It is a conviction which nothing can touch, for it rests on incontrovertible facts and unassailable reasonings; and which are such as will justify a man in expending his own life, and in calling upon others to do the same, for the maintenance and advancement of morality and religion. And this connexion with the past appears to give a prospective as well as retrospective extension to my being. If I am in the past, then, by parity of reason, I am equally in the future. As my moral and intellectual being was, in this way, forming itself before I was in the flesh, it will continue, in the same way, the same process after I shall have put off the flesh. The dissolution of the body will not affect what existed before the assumption of the body. These thoughts I did not take with me to the East, or, if I did, they had at that time only a potential existence in my mind as unquickened germs. It was what I saw and felt in the East that gave them life and shape. At all events, I brought them back with me as recognized and active elements of my mental being. I am aware that there are some on whom the sight of the diversities observable among different peoples in moral and religious ideas has an effect the very contrary to that which I have been describing. Instead of helping them to bring their knowledge on these subjects into order, and giving them solid foundations to rest the structure upon, it appears in them only to make confusion worse confounded, and to render more incapable of support what had in them little enough support before. But may not this arise from the fact that the true idea of history does not exist in the minds of these persons? For I suppose that just as true science infallibly generates the craving, and, as far as it reaches, the successful effort, to harmonize all nature, so does true history the craving, and, as far as it reaches, the successful effort, to harmonize all that is known of man. One man observes differences in moral ideas, and thence infers that it is impossible to arrive at any fixed and certain conclusions on such subjects. Another man observes the same differences, but observing at the same time that they are those of growth and development, thence infers that the principle of which they are the growth and development must be as real and certain as anything in the earth beneath, or in the heaven above. There is no difficulty in understanding the prepotency these ideas must have in modifying and forming a man’s conceptions of duty and of happiness. * * * * *