The third condition is that of the soul first described, in which the body has either temporarily or permanently parted with its life, while the soul remains intact. Still a part of the world's seething life, because action and reaction of the powerful causative soul-currents continue with such a soul, the interment of the body will decide whether the temporary physical death shall become permanent or not. In those exceptional cases where the body is preserved from the paroxysms of a blind grief which, when they include contact, tend to snap the last thread of vitality, or, still more important, from the embalmer's ignorant knife, which slays unnumbered thousands--when the body is preserved from both these dangers by a previous isolation, great possibilities are in store. A forty-days' fast in the wilderness was the experience of one such soul, after which he was able to say of his bodily life, No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. For his bodily life was restored to him, and death of the body had no more terrors to the man who had attained superhuman powers. The fourth and last case, that where the death of the body follows that of the soul, will not be enlarged on. There are such cases, but such can receive no lessons from a printed page. The language of events alone can reach them, and even when the soul is not dead, but rather entombed in the body, and rendered torpid for want of air to breathe, the effect is the same, so far as reaching them is concerned; the death of the body wakens such imprisoned spirits, only to plunge them into an untold agony of despair as they discover that life, with all its opportunities, has been worse than wasted, and a bare existence alone remains, minus friends, minus hope, minus resource of any kind even to conceal the abject poverty which is seen to be the direct result of wilful and persistent wrongdoing all the way to the bitter end. If we can suppose that such a soul, at this twelfth hour, under the tremendous pressure of this awakening, should suddenly resolve to accept the situation, and to brace every nerve to endure the horrors of the event without complaint, while it would not be possible to say _when_ there would be any change for the better for such a one, the reason would be because time is not to such a soul; while it still remains true that mercy is as truly an attribute of infinite power, as justice must always be. If, on the other hand, we suppose that such a soul breaks out into rage at the discovery of its loss, hurling anathemas at the author of its being, it will thereby plunge itself into darker depths, parting with one after another of its faculties, until final extinction of the individuality closes the scene.