employ it for all the highest interests of mankind, and fear no reaction into libertinism.

The Sunday is made for man, as are all other days; not man for the Sunday. Let us use it, then, not consuming its hours in a Jewish observance; not devote it to the lower necessities of life, but the higher; not squander it in idleness, sloth, frivolity, or sleep; let us use it for the body's rest, for the mind's culture, for head and heart and soul.

Men and women, you have received the Sunday from your fathers, as a day to be devoted to the highest interests of man. It has done great service for them and for you. But it has come down accompanied with superstition which robs it of half its value. It is easy for you to make the day far more profitable to yourselves than it ever was to your fathers; easy to divest it of all bigotry, to free it from all oldness of the letter; easy to leave it for your children an institution which shall bless them for ages yet to come: or it is easy to bind on their necks unnatural restraints; to impose on their conscience and understanding absurdities which at last they must repel with scorn and contempt. It is in your hands to make the Sunday Jewish or Christian.

III.

A SERMON OF IMMORTAL LIFE.—PREACHED AT THE MELODEON, ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1846.

WISDOM OF SOLOMON III. 1, 4.

The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God: their hope is full of immortality.

It is the belief of mankind that we shall all live forever. This is not a doctrine of Christianity alone. It belongs to the human race. You may find nations so rude that they live houseless, in caverns of the earth; nations that have no letters, not knowing the use of bows and arrows, fire or even clothes, but no nation without a belief in immortal life. The form of that belief is often grotesque and absurd; the mode of proof ridiculous; the expectations of what the future life is to be are often childish and silly. But notwithstanding all that, the fact still remains, the belief that the soul of a man never dies.

How did mankind come by this opinion? "By a miraculous revelation," says one. But according to the common theory of miraculous revelations, the race could not have obtained it in this way, for according to that theory the heathen had no such revelations; yet we find this doctrine the settled belief of the whole heathen world. The Greeks and Romans believed it long before Christ; the Chaldees, with no pretence to miraculous inspiration, taught the idea of immortality; while the Jews, spite of their alleged revelations, rested only in the dim sentiment thereof.

It was not arrived at by reasoning. It requires a good deal of hard thinking to reason out and prove this matter. Yet you find this belief among nations not capable as yet of that art of thinking and to that degree, nations who never tried to prove it, and yet believe it as confidently as we. The human race did not sit down and think it out; never waited till they could prove it by logic and metaphysics; did not delay their belief till a miraculous revelation came to confirm it. It came to mankind by intuition; by instinctive belief, the belief which comes unavoidably from the nature of man. In this same way came the belief in God; the love of man; the sentiment of justice. Men could see, and knew they could see, before they proved it; before they had theories of vision; without waiting for a miraculous revelation to come and tell them they had eyes, and might see if they would look. Some faculties of the body act spontaneously at first—so others of the spirit.

Immortality is a fact of man's nature, so it is a part of the universe, just as the sun is a fact in the heavens and a part of the universe. Both are writings from God's hand; each therefore a revelation from Him, and of Him; only not miraculous, but natural, regular, normal. Yet each is just as much a revelation from Him as if the great Soul of all had spoken in English speech to one of us and said, "There is a sun there in the heavens, and thou shalt live for ever." Yes, the fact is more certain than such speech would make it, for this fact speaks always—a perpetual revelation, and no words can make it more certain.

As a man attains consciousness of himself, he attains consciousness of his immortality. At first he asks proof no more of his eternal existence than of his present life; instinctively he believes both. Nay, he does not separate the two; this life is one link in that golden and electric chain of immortality; the next life another and more bright, but in the same chain. Immortality is what philosophers call an ontological fact; it belongs essentially to the being of man, just as the eye is a physiological fact and belongs to the body of man. To my mind this is the great proof of immortality: the fact that it is written in human nature; written there so plain that the rudest nations have not failed to find it, to know it; written just as much as form is written on the circle, and extension on matter in general. It comes to our consciousness as naturally as the notions of time and space. We feel it as a desire; we feel it as a fact. What is thus in man is writ there of God who writes no lies. To suppose that this universal desire has no corresponding gratification, is to represent Him, not as the father of all but as only a deceiver. I feel the longing after immortality, a desire essential to my nature, deep as the foundation of my being; I find the same desire in all men. I feel conscious of immortality; that I am not to die; no, never to die, though often to change. I cannot believe this desire and consciousness are felt only to mislead, to beguile, to deceive me. I know God is my father, and the father of the nations. Can the Almighty deceive his children? For my own part, I can conceive of nothing which shall make me more certain of my immortality. I ask no argument from learned lips. No miracle could make me more sure; no, not if the sheeted dead burst cerement and shroud, and rising forth from their honored tombs stood here before me, the disenchanted dust once more enchanted with that fiery life; no, not if the souls of all my sires since time began came thronging round, and with miraculous speech told me they lived and I should also live. I could only say, "I knew all this before, why waste your heavenly speech!" I have now indubitable certainty of eternal life. Death removing me to the next state, can give me infallible certainty.

But there are men who doubt of immortality. They say they are conscious of the want, not of the fact. They need a proof. The exception here proves the rule. You do not doubt your personal and conscious existence now; you ask no proof of that; you would laugh at me should I try to convince you that you are alive and self-conscious. Yet one of the leaders of modern philosophy wanted a proof of his as a basis for his science, and said,—"I am because I think." But his thought required proof as much as his being; yes, logically more, for being is the ground of thinking, not thinking of being. At this day there are sound men who deny the existence of this outward world, declaring it only a dreamworld. This ground, they say, and yonder sun have being but in fancy, like the sun and ground you perchance dreamed of last night whose being was only a being-dreamed. These are exceptional men, and help prove the common rule, that man trusts his senses and believes an outward world. Yet such are more common amongst philosophers than men who doubt of their immortal life. You cannot easily reason those men out of their philosophy and into their senses, nor by your own philosophy perhaps convince them that there is an outward world.

I think few of you came to your belief in everlasting life through reasoning. Your belief grew out of your general state of mind and heart. You could not help it. Perhaps few of you ever sat down and weighed the arguments for and against it, and so made up your mind. Perhaps those who have the firmest consciousness of the fact are least familiar with the arguments which confirm that consciousness. If a man disbelieves it, if he denies it, his opinion is not often to be changed immediately or directly by argument. His special conviction has grown out of his general state of mind and heart, and is only to be removed by a change in his whole philosophy. I am not honoring men for their belief, nor blaming men who doubt or deny. I do not believe any one ever willingly doubted this; ever purposely reasoned himself into the denial thereof. Men doubt because they cannot help it; not because they will, but must.

There are a great many things true which no man as yet can prove true; some things so true that nothing can make them plainer, or more plainly true. I think it is so with this doctrine, and therefore, for myself, ask no argument. With my views of man, of God, of the relation between the two, I want no proof, satisfied with my own consciousness of immortality. Yet there are arguments which are fair, logical, just, which satisfy the mind, and may, perhaps, help persuade some men who doubt, if such men there are amongst you. I think that immortality is a fact of consciousness; a fact given in the constitution of man: therefore a matter of sentiment. But it requires thought to pick it out from amongst the other facts of consciousness. Though at first merely a feeling, a matter of sentiment, on examination it becomes an idea—a matter of thought. It will bear being looked at in the sharpest and dryest light of logic. Truth never flinches before reason. It is so with our consciousness of God; that is an ontological fact, a fact given in the nature of man. At first it is a feeling, a matter of sentiment. By thought we abstract this fact from other facts; we find an idea of God. That is a matter of philosophy, and the analyzing mind legitimates the idea and at length demonstrates the existence of God, which we first learned without analysis, and by intuition. A great deal has been written to prove the existence of God, and that by the ablest men; yet I cannot believe that any one was ever reasoned directly into a belief in God, by all those able men, nor directly out of it by all the skeptics and scoffers. Indirectly such works affect men, change their philosophy and modes of thought, and so help them to one or the other conclusion.

The idea of immortality, like the idea of God, in a certain sense, is born in us, and fast as we come to consciousness of ourselves we come to consciousness of God, and of ourselves as immortal. The higher we advance in wisdom, goodness, piety, the larger place do God and immortality hold in our experience and inward life. I think that is the regular and natural process of a man's development. Doubt of either seems to me an exception, an irregularity. Causes that remove the doubt must be general more than special.

However, in order to have a basis of thought and reasoning, as well as of intuition and reason, let me mention some of the arguments for everlasting life.

I. The first is drawn from the general belief of mankind. The greatest philosophers and the most profound and persuasive religious teachers of the whole world have taught this. That is an important fact, for these men represent the consciousness of mankind in the highest development it has yet reached, and in such points are the truest representatives of man. What is more, the human race believes it, not merely as a thing given by miraculous revelation, not as a matter proven by science, not as a thing of tradition resting on some man's authority, but believes it instinctively, not knowing and not asking why, or how; believes it as a fact of consciousness. Now in a matter of this sort the opinion of the human race is worth considering. I do not value very much the opinion of a priesthood in Rome or Judea, or elsewhere on this point, or any other, for they may have designs adverse to the truth. But the general sentiment of the human race in a matter like this is of the greatest importance. This general sentiment of mankind is a quite different thing from public opinion, which favors freedom in one country and slavery in another; this sentiment of mankind relates to what is a matter of feeling with most men. It is only a few thinkers that have made it a matter of thought. The opinion of mankind, so far as we know, has not changed on this point for four thousand years. Since the dawn of history, man's belief in immortality has continually been developing and getting deeper fixed.

Still more, this belief is very dear to mankind. Let me prove that. If it were true that one human soul was immortal and yet was to be eternally damned, getting only more clotted with crime and deeper bit by agony as the ages went slowly by, then immortality were a curse, not to that man only, but to all mankind—for no amount of happiness, merited or undeserved, could ever atone or make up for the horrid wrong done to that one most miserable man. Who of you is there that could relish Heaven, or even bear it for a moment, knowing that a brother was doomed to smart with ever greatening agony, while year on year, and age on age, the endless chain of eternity continued to coil round the flying wheels of hell? I say the thought of one such man would fill even Heaven with misery, and the best man of men would scorn the joys of everlasting bliss, would spurn at Heaven and say, "Give me my brother's place; for me there is no Heaven while he is there!" Now it has been popularly taught, that not one man alone, but the vast majority of all mankind, are thus to be condemned; immortal only to be everlastingly wretched. That is the popular doctrine now in this land. It has been so taught in the Christian churches these sixteen centuries and more—taught in the name of Christ! Such an immortality would be a curse to men, to every man; as much so to the "saved" as to the "lost;" for who would willingly stay in Heaven, and on such terms? Surely not he who wept with weeping men! Yet in spite of this vile doctrine drawn over the world to come, mankind religiously believes that each shall live for ever. This shows how strong is the instinct which can lift up such a foul and hateful doctrine and still live on. Tell me not that scoffers and critics shall take away man's faith in endless life: it has stood a harder test than can ever come again.

II. The next argument is drawn from the nature of man.

1. All men desire to be immortal. This desire is instinctive, natural, universal. In God's world such a desire implies the satisfaction thereof equally natural and universal. It cannot be that God has given man this universal desire of immortality, this belief in it, and yet made it all a mockery. Man loves truth; tells it; rests only in it; how much more God who is the trueness of truth. Bodily senses imply their objects—the eye light, the ear sound; the touch, the taste, the smell, things relative thereto. Spiritual senses likewise foretell their object,—are silent prophecies of endless life. The love of justice, beauty, truth, of man and God, points to realities unseen as yet. We are ever hungering after noblest things, and what we feed on makes us hunger more. The senses are satisfied, but the soul never.

2. Then, too, while this composite body unavoidably decays, this simple soul which is my life decays not. Reason, the affections, all the powers that make the man, decay not. True, the organs by which they act become impaired. But there is no cause for thinking that love, conscience, reason, will, ever become weaker in man; but cause for thinking that all these continually become more strong. Was the mind of Newton gone when his frame, long over-tasked, refused its wonted work?

3. Here on earth, every thing in its place and time matures. The acorn and the chestnut, things natural to this climate, ripen every year. A longer season would make them no better nor bigger. It is so with our body—that, under proper conditions, becomes mature. It is so with all the things of earth. But man is not fully grown as the acorn and the chestnut; never gets mature. Take the best man and the greatest—all his faculties are not developed, fully grown and matured. He is not complete in the qualities of a man; nay, often half his qualities lie all unused. Shall we conclude these are never to obtain development and do their work? The analogy of nature tells us that man, the new-born plant, is but removed by death to another soil, where he shall grow complete and become mature.

4. Then, too, each other thing under its proper conditions not only ripens but is perfect also after its kind. Each clover-seed is perfect as a star. Every lion, as a general rule, is a common representation of all lionhood; the ideal of his race made real in him, a thousand years of life would not make him more. But where is the Adamitic man; the type and representative of his race, who makes actual its idea? Even Jesus bids you not call him good; no man has all the manhood of mankind. Yes, there are rudiments of greatness in us all, but abortive, incomplete, and stopped in embryo. Now all these elements of manhood point as directly to another state as the unfinished walls of yonder rising church intimate that the work is not complete, that the artist here intends a roof, a window there, here a tower, and over all a heaven-piercing spire. All men are abortions, our failure pointing to the real success. Nay, we are all waiting to be born, our whole nature looking to another world, and dimly presaging what that world shall be. Death, however we misname him, seasonable or out of time, is the birth-angel, that alone.

5. Besides, the presence of injustice, of wrong, points the same way. The fact that one man goes out of this life in childhood, in manhood, at any time before the natural measure of his days is full; the fact that any one is by circumstances made wretched; that he is hindered from his proper growth and has not here his natural due—all intimates to me his future life. I know that God is just. I know His justice too shall make all things right, for He must have the power, the wish, the will therefor, to speak in human speech. I see the injustice in this city, its pauperism, suffering, and crime, men smarting all their life, and by no fault of theirs. I know there must be another hemisphere to balance this; another life, wherein justice shall come to all and for all. Else God were unjust; and an unjust God to me is no God at all, but a wretched chimera which my soul rejects with scorn. I see the autumn prefigured in the spring. The flowers of May-day foretold the harvest, its rosy apples and its yellow ears of corn. As the bud now lying cold and close upon the bark of every tree throughout our northern clime is a silent prophecy of yet another spring and other summers, and harvests too; so this instinctive love of justice scantly budding here and nipped by adverse fate, silently but clearly tells of a kingdom of heaven. I take some miserable child here in this city, squalid in dress and look, ignorant and wicked too as most men judge of vagrant vice, made so by circumstances over which that child had no control; I turn off with a shudder at the public wrong we have done and still are doing; but in that child I see proof of another world, yes, Heaven glittering from behind those saddened eyes. I know that child has a man's nature in him, perhaps a Channing's trusting piety; perhaps a Newton's mind; has surely rudiments of more than these; for what were Channing, Newton, both of them, but embryo men? I turn off with a shudder at the public wrong, but a faith in God's justice, in that child's eternal life, which nothing can ever shake.

III. A third argument is drawn from the nature of God. He, as the infinite, the unconditioned, the absolute, is all-powerful, all-wise, all-good. Therefore he must wish the best of all possible things; must know the best of all possible things; must will the best of all possible things, and so bring it to pass. Life is a possible thing; eternal life is possible. Neither implies a contradiction; yes, to me they seem necessary, more than possible. Now, then, as life, serene and happy life, is better than non-existence, so immortality is better than perpetual death. God must know that, wish that, will that, and so bring that about. Man, therefore, must be immortal. This argument is brief indeed, but I see not how it can be withstood.

I do not know that one of you doubts of eternal life. If any does, I know not if these thoughts will ever affect his doubt. Still, I think each argument is powerful; to one that thinks, reasons, balances, and then decides, exceeding powerful. All put together form a mass of argument which, as it seems to me, no logic can resist. Yet I beg you to understand that I do not rest immortality on any reasoning of mine, but on reason itself; not on these logical arguments, but on man's consciousness, and the instinctive belief which is common to the human race. I believed my immortality before I proved it; believed it just as strongly then as now. Nay, could some doubter rise, and, to my thinking, vanquish all these arguments, I should still hold fast my native faith, nor fear the doubter's arms. The simple consciousness of men is stronger than all forms of proof. Still, if men want arguments—why, there they are.

The belief in immortality is one thing; the special form thereof, the definite notion of the future life, another and quite different. The popular doctrine in our churches I think is this: That this body which we lay in the dust shall one day be raised again, the living soul joined on anew, and both together live the eternal life. But where is the soul all this time, between our death-day and our day of rising? Some say it sleeps unconscious, dead all this time; others, that it is in Heaven now, or else in hell; others, in a strange and transient home, imperfect in its joy or woe, waiting the final day and more complete account. It seems to me this notion is absurd and impossible: absurd in its doctrine relative to the present condition of departed souls; impossible in what it teaches of the resurrection of this body. If my soul is to claim the body again, which shall it be, the body I was born into, or that I died out of? If I live to the common age of men, changing my body as I must, and dying daily, then I have worn some eight or ten bodies. So at the last, which body shall claim my soul, for the ten had her? The soul herself may claim them all. But to make the matter still more intricate, there is in the earth but a certain portion of matter out of which human bodies can be made. Considering all the millions of men now living, the myriads of millions that have been before, it is plain, I think, that all the matter suitable for human bodies has been lived over many times. So if the world were to end to-day, instead of each old man having ten bodies from which to choose the one that fits him best, there would be ten men, all clamoring for each body! Shall I then have a handful of my former dust, and that alone? That is not the resurrection of my former body. This whole doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh seems to me impossible and absurd.

I know men refer this, as many other things no better, to Jesus. I find no satisfactory evidence that he taught the resurrection of the body; there is some evidence that he did not. I know it was the doctrine of the Pharisees of his time, of Paul, the early Christians, and more or less of the Christian churches to this day. In Christ's time in Judea, there were the Sadducees, who taught the eternal death of men; the Pharisees who taught the resurrection of the flesh and its reunion with the soul; the Essenes, who taught the immortality of the soul, but rejected the resurrection of the body. Paul was a Pharisee, and in his letters taught the resurrection of the dead, the belief of the Pharisees. From him it has come down to us, and in the creed of many churches it is still written, "I believe in the resurrection of the flesh." Many doubted this in early times, but the council of Nice declared all men accursed who dared to doubt the resurrection of the flesh. I mention this as absurd and impossible, because it is still, I fear, the popular belief, and lest some should confound the doctrine of immortality with this tenet of the Pharisees. Let it be remembered the immortality of the soul is one thing, the resurrection of the body another and quite different.

What is this future life? what can we know of it besides its existence? Some men speak as if they knew the way around Heaven as around the wards of their native city. What we can know in detail is cautiously to be inferred from the nature of man and the nature of God. I will modestly set down what seems to me.

It must be a conscious state. Man is by his nature conscious; yes, self-conscious. He is progressive in his self-consciousness. I cannot think a removal out of the body destroys this consciousness; rather that it enhances and intensifies this. Yet consciousness in the next life must differ as much from consciousness here as the ripe peach differs from the blossom, or the bud, or the bark, or the earthly materials out of which it grew. The child is no limit to the man, nor my consciousness now to what I may be, must be hereafter.

It must be a social state. Our nature is social; our joys social. For our progress here, our happiness, we depend on one another. Must it not be so there? It must be an advance upon our nature and condition here. All the analogy of nature teaches that. Things advance from small to great; from base to beautiful. The girl grows into a woman; the bud swells into the blossom, that into the fruit. The process over, the work begins anew. How much more must it be so in the other life. What old powers we shall discover now buried in the flesh; what new powers shall come upon us in that new state, no man can know; it were but poetic idleness to talk of them. We see in some great man, what power of intellect, imagination, justice, goodness, piety, he reveals, lying latent in us all. How men bungle in their works of art! No Raphael can paint a dew-drop or a flake of frost. Yet some rude man, tired with his work, lies down beneath a tree, his head upon his swarthy arm, and sleep shuts, one by one, these five scant portals of the soul, and what an artist is he made at once! How brave a sky he paints above him, with what golden garniture of clouds set off; what flowers and trees, what men and women does he not create, and moving in celestial scenes! What years of history does he condense in one short minute, and when he wakes, shakes off the purple drapery of his dream as if it were but worthless dust and girds him for his work anew! What other powers there are shut up in men less known than this artistic phantasy; powers of seeing the distant, recalling the past, predicting the future, feeling at once the character of men—of this we know little, only by rare glimpses at the unwonted side of things. But yet we know enough to guess there are strange wonders there waiting to be revealed.

What form our conscious, social, and increased activity shall take, we know not. We know of that no more than before our birth we knew of this world, of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, or the things which they reveal. We are not born into that world, have not its senses yet. This we know, that the same God, all-powerful, all-wise, all-good, rules there and then, as here and now. Who cannot trust him to do right and best for all? For my own part, I feel no wish to know how or where, or what I shall be hereafter. I know it will be right for my truest welfare; for the good of all. I am satisfied with this trust.

Yet the next life must be a state of retribution. Thither we carry nothing but ourselves, our naked selves. Our fortune we leave behind us; our honors and rank return to such as gave; even our reputation, the good or ill men thought we were, clings to us no more. We go thither without our staff or scrip; nothing but the man we are. Yet that man is the result of all life's daily work; it is the one thing which we have brought to pass. I cannot believe men who have voluntarily lived mean, little, vulgar and selfish lives, will go out of this and into that, great, noble, generous, good, and holy. Can the practical saint and the practical hypocrite enter on the same course of being together? I know the sufferings of bad men here, the wrong they do their nature, and what comes of that wrong. I think that suffering is the best part of sin, the medicine to heal it with. What men suffer here from their wrong-doing is its natural consequence; but all that suffering is a mercy, designed to make them better. Every thing in this world is adapted to promote the welfare of God's creatures. Must it not be so in the next? How many men seem wicked from our point of view, who are not so from their own; how many become infamous through no fault of theirs; the victims of circumstances, born into crime, of low and corrupt parents, whom former circumstances made corrupt! Such men cannot be sinners before God. Here they suffer from the tyranny of appetites they never were taught to subdue; they have not the joy of a cultivated mind. The children of the wild Indian are capable of the same cultivation as children here; yet they are savages. Is it always to be so? Is God to be partial in granting the favors of another life? I cannot believe it. I doubt not that many a soul rises up from the dungeon and the gallows, yes, from dens of infamy amongst men, clean and beautiful before God. Christ, says the Gospel, assured the penitent thief of sharing heaven with him—and that day. Many seem inferior to me, who in God's sight must be far before me; men who now seem too low to learn of me here, may be too high to teach me there.

I cannot think the future world is to be feared, even by the worst of men. I had rather die a sinner than live one. Doubtless justice is there to be done; that may seem stern and severe. But remember God's justice is not like a man's; it is not vengeance, but mercy; not poison, but medicine. To me it seems tuition more than chastisement. God is not the Jailer of the Universe, but the Shepherd of the people; not the Hangman of mankind, but their Physician; yes, our Father. I cannot fear Him as I fear men. I cannot fail to love. I abhor sin, I loathe and nauseate thereat; most of all at my own. I can plead for others and extenuate their guilt, perhaps they for mine; not I for my own. I know God's justice will overtake me, giving me what I have paid for. But I do not, cannot fear it. I know His justice is love; that if I suffer, it is for my everlasting joy. I think this is a natural state of mind. I do not find that men ever dread the future life, or turn pale on their death-bed at thought of God's vengeance, except when a priesthood has frightened them to that. The world's literature, which is the world's confession, proves what I say. In Greece, in classic days, when there was no caste of priests, the belief in immortality was current and strong. But in all her varied literature I do not remember a man dying, yet afraid of God's vengeance. The rude Indian of our native land did not fear to meet the Great Spirit, face to face. I have sat by the bedside of wicked men, and while death was dealing with my brother, I have watched the tide slow ebbing from the shore, but I have known no one afraid to go. Say what we will, there is nothing stronger and deeper in men than confidence in God, a solemn trust that He will do us good. Even the worst man thinks God his Father; and is he not? Tell me not of God's vengeance, punishing men for his own glory! There is no such thing. Talk not to me of endless hell, where men must suffer for suffering's sake, be damned for an eternity of woe. I tell you there is no such thing, nor can there ever be. Does not even the hireling shepherd, when a single lamb has gone astray, leave the ninety and nine safe in their fold, go forth some stormy night and seek the wanderer, rejoicing to bring home the lost one on his shoulders? And shall God forget His child, his frailest or most stubborn child; leave him in endless misery, a prey to insatiate Sin, that grim, bloodthirsty wolf, prowling about the human fold? I tell you No; not God. Why, this eccentric earth forsakes the sun awhile, careering fast and far away, but that attractive power prevails at length, and the returning globe comes rounding home again. Does a mortal mother desert her son, wicked, corrupt and loathsome though he be? If so, the wiser world cries, Shame! But she does not. When her child becomes loathsome and hateful to the world, drunk with wickedness, and when the wicked world puts him away out of its sight, strangling him to death, that mother forgets not her child. She had his earliest kiss from lips all innocent of coming ill, and she will have his last. Yes, she will press his cold and stiffened form to her own bosom; the bosom that bore and fed the innocent babe yearns yet with mortal longing for the murdered murderer. Infamous to the world, his very dust is sacred dust to her. She braves the world's reproach, buries her son, piously hoping, that as their lives once mingled, so their ashes shall. The world, cruel and forgetful oft, honors the mother in its deepest heart. Do you tell me that culprit's mother loves her son more than God can love him? Then go and worship her. I know that when father and mother both forsake me, in the extremity of my sin, I know my God loves on. Oh yes, ye sons of men, Indian and Greek, ye are right to trust your God. Do priests and their churches say No!—bid them go and be silent forever. No grain of dust gets lost from off this dusty globe; and shall God lose a man from off this sphere of souls? Believe it not.

I know that suffering follows sin, lasting long as the sin. I thank God it is so; that God's own angel stands there to warn back the erring Balaams, wandering towards woe. But God, who sends the rain, the dew, the sun, on me as on a better man, will, at last, I doubt it not, make us all pure, all just, all good, and so, at last, all happy. This follows from the nature of God himself, for the All-good must wish the welfare of His child; the All-wise know how to achieve that welfare; the All-powerful bring it to pass. Tell me He wishes not the eternal welfare of all men, then I say, That is not the God of the universe. I own not that as God. Nay, I tell you it is not God you speak of, but some heathen fancy, smoking up from your unhuman heart. I would ask the worst of mothers, Did you forsake your child because he went astray, and mocked your word? "Oh no," she says; "he was but a child, he knew no better, and I led him right, corrected him for his good, not mine!" Are we not all children before God; the wisest, oldest, wickedest, God's child! I am sure He will never forsake me, how wicked soever I become. I know that he is love; love, too, that never fails. I expect to suffer for each conscious, wilful wrong; I wish, I hope, I long to suffer for it. I am wronged if I do not; what I do not outgrow, live over and forget here, I hope to expiate there. I fear a sin; not to outgrow a sin.

A man who has lived here a manly life, must enter the next under the most favorable circumstances. I do not mean a man of mere negative goodness, starting in the road of old custom, with his wheels deep in the ruts, not having life enough to go aside, but a positively good man, one bravely good. He has lived heaven here, and must enter higher up than a really wicked man, or a slothful one, or one but negatively good. He can go from earth to heaven, as from one room to another, pass gradually, as from winter to spring. To such an one, no revolution appears needed. The next life, it seems, must be a continual progress, the improvement of old powers, the disclosure or accession of new ones. What nobler reach of thought, what profounder insight, what more heavenly imagination, what greater power of conscience, faith and love, will bless us there and then, it were vain to calculate, it is far beyond our span. You see men now, whose souls are one with God, and so His will works through them as the magnetic fire runs on along the unimpeding line. What happiness they have, it is they alone can say. How much greater must it be there; not even they can tell. Here the body helps us to some things. Through these five small loop-holes the world looks in. How much more does the body hinder us from seeing? Through the sickly body yet other worlds look in. He who has seen only the daylight, knows nothing of that heaven of stars, which all night long hang overhead their lamps of gold. When death has dusted off this body from me, who will dream for me the new powers I shall possess? It were vain to try. Time shall reveal it all.

I cannot believe that any state in Heaven is a final state, only a condition of progress. The bud opens into the blossom, the flower matures into the fruit. The salvation of to-day is not blessedness enough for to-morrow. Here we are first babes of earth, with a few senses, and those imperfect, helpless and ignorant; then children of earth; then youths; then men, armed with reason, conscience, affection, piety, and go on enlarging these without end. So methinks it must be there, that we shall be first babes of Heaven, then children, next youths, and so go on growing, advancing and advancing—our being only a becoming more and more, with no possibility of ever reaching the end. If this be true, then there must be a continual increase of being. So, in some future age, the time will come, when each one of us shall have more mind, and heart, and soul, than Christ on earth; more than all men now on earth have ever had; yes, more than they and all the souls of men now passed to Heaven;—shall have, each one of us, more being than they all have had, and so more truth, more soul, more faith, more rest and bliss of life.

Do men of the next world look in upon this? Are they present with us, conscious of our deeds or thoughts? Who knows? Who can say aye or no? The unborn know nothing of the life on earth; yet the born of earth know somewhat of them, and make ready for their coming. Who knows but men born to heaven are waiting for your birth to come—have gone to prepare a place for us? All that is fancy, and not fact; it is not philosophy, but poetry; no more. Of this we may be sure, that what is best will be; what best for saint or sinner; what most conducive to their real good. That is no poetry, but unavoidable truth, which all mankind may well believe.

There are many who never attained their true stature here, yet without blameworthiness of theirs; men cheated of their growth. Many a Milton walks on his silent way, and goes down at last, not singing and unsung. How many a possible Newton or Descartes has dug the sewers of a city, and dies, giving no sign of the wealthy soul he bore!