34 SYMBOLIC TEACHING. 



body, recomposed of its elements, and re-united, after a certain 

 interval, to the soul. 



But whatever the views taken of the mode in which we 

 shall put on immortality, or however modern science may have 

 impaired the fitness of the insect symbol employed to represent 

 it, there yet remains a very obvious analogy between the stages 

 of insect development, and the progressive states of our own 

 being. The gross and grovelling habits of the Caterpillar, 

 with its repeated castings of skin, as it advances towards 

 maturity a maturity which it often fails to reach owing to 

 parasitic enemies (" apt symbols of the vices which prey upon 

 the soul""*) still serve to parallel completely the work of 

 spiritual regeneration. 



Although the butterfly seems to have been the first, if not the 

 only insect noticed by the ancients as representative of the immor- 

 tal principle, there are a multitude of others which famish em- 

 blems quite as fitting of the souPs destination to a higher sphere. 



The fly, now regaling upon sweets, or buzzing in the 

 summer sun, has come out from a shape, and most likely from 

 a substance, of disgust. The beetle, now careering it through 

 the summer evening sky, has emerged from the form of an 

 unsightly grub, and from a living burial within the earth. 

 And the gnat, now a graceful and agile sporter in the air, has 

 issued from perhaps a horse-pond, where it dwelt an hour ago 

 a miniature monster of the mimic deep. 



* Kirby. 



