Illustration: Banner of two birds
i.—sleep.
Life is a current of spiritual forces. In perpetual tides, the stream traverses its vessels to vary its pulsations and perspectives of things, receding from forehead and face into cerebellum and spine, to be replenished night by night from these springs of vigor. The Genius trims our lamps while we sleep. It plumbs us by day and levels us by night. Here recumbent as at nature's navel, her energies flood the spirits with puissance, restoring tone and tension for the coming day's occupations. Then what varying scenes rise to fancy's eye, while the mind lapses out of the globe of thought, the house of the senses, into the palaces of memory through the gate of dreams! Under the sway of occult forces we partake of preternatural insights, having access to sources of information unopened to us in our wakeful hours. Vast systems of sympathies, antedating and extending beyond our mundane experiences, absorb us within their sphere, relating us to other worlds of life and light; as if stirred by the nocturnal impulse we climbed the empyrean, still crediting the superstition of our affinities with the starry orbs—
"Eternal fathers of whate'er exists below."
Or, pursuing our peregrinations, we plunge suddenly into the abyss of origins, transformed for the moment into slumbering umbilici, skirting the shores of our nativity; or, ascending spine-wise, traverse the hierarchy of gifts. How we grope strangely! Seeking the One amidst the many, we lose ourselves in finding the One we lost. We enter bodies of our bodies, souls of our soul, successively; each organ our prisoner, we in turn the prisoner of each, till by chance the bewildered occupant recover the key to the wards of his apartments, and forth issues into the haunts of his consciousness, the world of natural things. For never is the sleep so profound, the dream so distracting, as to obliterate all sense of the personality,—despite these vagaries of the night, these opiates of the senses, memory sometime dispels the oblivious slumber, and recovers for the mind recollections of its descent and destiny. Some reliques of the ancient consciousness survive, recalling our previous history and experiences.[N]
ii.—reminiscence.
"Heaven's exile straying from the orb of light."
And but for our surface and distracted lives,—lived here for the most part in the senses,—we should have never lost the consciousness of our descent into mortality, nor have questioned our resurrection and longevity. But as in descending, all drink of oblivion—some more, some less—it happens that while all are conscious of life, by defect of memory, our recollections are various concerning it; those discerning most vividly who have drank least of oblivion, they more easily recalling the memory of their past existence. Ancients of days, we hardly are persuaded to believe that our souls are no older than our bodies, and to date our nativity from our family registers, as if time and space could chronicle the periods of the immortal mind by its advent into the flesh and decease out of it.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;The soul that rises with us, our life's star,Hath had elsewhere its setting,And cometh from afar;Not in entire forgetfulness,Nor yet in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we comeFrom God who is our home."
None of us remember when we did not remember, when memory was nought, and ourselves were unborn. Memory is the premise of our sensations, it dates our immortality. Nestling ever in the twilight of our earliest recollections, it cradles our nativity, canopies our hopes, and bears us babes, out of our bodies as into them; opening vistas alike into our past and coming existence. The thread of our experiences, it cannot be severed by any accidents of our mortality; time and space, earliest found and last to leave us, fading and falling away as we pass into recollections which these can neither date nor confine—the smiles that welcomed, the tears that dismiss us, being of no age, nor place nor time.
"O love! thou makest all things evenIn earth and heaven:Finding thy way through prison barsUp to the stars:Or true to the Almighty planThat out of dust created man,Thou lookest in a grave, to seeThine immortality."
iii.—immortality.
If immortality inhere in objects known by us, these surely are persons; the ties of kindred being the liveliest, most abiding of any; our faith in the impossibility of being sundered forever, remaining unshaken to the last, and surviving all changes that our bodies may undergo.
"Deep love, the godlike in us, still believesIts objects are immortal as itself."
'Tis not our bodies that contain us but our souls. None beholds with bodily eyes the apparition of his person, sees and survives the ghost he provokes. The perturbed spirits alone linger about the tombs—dead before they die, dead burying their dead—comfortless because these are bereft of bodies, flesh being all of them they ever knew.[O]
Moreover, the insatiableness of our desires asserts our personal imperishableness. Yearning for full satisfactions while balked of these perpetually, we still prosecute our search for them, our faith in their attainment remaining unshaken under every disappointment. Our hope is eternal as ourselves—a never ending, still beginning quest of our divinity. Infinite in essence, we crave it in potence. The boundlessness and elasticity of the mind, its power of self-recovery, uprise from temporary obstructions self-imposed, or from temperament, are assurances made doubly sure of our soul's infinitude and longevity. So the lives of empires, of men of genius and sanctity, are grand illustrations of its heroic strife for the largest freedom, the widest sway,—of instincts striving within, which these pent confines of time and space can neither subjugate nor appease.
"Take this, my child," the father said,"This globe I give thy mind for bread;"Eager we seize the proffered store,The bait devour—then ask for more.
"Everything aspires to its own perfection and is restless till it attain it, as the trembling needle till it find its beloved north. And the knowledge of this is innate as is the desire, else the last had been a torment and needless importunity. Nature shoots not at rovers. Even inanimate things, while ignorant of their perfection, are carried towards it by a blind impulse. But that which conducts them knows. The next order of beings have some sight of it, and man most perfectly till he touch the apple." Our delights suckle us life long, our desires being memories of past satisfactions, and we here but sip pleasures once tasted to satiety. The more exquisite our enjoyments, the more transient; the more eagerly sought, the more elusive. We cannot come out of our paradise, nor stay in it contentedly, the gates of bliss closing on opening.
"E'en as the amorous needle joys to bendTo her magnetic friend,Or as the greedy lover's eyeballs flyAt his fair mistress' eye,Eager we kindle life's illumined stuff,Can tire, nor tease, nor kindle it enough."
Still heaven is, our hearts affirm against every disappointment; and whether behind or before us, as memory or as hope, 'tis to be ours,—our port and resting place sometime in the stream of ages.
"All before us lies the way;Give the past unto the wind;All before us is the day,Night and darkness are behind.Eden with its angels bold,Love and flowers and coolest sea,Is less an ancient story toldThan a glowing prophecy.In the spirit's perfect air,In the passions tame and kind,Innocence from selfish care,The real Eden we shall find.When the soul to sin hath died,True and beautiful and sound,Then all earth is sanctified,Upsprings paradise around.From the spirit-land, afarAll disturbing force shall flee;Stir, nor toil, nor hope shall marIts immortal unity."
"All before us lies the way;Give the past unto the wind;All before us is the day,Night and darkness are behind.
Eden with its angels bold,Love and flowers and coolest sea,Is less an ancient story toldThan a glowing prophecy.
In the spirit's perfect air,In the passions tame and kind,Innocence from selfish care,The real Eden we shall find.
When the soul to sin hath died,True and beautiful and sound,Then all earth is sanctified,Upsprings paradise around.
From the spirit-land, afarAll disturbing force shall flee;Stir, nor toil, nor hope shall marIts immortal unity."
[N]"'Tis well known thataccordingto the sense of antiquity, these two considerations were always included in that one opinion of the soul's immortality—namely; its pre-existence as well as its post existence. Neither were there ever any of the ancients before christianity, that held the soul's future permanency after death, who did not likewise assert its pre-existence,—they clearly perceiving that if it was once granted that the soul was generated, it could never be proved but that it might be also corrupted. And therefore the asserters of its immortality commonly began here—first, to prove its pre-existence, proceeding thence afterwards to establish its permanency after death."—Cudworth.
[O]Let us remember that immortality signifies a negative, or not having of mortality, and that a positive term is required by which to express a change, since nature teaches that whatever is, will abide with the being it is, unless forced out of it by something positive. And as it appears that man's soul has these grounds in her which make all visible things to be perishable, it is obvious that his soul is immortal and the cause of mortality itself.—Sir Kenelm Digby.
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THE LAYMAN'S BREVIARY.A Selection for Every Day in the Year. Translated from the German ofLeopold Schefer, by Charles T. Brooks. In one square 16mo. volume, bevelled cloth, gilt edges. Price, $2.50. A cheaper edition. Price, $1.50.
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"Each poem is in itself a sermon; not of dry, theological dogmas, but the love and care of the Infinite, the yearning and outreaching of the human to grasp the divine. It is a book not to be lightly read and carelessly tossed aside, but to be studied daily until the lessons it conveys are learned, and its comforting words written on every heart. Of the author's religious opinions we know nothing; what creed he subscribes to we cannot tell; but we do know that he is a true worshipper of God, and lover of his fellow-men. This book should be on every table; all households should possess it; we cannot too highly recommend it to the notice of all. It has been truly said, that 'these blooming pictures of Nature, praising the love, the goodness, the wisdom of the Creator and His work, form in truth a poetical book of devotion for the layman whom the dogma does not satisfy—abreviaryfor man.'"—The Wide World.
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Transcriber's Note:In the Table of Contents, section titles are in Arabic numbers, while in the text of the book, Roman numerals are used. Each is retained as printed.Footnotes were moved to the end of the section in which they occur.Alternate and obsolete spellings were retained. The remaining changes are indicated by dotted lines under the text. Scroll the mouse over the word and the original text willappear.
In the Table of Contents, section titles are in Arabic numbers, while in the text of the book, Roman numerals are used. Each is retained as printed.
Footnotes were moved to the end of the section in which they occur.
Alternate and obsolete spellings were retained. The remaining changes are indicated by dotted lines under the text. Scroll the mouse over the word and the original text willappear.