THE MATERIALISTS AT WORK. 829 



their embryonic functions, the life after birth could not proceed. 

 And so, unless our old fixed ways of wanting-, deeming and cogitat- 

 ing, the channels of nature's thoughts and loves, were dried up, and 

 rendered inert, the life after death would be impossible : and in that 

 case, having given up one life by inevitable stages, and yet not at- 

 tained to the next, we should stick in death, and be lost to progress; 

 which last, however, is provided by the successive dying of our aged 

 minds. We therefore claim materialism as not only the cause of 

 death, but by poetical justice, as the undertaker and burier of the 

 dead ; and we leave it with sadness to its " black work/' of caring 

 for that for which no soul can care. And as we leave it shoveling 

 away — ashes to ashes and dust to dust — we meet our brother, the 

 Man, again, with all his virilities and appointments intact; an eye 

 which is mind, and a mind which is spirit, the risen person and new 

 born infant of the second life. 



Having now dwelt upon the functions of the human form, and 

 seen that they repose upon the functions of the body, and that the 

 one is never without the other, we conclude the present Chapter 

 with a few words on some of the functions of the doctrine of the hu- 

 man form, which doctrine is to knowledge what the human form is 

 to existence. 



With regard to the sciences of the body, we have found that this 

 doctrine opens up the sluices of all life, and determines its tide into 

 physiology. We can no longer think of our vitals, or molecules,* 



There is the same God on both sides of the grave, yet the state is according to 

 the materials. 



* In stating this, we know that we disagree with the prevailing views, which 

 powder the human body into cells, and regard them as the elements of mankind. 

 But, as we before stated (pp. 174 — 177), only that is essential to any subject, 

 ■which is peculiar to it, and contradistinguishes it from others, whereas nucleated 

 cells and cell-germs are common to all organization as the chaos out of which 

 it arises. To think of them in connection with anything human, is to think of 

 man in and from chaos. But it has required a divine hand fo win the human form 

 out of matter, and science has no prospect of gaining it, unless by accepting it as 

 il i^. without attempting to construct it out of cells. For our own part we are 

 conscious that we can make nothing of cells, and we bless God every day that 

 his works come to us ready made, and can neither be taken to pieces, nor put 

 together — save by his own hand. Our ceils are not the pieces, but the fragments 



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