philosophers, that some kind of honour and dignity shall be conferred upon excellent persons, after their departure out of this life; and that there is a certain region appointed, in which the souls of such persons reside. The same excellent philosopher, in his consolatory letter to his wife on the death of their little child, supposes that the souls of infants pass after death into a better and more divine state. And that this is what may be gathered from their ancient laws and customs derived by tradition from their ancestors. It is stated also to have been the doctrine of the Persian Magi, that men shall live again, and be immortal.-Seneca again has some sublime thoughts on this subject, in one of his epistles, in which he says,-" that the last day of this life is to be regarded as the birth-day of an eternal one.”

I by no means intend to say, that we Christians are to form our ideas of a future state from what has been written on the subject by ancient heathens. Yet surely a fair argument may be drawn in support of the doctrine under consideration, from the general belief in it, which appears to have obtained amongst the most ancient inhabitants of the earth. In the words of Cicero, "Permanere animos arbitramur, consensu nationum omnium." And surely it is deeply interesting to observe the workings of these powerful minds (and more pow

erful minds have never existed in any age,) labouring and struggling for light through the gross darkness that covered and overshadowed them. Circumstanced as they were, we cannot expect that they should always be consistent in their opinions on these weighty points. If they had been, human strength would have proved itself sufficient for the attainment of the truth, and Divine Revelation would have been in the same degree superfluous. We must not be surprised, then, if we find the ancient philosophers at one time approaching very near indeed to the light, in language equally sublime and correct; at another time lamentably wandering back into the thick gloom, and proving at once the childish weakness of man, when left to his own unassisted guidance. Yet, amidst all their devious wanderings, we find the right notion constantly recurring, "that death (as one of them most strongly asserts) belongs only to the body, and not to the soul; for that there is no death to the soul." And it is both curious and melancholy to observe the strange conceits into which they sometimes fell, whilst endeavouring to investigate this subject. The most remarkable one was the well-known notion of Pythagoras, who held that the souls of men, immediately after death, migrate from one body to another, and even into the bodies of beasts as well as of men. Thus the Pythago

reans taught that the souls of cowards and effeminate persons are thrust into the bodies of women; those of murderers into the bodies of savage beasts; the lascivious into the forms of boars and swine ; the vain and inconstant, they said, are to be changed into birds; the slothful and ignorant into fishes; the angry and malicious into serpents; the fraudulent into foxes. Again, the virtuous are promised, upon leaving the body, to pass into pure æther; to become immortal gods; incorruptible; no more obnoxious to death. Socrates is represented as saying, that they who diligently practise popular and civil virtue, go immediately after death into the bodies of animals of a mild and social kind, who have some sort of polity among them, such as bees and ants; or into human bodies of a like kind with their own; and so become men of moderation and sobriety. Plato says, that according to the different qualities of men's souls and their actions, they have different abodes assigned them in some separate place; that they who have been guilty of smaller sins do not sink so deep into that region, but wander about near the surface of it; but they who have sinned most frequently and most heinously, shall fall into the depth, and into those lower places which are called Hades, and by other names of the like kind. And he adds the following fine passage, which is also remarkable, because the latter

part of it is not unlike a passage in one of the Psalms: "O young man! who thinkest the Gods take no notice of thee, this is the judgment of the Gods who dwell in heaven, that he who is bad, shall go to the souls that are bad; and he who is better, to better souls. Wherefore neither do you, nor any other, expect to escape this judgment of the Gods. For thou shalt never be neglected, nor pass unnoticed; neither if thou shouldest be so small as to hide thyself in the lowest part of the earth; nor if thou shouldest take thy flight as high as heaven; but thou shalt suffer a suitable punishment, either whilst thou remainest here, or when thou goest to Hades, or art transported to some wilder and more horrid place."

Cicero is a remarkable instance how far the natural acumen of a powerful mind can carry it towards the discovery of the truth; yet how absolutely necessary is the assistance of Divine Revelation to enlighten even the clearest natural intellect; strongly affirming the doctrine in question in one passage, and doubting it in the next. He argues fully for the immortality of the soul, in one of the finest passages antiquity has left us. He supports his argument by considering the nature of the soul; its uncompounded, indivisible essence, of a quite different kind from common elementary natures; he argues from the soul's wonderful powers

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and faculties, which have something divine in them, incompatible with sluggish matter; from the ardent thirst after immortality, natural to the human mind, but most conspicuous in the most exalted souls.

I have stated so much at length the opinions of ancient writers, not as wishing to build on the evidence of heathens what can only be grounded safely on Christian Revelation, but merely to shew how universal has been the notion, that the death of the body by no means occasions a suspension of self-consciousness in the soul. Now whence could this universal feeling, that such must be the truth, have arisen? I answer, from tradition. The truth was known with certainty by the first inhabitants of the world; from them it was handed down to their posterity, becoming gradually more obscure as the knowledge of the true God was gradually lost in the errors and absurdities of Polytheism. And this may be one reason why the subject is not more distinctly and expressly handled in the Old Testament; because by the Sacred Writers, and by those to whom they addressed themselves, the opinion was so generally received as to require no particular notice. They could never conceive it necessary to enforce a truth which no one doubted; not but what the subject is incidentally noticed in the Old Testament; as we shall presently have. occasion to observe.