At last, when all was completed, from the swathed-up chrysalis burst forth a marvellously furnished body. What had painfully crawled in the earth, now spurned the earth, and flew to and fro, at its will, in the air. It had passed into another and totally different stage of being; and, too, into a new world where life was bright and free. And, besides, it was now full of Divine sagacity, such as became its new life. All this was nature’s triptych in illustration of the three stages of man’s being. The earth-born, dirt-fed grub represented the first, the earthly stage, during which man is the slave of toil and suffering, the victim of grovelling cares, the sport of ever-recurring accidents—a knot of troubles and incapacities, in which, however, are concealed the precious germs of eventual glory and blessedness. The chrysalis was an explanation, which he that ran might read, of the conditions and purpose of the mummy period, that middle stage, without cares, or wants, or enjoyments; the long undreaming sleep, during which the incapacities of the first stage are transforming themselves into the capacities and powers of the last. It was so with the chrysalis: and they believed, and taught, that it would be so with the mummy, the first stage of whose course was now closed; and for that reason it was that they embalmed his body into a human chrysalis. The winged insect bursting from the cerements of its suspended, into the happy freedom of its new aërial life, was a type, addressed by nature to the eye, and through the eye to the understanding, to prefigure the soul of man, at last emancipated from all earthly and fleshly hindrances, soaring to the empyrean regions of eternal day, for the full enjoyment of its predestined glory, for which—all that had gone before having been the long and troublous discipline—it is now completely equipped. In that last transformation from the chrysalis to the winged insect was an assurance in nature’s handwriting of the resurrection from the mummy condition, in a higher form, and with enlarged endowments. What volumes of profoundest doctrine, what revelations in this little beetle! For thought was not yet ossified, as in after times, into those rigid forms, with which neither history nor our own experience is unfamiliar, and which oblige men to reject obstinately, and to denounce loudly, everything that does not support the existing settled system; but was still growing vigorously, and assimilating freely what it fed on: and so the eye and heart were still open to the lessons of nature.