are sufficiently general in any given species
of creature, to be called universal to that species,
and yet not given to another species, then, from
all analogy throughout Nature, those capacities
are surely designed by Providence for the distinct
use and conservation of the species to which
they are given.

"It is no answer to me to say that the inherent
capacities thus bestowed on Man do not suffice
in themselves to make him form right notions of
a Deity or a Hereafter; because it is plainly
the design of Providence that Man must learn
to correct and improve all his notions by his
own study and observation. He must build a hut
before he can build a Parthenon; he must believe
with the savage or the heathen before he can
believe with the philosopher or Christian. In a word,
in all his capacities, Man has only given to him,
not the immediate knowledge of the Perfect, but
the means to strive towards the Perfect. And thus
one of the most accomplished of modern reasoners
to whose lectures you must have listened
with delight in your college days, says well:
'Accordingly, the sciences always studied with
keenest interest are those in a state of progress
and uncertainty; absolute certainty and absolute
completion would be the paralysis of any
study, and the last worst calamity that could
befal Man, as he is at present constituted, would
be that full and final possession of speculative
truth which he now vainly anticipates
as the consummation of his intellectual
happiness.'*

* Sir W. Hamilton's Lectures, vol. i. p. 10.

"Well, then, in all those capacities for the
reception of impressions from external Nature,
which are given to Man and not to the brutes, I
see the evidence of Man's Soul. I can understand
why the inferior animal has no capacity to
receive the idea of a Deity and of Worship—
simply because the inferior animal, even if
graciously admitted to a future life, may not
therein preserve the sense of its identity. I can
understand even why that sympathy with each
other which we men possess, and which
constitutes the great virtue we emphatically call
Humanity, is not possessed by the lesser animals
(or, at least, in a very rare and exceptional
degree), even where they live in communities,
like beavers, or bees, or ants; because men are
destined to meet, to know, and to love each
other in the life to come, and the bond
between the brutes ceases here.

"Now, the more, then, we examine the inherent
capacities bestowed distinctly and solely on
Man, the more they seem to distinguish him
from the other races by their comprehension of
objects beyond his life upon this earth. ' Man
alone,' says Muller, ' can conceive abstract
notions:' and it is in abstract notions— such as
time, space, matter, spirit, light, form, quantity,
essence— that Man grounds not only all philosophy,
all science, but all that practically improves
one generation for the benefit of the next. And
why? Because all these abstract notions
unconsciously lead the mind away from the material
into the immaterial; from the present into the
future. But if Man ceases to exist when he
disappears in the grave, you must be compelled
to affirm that lie is the only creature in existence
whom Nature or Providence has condescended
to deceive and cheat by capacities for which
there are no available objects. How nobly and
how truly has Chalmers said: ' What inference
shall we draw from this remarkable law in
Nature that there is nothing waste and nothing
meaningless in the feelings and faculties wherewith
living creatures are endowed? For each
desire there is a counterpart object; for each
faculty there is room and opportunity for
exercise either in the present or in the coming
futurity. Now, but for the doctrine of immortality,
Man would be an exception to this law—
he would stand forth as an anomaly in Nature,
with aspirations in his heart for which the
universe had no antitype to offer, with capacities
of understanding and thought that never
were to be followed by objects of corresponding
greatness through the whole history of his
being!

          *          *          *          *          *

" ' With the inferior animals there is a certain
squareness of adjustment, if we may so term it,
between each desire and its correspondent
gratification. The one is evenly met by the other,
and there is a fulness and definiteness of
enjoyment up to the capacity of enjoyment. Not so
with Man, who, both from the vastness of his
propensities and the vastness of his powers, feels
himself chained and beset in a field too narrow
for him. He alone labours under the discomfort
of an incongruity between his circumstances and
his powers, and unless there be new circumstances
awaiting him in a more advanced state of
being, he, the noblest of Nature's products here,
would turn out to be the greatest of her
failures.'*

* Chalmers, Bridgewater Treatise, voL ii. pp. 28,
30. Perhaps I should observe that here and else-
where in the dialogues between Faber and Fenwick
it has generally been thought better to substitute the
words of the author quoted for the mere outline or
purport of the quotation which memory afforded to
the interlocutor.

"This, then, I take to be the proof of Soul in
Man, not that he has a mind— because, as you
justly say, inferior animals have that, though in a
lesser degree— but because he has the capacities
to comprehend, as soon as he is capable of any
abstract ideas whatsoever, the very truths not
needed for self-conservation on earth, and therefore
not given to yonder ox and opossum— viz. the
nature of Deity— Soul— Hereafter.  And in the
recognition of these truths, the Human society
that excels the society of beavers, bees, and ants
by perpetual and progressive improvement on the
notions inherited from its progenitors, rests its
basis. Thus, in fact, this world is benefited
for men by their belief in the next, while the
society of brutes remains age after age the
same. Neither the bee nor the beaver has, in
all probability, improved since the Deluge.

"But, inseparable from the conviction of these