288 FINAL CAUSES : THEIR BEARING 



the hypothesis of Bolingbroke, and yet find the mysteri- 

 ous fact of degradation remain an unsolved riddle in our 

 hands. 



But though I can assign neither reason nor cause for the 

 fact, I cannot avoid the conclusion that it is associated with 

 certain other great facts in the moral government of the uni- 

 verse, by those threads of analogical connection which run 

 through the entire tissue of Creation and Providence, and 

 impart to it that character of unity which speaks of the single 

 producing Mind. The first idea of every religion on earth 

 which has arisen out of what may be termed the spiritual in- 

 stincts of man's nature, is that of a Future State ; the second 

 idea is, that in this state men shall exist in two separate classes, 

 — ^the one in advance of their present condition, the other far 

 in the rear of it. It is on these two great beliefs that con- 

 science everywhere finds the fulcrum from which it acts upon 

 the conduct ; and it is, we find, wholly inoperative as a force 

 without them. And in that one religion among men that, 

 instead of retiring, like the pale ghosts of the others, before 

 the light of civilization, brightens and expands in its beams, 

 and in favour of whose claim as a revelation from God the 

 highest philosophy has declared, we find these two master 

 ideas occupying a still more prominent place than in any of 

 those merely indigenous religions that spring up in the human 

 mind of themselves. The special lesson which the Adorable 

 Saviour, during his ministry on earth, ofbenest enforced, and 

 to which all the others bore reference, was the lesson of a final 

 separation of mankind into two great divisions, — a division 

 of God-like men, of whose high standing and full-orbed hap- 

 piness man, in the present scene of things, can form no ade- 

 quate conception ; and a division of men finally lost, and 

 doomed to unutterable misery and hopeless degradation. 

 There is not in all Revelation a single doctrine which we find 

 oftener or more clearly enforced than that there shall con- 



