THE INSTINCT OP IMMORTALITY. 303 



burial of Hector or Patroclus would be as intelligible 

 as the death- song of one of their own warriors. 



What shall we say, then, of this instinct of immor- 

 tality, handed down through all the generations of 

 pre-historic and savage men, and prompting to costly 

 funeral rites ? Is it a mere fancy, a baseless super- 

 stition? Is it not rather a god-given feature of a 

 spiritual nature yearning after a lost earthly immor- 

 tality, and clinging to the hope of a better being in a 

 future life ? And is it not, after all, inseparable from 

 the belief in a God, whose children we are, and who 

 can transfer us from this lower sphere to better man- 

 sions in His own heavenly home ? Is the " Monist " 

 or Materialist who looks with indifference on death as 

 the close of certain physical changes and nothing more, 

 or who shrinks from it as a hopeless annihilation, on 

 any higher mental or moral platform than the savage 

 who departs chanting his death- song and looking 

 forward to meeting with the shades of his fathers in 

 the happy hunting-grounds ? Is he not rather on a 

 level with those more degraded savage tribes, if there 

 are such, who have lost the pre-historic faith without 

 receiving anything better, and who regard the future 

 either as a mere blank or as an unknown and terrible 

 mystery ? How much happier than either are those 

 on whose last days shines the brighter hope of the 

 light and immortality revealed by the Grospel ! 



In the present state of religious opinion among our- 

 selves, and in view of the strange and absurd logo- 

 machies which have raged as to the doctrine of a 



