minds of parents, of either sex, are subject to violent perturbations of emotion, of passion, and of temper. The alarms of war, and the shock of sieges, are not necessary to the effect; the clash of souls in ungodly struggle, and the occupation of the mind with sensational horrors, in intellectual dram-drinking, and mental debauchery, equally disorder the nerves and degrade both in mind and body the families of all who subject themselves to their influence.

There are mothers' marks of a moral as well as a material kind upon all of us, and fathers' marks also. We will not, however, attribute all our defects and deformities to inherited evils; for there are disorders unavoidably incident to our fallen nature that are no direct signs of sin, but rather occasions for the manifestation of His mercy and might, who sent the man born blind to the pool of Siloam. But then He is working by natural as well as by supernatural laws, and He gives mankind all means of self-help and betterment, to be used with responsibility in proportion to the knowledge communicated, in relation alike to things natural and things divine. In fact, the nations that are most imbued with Christian knowledge, and are most patiently employing body and mind with the feeling that the Maker of man and man's world requires obedience to physical as well as to moral laws, have the most good of every kind at their command. They grow and strengthen with their growth. But, alas, in the midst of Christian light there may be darkness. The contest between good and evil is a struggle to the death, but not of that which is good and true-good because true, true because good. The evil, propagated with violence to the laws of nature, and so of God, goes to death and judgment, in three or four generations; the good, propagated in obedience to the ordinances of Heaven and earth, lives on, and spreads and strengthens for generations numbered by thousands,

here on earth. O hideous visions of sin reigning unto death! Who can bear them, if not also seeing that righteousness is reigning to eternal life, through Him who received gifts for the rebellious, that the Lord God might dwell amongst them?

A little virtue of a natural, social, domestic kind will fortify even a semi-barbarous people to overpower the refined and vicious. Thus Goths grew mightier as they fought with the Romans, who had lost their family virtues. The Teutons believed in woman as man's glory, and in the God that made the home-hearth sacred. They were prepared to receive the Gospel, and then to push back the trappings that restrained its freedom. And now the nations they conquered and absorbed, with all the lands they hold, are blessed above all others. They rejoice in openness, and believe the air they breathe is God's, and therefore they breathe freely. They believe in law because they believe in God and in Immanuel— God with us. They are not afraid of liberty, but war with a sure weapon-the word of God—against all lawlessness, which is but imagination perverted by wild riot. This is the spirit that gives license to imagination to exalt ideal monsters, to demonise humanity, in the place of divine truths, which make it Godlike. This is the spirit that tells men not to think of what they cannot comprehend, for fear of 'phantasy.' This is the spirit that teaches men to limit their reason to their bodily eyesight, and to believe that memory, thought, and will have no relation to a world unseen, which man shall enter. Not to recognise mind, purpose, plan, end in creation, and especially in man's ability to imagine, is to leave one's self without God and without hope in the world, and to feel at the mercy of Force and Matter. A man is indeed a soul at sea, where life itself is death, if there beno hereafter. Are the children of ignorance, trained only in the wantonness of brutal selfism, to be judged

and condemned to external darkness by the eternal Light? We are not so instructed, but rather that their stripes shall be few in comparison with those righteously and correctively inflicted on souls that know their Lord's will and do it not. Happy, then, are they who are not, by the corrupt imaginations of their own hearts, already placed in condemnation; or, if condemned, fly to Him who is greater than their hearts, and knoweth all things. He makes us conscious of evil that we may seek and find the Way, the Truth, and the Life. If in this life only we have hope, alas, that we should think! To be exposed to all the possibilities of pain, delusion, temptation, disease, and deadly fear of death from mental causes inherited with our bodies, and yet not to trust in our Maker as the eternal Healer, is to be gifted by Him with feeling aggravated by the faith that breathes in love, for no ulterior purpose. This cannot be consistent either with Divine or human existence, and we must believe, because we think, that as we feel the trials of faith through the present evils which we cannot shun, so the triumph of our trust shall be hereafter in possession for ever of the good we would most aspire to when here we are most tried.

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CHAPTER XII.

FURTHER PROOFS OF THE IMMATERIAL NATURE OF MEMORY.

WE daily experience the recurrence of past impressions to be entirely independent of the will, and we are often surprised at the distinctness with which scenes that had long been lost in oblivion suddenly reappear, without the possibility of our detecting the cause of their revival. That such resurrections of thought and impression result from some constant law of our existence, there cannot be a doubt; but that the recognised influence of association is insufficient for the purpose of explaining the fact, we possess abundant proof in those examples of renewed recollection, or its loss, which are so common in consequence of disease. Sir Astley Cooper relates, in his Lectures, the case of a sailor who was received into St. Thomas's Hospital, in a state of stupor, from an injury in the head, which had continued some months. After an operation, he suddenly recovered, so far as to speak, but no one in the hospital understood his language. But a Welsh milk-woman, happening to come into the ward, answered him, for he spoke Welsh, which was his native language. He had, however, been absent from Wales more than thirty years, and previous to the accident had entirely forgotten Welsh, although he now spoke it fluently, and recollected not a single word of any other tongue. On his perfect recovery, he again completely forgot his Welsh and recovered his English.

An Italian gentleman, mentioned by Dr. Rush, in the beginning of an illness spoke English; in the middle of it, French; but, on the day of his death, he spoke only Italian. A Lutheran clergyman, of Philadelphia, informed Dr. Rush that Germans and Swedes, of whom he had a large number in his congregation, when near death, always prayed in their native languages; though some of them, he was confident, had not spoken them for fifty or sixty years. Coleridge mentions an ignorant servant girl who, during the delirium of fever, repeated, with perfect correctness, passages from a number of theological works in Latin, Greek, and Rabbinical Hebrew. It was at length discovered that she had been servant to a learned clergyman, who was in the habit of walking backward and forward along a passage by the kitchen, and there reading aloud his favourite authors.

Dr. Abercrombie relates the case of a child, that, at four years of age, underwent the operation of trepanning while in a state of profound stupor from a fracture of the skull. After his recovery, he retained no recollection either of the operation or the accident; yet, at the age of fifteen, during the delirium of a fever, he gave his mother an exact description of the operation, of the persons present, their dress, and many other minute particulars. Dr. Prichard mentions a man who had been employed with a beetle and wedges, splitting wood. At night, he put these implements in the hollow of an old tree, and directed his sons to accompany him the next morning in making a fence. In the night, however, he became mad. After several years, his reason suddenly returned, and the first question he asked was, whether his sons had brought home the beetle and wedges. They, being afraid to enter into an explanation, said they could not find them; on which he arose, went to the field where he had been at work so many years before, and found, in the place where he had left