CONCLUSION. 351 



above suggested are not wanted, at least in the same degree 

 But to such as fnid, which some persons do find, an insuper- 

 able difficulty in shaking off an adherence to those analogies 

 which the corporeal world is continually suggesting to their 

 thoughts — to such, I say, every consideration will be a reliel 

 which manifests the extent of that intelligent power which 

 is acting in nature, the fruitfulness of its resources, the va- 

 riety and aptness and success of its means ; most especially, 

 every consideration which tends to show that, in the trans- 

 lation of a conscious existence, there is not, even. in their 

 own way of regarding it, any thing greatly beyond or totally 

 unlike what takes place in such parts — probably small 

 parts — of the order of nature as are accessible to our obser- 

 vation. 



Again, if there be those who think that the contracted- 

 ness and debility of the human faculties in our present state 

 seem ill to accord with the high destinies which the expec- 

 tations of rehgion point out to us ; I would only ask them, 

 whether any one who saw a child two hours after its birth, 

 could suppose that it would ever come to understand flux- 

 ions ;^^ or who then shall say, what further amplification of 

 intellectual powers, what accession of knowledge, what ad- 

 vance and improvement, the rational faculty, be its constitu- 

 tion what it will, may not admit of when placed amidst new 

 objects, and endov/ed with a sensorium adapted, as it un- 

 doubtedly will be, and as our present senses are, to the per- 

 ception of those substances, and of those properties of thingS; 

 with which our concern may lie. 



Upon the whole, in every thing which respects txiis 

 awful, but, as we trust, glorious change, we have a wise 

 and powerful Being — the author in nature of infinitely vari- 

 ous expedients for infinitely various ends — upon whom to 

 rely for the choice and appointment of means adequate to 

 the execution of any plan which his goodness or his justice 

 may have formed for the moral and accountable part of his 

 * See Search's Light of Nature, jidssitn. 



