those bones will be the last relic in the world to bear record that he once trod this green earth, and that life was once dear to him, Thomas, or James, or Paul. Or whether that thrilling, loving, thinking something, that he calls himself, has indeed within it an indestructible existence, which shall still be conscious, when every thing else shall have rushed into endless wreck. 0, in the awful earnestness of a question such as that, a speculation and a peradventure will not do; we must have proof. The honest doubt of Thomas craves a sign as much as the cold doubt of the Sadducee. And .a sign shall be mercifully given to the doubt of love which is refused to the doubt of indifference.

This passage presents two lines of thought.

I. The naturalness of the doubts of Thomas, which partly excuses them."

II. The evidences of the Christian Resurrection.

I. The naturalness of the doubts of Thomas.

The first assertion that we make to explain those doubts is, that Nature is silent respecting a future life. All that reason, all that Nature, all that religion, apart from Christ, have to show us, is something worse than darkness. It is the twilight of excruciating uncer tainty. There is enough in the riddle of this world to show us that there may be a life to come; there is nothing to make it certain that there will be one. crave, as Thomas did, a sign either in the height above or in the depth beneath; and the answer seems to fall back like ice upon our heart's, There shall no sign be given you.

We

It is the uncertainty of twilight. You strain at something in the twilight, and just when you are be

ginning to make out its form and color, the light fails you, and your eyelid sinks down, wet and wearied. with the exertion. Just so it is when we strain into Nature's mysteries, to discern the secret of the Great Hereafter. Exactly at the moment when we think we begin to distinguish something, the light goes out, and we are left groping in darkness, the darkness of the grave.

more.

--

Let us forget for a moment that we ever heard of Christ: what is there in life or nature to strengthen the guess that there is a life to come? There are hints there are probabilities there is nothing Let us examine some of those probabilities. First, there is an irrepressible longing in our hearts. We wish for immortality. The thought of annihilation is horrible; even to conceive it is almost impossi ble. The wish is a kind of argument; it is not likely that God would have given all men such a feeling, if He had not meant to gratify it. Every natural long. ing has its natural satisfaction. If we thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy. that craving.

Likely, I say; more we cannot say. A likelihood of an immortality of which our passionate yearnings are a presumption-nothing higher than a likelihood. And in weary moments, when the desire of life is not strong, and in unloving moments, there is not even a likelihood.

Secondly, corroborating this feeling we have the traditions of universal belief. There is not a nation,

perhaps, which does not in some form or other hold that there is a country beyond the grave where the weary are at rest. Now, that which all men every where and in every age have held, it is impossible to treat contemptuously. How came it to be held by all, if only a delusion? Here is another probability in the universality of belief. And yet, when you come to estimate this, it is too slender for a proof; —it is only a presumption. The universal voice of mankind is not infallible. It was the universal belief once, on the evidence of the senses, that the earth was stationary;

- the universal voice was wrong. The universal voice might be wrong in the matter of a resurrection. It might be only a beautiful and fond dream, indulged till hope made itself seem to be a reality. You cannot build upon it.

Once again, In this strange world of perpetual change, we are met by many resemblances to a resurrection. Without much exaggeration we call them resurrections. There is the resurrection of the moth from the grave of the chrysalis. For many ages the sculptured butterfly was the type and emblem of immortality. Because it passes into a state of torpor or deadness, and because from that it emerges by a kind of resurrection, the same, yet not the same,—in all the radiance of a fresh and beautiful youth, never again to be supported by the coarse substance of earth, but destined henceforth to nourish its etherealized existence on the nectar of the flowers, the ancients saw in that transformation a something added to their hopes of immortality. It was their beautiful symbol of the soul's indestructibility.

Again, there is a kind of resurrection when the

spring brings vigor and motion back to the frozen pulse of the winter world. Let any one go into the fields at this spring season of the year. Let him mark the busy preparations for life which are going on. Life is at work in every emerald bud, in the bursting bark of every polished bough, in the greening tints of every brown hill-side. A month ago everything was as still and cold as the dead silence which chills the heart in the highest regions of the glacier solitudes. Life is coming back to a dead world. It is a resurrec tion, surely! The return of freshness to the frozen world is not less marvellous than the return of sensibility to a heart which has ceased to beat. If one has taken place, the other is not impossible.

And yet all this, valuable as it is in the way of sug gestiveness, is worth nothing in the way of proof. It is worth everything to the heart, for it strengthens the dim guesses and vague intimations which the heart had formed already. It is worth nothing to the intellect; for the moment we come to argue the matter, we find how little there is to rest upon in these analogies. They are no real resurrections, after all; they only look like resurrections. The chrysalis only seemed dead; the tree in winter only seemed to have lost its vitality. Show us a butterfly, which has been dried and crushed, fluttering its brilliant wings next year again. Show us a tree, plucked up by the roots and seasoned by exposure, the vital force really killed out, putting forth its leaves again, then we should have a real parallel to a resurrection. But nature does not show us that. So that all we have got in the butterfly and the spring are illustrations exquisitely in point

after immortality is proved, but in themselves no proofs at all.

Further still. Look at it in another point of view, and it is a dark prospect. Human history behind, and human history before, both give a stern "No," in reply to the question, Shall we rise again?

Six thousand years of human existence have passed away, countless armies of the dead have set sail from the shores of time. No traveller has returned from the still land beyond. More than one hundred and fifty generations have done their work, and sunk into the dust again, and still there is not a voice, there is not a whisper, from the grave, to tell us whether, indeed, those myriads are in existence still. Besides, why should they be? Talk as you will of the grandeur of man, why should it not be honor enough for him more than enough to satisfy a thing so mean — to have had his twenty or his seventy years' life-rent of God's universe? Why must such a thing, apart from proof, rise up and claim to himself an exclusive immortality? Man's majesty! man's worth!- the dif ference between him and the elephant or ape is too degradingly small to venture much on. That is not all; instead of looking backwards, now look forwards. · The wisest thinkers tell us that there are already on the globe traces of a demonstration that the human race is drawing to its close. Each of the great human families has had its day, -its infancy, its manhood, its decline. The two last races that have not been tried are on the stage of earth, doing their work now. There is no other to succeed them. Man is but of vesterday, and yet his race is well-nigh done. Man is wearing out, as everything before him has been worn