This advantage they had, however, that their opinion preserved the identity of individuals, and they conceived themselves to be the very same with respect to the life to come as they found themselves to be in regard to the life present. But then, had they been pressed, they could not have stood the difficultier arising from the dissolution of the body, the loss of which, in their way of thinking, was the loss of the individual.

The learned, who could not but see and feel this difficulty, to avoid it, shut out the body from being any part of the man, and made the soul alone to be the perfect individuum. This engaged them in endless disputes upon the nature of the soul; and this grand article of natural religion, by this means, was made to hang by the slender threads of philosophy; and the whole was entirely lost, if their first position proved false, that the soul is the whole of man; and it is an assertion which will not perhaps stand the examination. The maintainers of this opinion, though they supposed a sensitive, as well as a rational soul in man, which was the seat of the passions, and consequently the spring of all numan actions; yet this sensitive soul they gave up to death as well as the body, and preserved nothing but the pure intellectual mind. And yet it is something surprising to think that a mere rational mind should be the same individual with a man, who consists of a rational mind, a sensitive soul, and a body. This carries no probability with it at first sight, and reason cannot undertake much in its behalf.

But, whatever becomes of these speculations, there is a further difficulty, which can hardly be got over; which is, that this notion of immortality and future judgment can never serve the ends and purposes of religion, because it is a notion which the genetality of mankind can never arrive at. Go to the villages, and tell the ploughmen, that if they sin, yet their bodies shall sleep in peace; no material, no sensible fire shall ever reach them; but there is something within them purely intellectual, which will suffer to eternity; you will hardly find that they have enough of the intellectual to comprehend your meaning. Now natural religion is founded on the sense of nature; that is, upon the common appre

hensions of mankind; and therefore abstracted metaphysical notions, beat out upon the anvil of the schools, can never support natural religion, or make any part of it.

In this point, then, nature seems to be lame, and not able to support the hopes of immortality which she gives to all her children. The expectation of the vulgar, that they shall live again, and be just the same flesh and blood which now they are, is justifiable upon no principles of reason or nature. What is there in the whole compass of things which yields a similitude of dust and ashes rising up again into regular bodies, and to perpetual immortality? On the other side, that the intellectual soul should be the whole man, how justifiable soever it may be in other respects, yet it is not the common sense of nature, and therefore most certainly no part of natural religion.

But it may be worth inquiring how nature becomes thus defective in this material point. Did not God intend men originally for religious creatures; and, if He did, is it no reasonable to expect an original and consistent scheme religion which yet in the point now before us seems to be wanting. The account of this we cannot learn from reason nature: but in the sacred

history the fact is cleared beyon-dispute.

nature stumbled.

of nature.

these

us t

Lastly, if we consider Ow our Saviour has enlightened this doctrine, it will appear at He has removed the difficulty at which s death was no part of the state of nature, so the difficulties --sing from it were not provided for in the religion remove these was the proper work of revelation ; Lord has effectually cleared by His gospel, and shown the body may and shall be united to the spirit in the day fe Lord, so that the complete man shall stand before the great ribunal, to receive a just recompense of reward for the things done in the body. This has restored religion, which had hardly one sound foot to stand on, and made our faith and our reason consistent, which were before at too great a distance. Nature indeed taught us to hope for immortality; but it was in spite of sense and experience, till the great Prince of our peace

appeared, who brought life and immortality to light through His

UNFADING Hope! when life's last embers burn,
When soul to soul, and dust to dust return!
Heaven to thy charge resigns the awful hour!
Oh! then thy kingdom comes! Immortal power!
What though each spark of earth-born rapture fly
The quivering lip, pale cheek, and closing eye!
Bright to the soul thy seraph hands convey
The morning dream of life's eternal day—
Then, then, the triumph and the trance begin,
And all the phoenix spirit burns within ;
Oh! deep enchanting prelude to repose!
The dawn of bliss, the twilight of our woes!
Yet half I hear the parting spirit sigh,
It is a dread and avul thing to die!
Mysterious worlds, un velled by the sun,
Where Time's far-wander tide has never run!

From your

unfathomed shade.

and viewless spheres

A warning comes, unheard by o er ears:

'Tis Heaven's commanding trumpe long and loud
Like Sinai's thunder, pealing from the loud!
While Nature hears, with terror mingled t
The shock that hurls her fabric to the dust"
And, like the trembling Hebrew, when he trod
The roaring waves, and called upon his God,
With mortal terrors clouds immortal bliss,
And shrieks and hovers o'er the dark abyss!
Daughter of faith! awake, arise, illume
The dread unknown, the chaos of the tomb!
Melt and dispel, ye spectre-doubts that roll
Cimmerian darkness on the parting soul !

en den Fly, like the moon-eyed herald of dismay, coliko Chased on his knight steed by the star of day! The strife is o'er-the pangs of nature close, And life's last rapture triumphs o'er her woes. down

It suggests pictures

Let winter come! let polar spirits sweep
The darkening world, and tempest-troubled deep!
Though boundless snows the wither'd heath deform,
And the dim sun scarce wanders through the storm,
Yet shall the smile of social love repay,
With mental light, the melancholy day!
And, when its short and sullen noon is o'er, d
The ice-chain'd waters slumbering on the shore,
How bright the faggots in his little hall,

Blaze on the hearth, and warm the pictured wall!.

CAMPBELL.

Even its gloom has its inspiration of solemn musings, such as Burns has beautifully described :—" As I am what the men of the world, if they knew such a man, would call a whimsical mortal, I have various sources of pleasure and enjoyment, which are, in a manner, peculiar to myself, or some here and there such other out-of-the-way person. Such is the peculiar pleasure I take in the season of winter, more than the rest of the year. This, I believe, may be partly owing to my misfortunes giving my mind a melancholy cast: but there is something even in the

666 'Mighty tempest, and the hoary waste,

Abrupt, and deep-stretch'd o'er the buried earth,'

which raises the mind to a serious solemnity, favourable to everything great and noble. There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more—I do not know if I should call it pleasure—but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me—than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood, or high plantation, in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season for devotion my mind is wrapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him who, in the pompous language of the Hebrew bard, 'walks on the wings of the wind.' In one of these seasons, just after a train of misfortunes, I composed the following:

"The wintry west extends his blast,

And hail and rain does blaw:

Or the stormy north sends driving forth
The blinding sleet and snaw;

While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down,

And roars frae bank to brae ;
And bird and beast in covert rest,
And pass the heartless day.

"The sweeping blast, the sky o'ercast,
The joyless winter day,

Let others fear, to me more dear

Than all the pride of May:

The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul,

My griefs it seems to join ;

The leafless trees my fancy please,

Their fate resembles mine!