MORAL RESULTS. 297 



descended fiistory, and the bounds within which all his 

 secular phenomena must ever be confined. The unit of 

 each individuality, great or humble in social regard, take9 

 a fixed place in that march of life which rose unreckoned 

 ages ago, and now goes on to a " weird," which no wizard 

 has pretended to know. We feel that, amidst all the dis- 

 grace of trouble and trespass, we are still the first form of 

 active being after the Greatest, and therefore may well ber 

 assured that, immeasurably as is our distance from God, 

 we are still immediately regarded and cared for by him 

 Surely there is here much to soothe and to encourage. It 

 may be that the individual often suffers innocently to ap- 

 pearance in our present sphere ; but then he is part of a 

 system of assured benevolence and justice : having faith 

 in this, he is safe. It may be, as some one has suggested, 

 that there is not only a term of life to the individual, but 

 to the species, and that when the proper time comes, the 

 prolific energy being exhausted, man is transferred to the 

 list of extinct forms. Strange thought, that the beauteous 

 phenomena of personal existence — the thrill of the lover, 

 the mother's smile on cherub infancy, the brightness of 

 loving firesides, the aspirations of generous poets and phi- 

 losophers, the thought cast up and beyond the earthly, 

 that petard which breaks down every door — the tear of 

 penitence, the meekness of the suffering humble, the 

 ardor iof the strong in good causes, all that the great and 

 beneficent of all ages have felt, all that each of us now 

 sees, and muses on, in his home, his people, his age, — 

 that all these should be thus resolved ; passing away whole 

 " equinoxes" into the past, as far as we particular men 

 are concerned, still passing further back as respects the 

 larger personalities called nations, and still further in 

 inconceivable multiplication with regard to the species — 

 gone, lost, hushed in the stillness of a mightier death 

 than has hitherto been thought of! But yet the faith may 

 not be shaken, that that which has been endowed with 

 the power of godlike thought, and allowed to come into 

 communion with its Eternal Author, cannot be truly lost. 

 The vital flame which proceeded from him at first re- 

 turns to him in our perfected form at last, bearing with 

 it all good and lovely things, and making of all the far- 

 extending Past but one intense Present, glorious and 

 everlasting. 



23 



