For would we avoid death, we must begin with renouncing all the interests of life; for what are all the interests of life, if love, and all its affections and relations are to be suppressed.

But if they are to be gratified, which is the intention and the law, all the natural consequences must ensue; and if procreation. is to continue without death, what world could nourish, or what world contain an indefinite increase of accumulating filiation?

No limited world, most clearly! The question refuteth itself: to live for what alone giveth value to life, leadeth to unavoidable death to live without love, is to make death desirable.

So was death decreed; individual death; as necessary and unavoidable to the continuation of life in our sons: so was individual death decreed as necessary to the survivance of the human race perpetuate in our sons.

Death, we say, but more properly speaking, the enfranchisement of life; the deposition of our mortal spoil; the pass to immortality; the flight of the spirit; the freedom of the soul.

CHAPTER V.

THEN, as soon as life retireth from the human form, all sensibility retireth with it!

Yes, ceaseth to inform the human body; but doth not cease itself to be.

Retireth, yes the spirit must retire from the human form, to resign it unto death. The very act of quitting, is it not an action of life?

The spirit which came to the human form; which so adapted itself to the human form; which alone enlivened the human form;

which is the spring essential, of all human action; and without which the human form is instantly defunct.

This particle of the universal principle of life; which is the life and soul of the world; which came to the human form; which liveth in the human form; which hath diffused, and is capable of further diffusing life to millions; which is the fountain of life itself. Shall there be any question as to its immortality?

CHAPTER VI.

THEN

HEN an existence of spirits?

There can be no question as to the immortality of the spirit, that is to say, as to the immortality of the great universal principle of life. People may question among themselves, as to an individual existence of that particle of life, by which any individual form may have been animated during its sojournment upon earth; or whether, upon the secession of this particle of the universal principle of life, it fali back into the general mass and be confounded, as a drop of water returning to the sea is confounded and lost, as to its individuality, in the general mass: but no question can exist as to the eternal essence of spirit itself.

The proper question before us, is, how it can preserve an individual existence, distinct, as in the earthly state, in the image of the human form, in which it had been so long before invested; or, as is generally believed, a spiritual existence?

Blair, in his Critical Dissertation on Ossian. p. 68. has said, "The mythology of Ossian, may be said to be the mythology of

human nature, because it is founded on popular credence: or what in all ages, and in all countries, may be said to have been the credence of the people, whatever religion may have prevailed, concerning the apparition of spirits after death.”

And what can be more reasonable? for if the soul is the principle of life in us: for if the soul is, in us, the sole mover of the body for if the motion of the body is from the will and impulsion of the soul for if the soul is competent not only, but necessary to move and remove at will the human form, heavy and immoveable of itself; for if all the energies of the mind, all the exertions of the body are immediate compliances with the emanations of the soul for if, as long as the soul shall remain with the earthly body, the body is agile, enterprising, adept; for if the moment the spirit retireth from the human body, the body sinketh lifeless, motionless, helpless to the ground; then, what is to become of the soul, or spirit, restored, by this act of separation from the earthly body, to its eternal range?

CHAPTER VII.

I 9 I 1x q.

EXISTENCE OF SPIRITS.

APPARITIONS.

THE HE separation of the soul, or spirit, from the body, is evinced by a cessation of every act or function of life. maineth, but without sense: the spirit is gone! lities of the form were prerogatives of life.

The form reAll the sensibi

But whither is the spirit gone?-Before it came to the human form, it existed?-Yes! Then in what form? In aerial form! Whence came it?-it existed? Yes! it must have occupied a space? Yes! then, an aerial space? then an aerial form, in aerial spaces? Is it not clear?

The spirit therefore existing; existing in all the prerogatives of the spirit: why is it not to return? It came to us; sojourned with us; departed from us; so as it had power to go, so may it have power to return, and often the will, having many delightful affinities to induce a compassionate spirit, to revisit its disconsolate sympathies upon earth. God willing; why not: is it not reasonable?

Then, in what form? then most naturally in the image of the human form, it had been used so long to animate upon earth :-in a manner to be known; is it not plausibic? what is the image we see reflected from a mirror? what is the image we see reflected from our mind?

What is the mind to receive impressions, and to reflect them back, after long obliterance, to the wish of the heart; as from a mirror to the sight the impressions are not material, nor on matter, but on the mind: the memory, or reminiscent faculty of the mind, what is it, to entertain a million of impressions jumbled all together, and to separate them from each other at the expression of the will? Is it not spirit?

Then, if the spirit is capable of impressions, so as to reflect them back to our recollection, in the images of their original form; then the spirit is capable of impressions; capable of forms; capable of disappearing; capable of re-appearing; capable of absence; capable of representation; so were man but worthy of this delightful condescension,

"For God will deign

"To visit oft the dwellings of just men

66

Delighted and with frequent intercourse "Thither will send his winged messengers "On errands of supernal grace.

CHAPTER VIII.

INTERCOURSE WITH HEAVEN.

THE Druids professed to aknowledge this doctrine of a possible

intercourse with heaven.

Now attend to what Doctor Blair, in his Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, hath proffered concerning these Druids.