A flower blossoms; then withers and dies. It leaves a fragrance behind, which, long after its delicate petals are but a little dust, still lingers in the air. Our material sense may not be cognizant of it, but it nevertheless exists. Let a note be struck on an instrument, and the faintest sound produces an eternal echo. A disturbance is created on the invisible waves of the shoreless ocean of space, and the vibration is never wholly lost. Its energy being once carried from the world of matter into the immaterial world will live for ever. And man, we are asked to believe, man, the living, thinking, reasoning entity, the indwelling deity of our nature’s crowning masterpiece, will evacuate his casket and be no more! Would the principle of continuity which exists even for the so-called _inorganic_ matter, for a floating atom, be denied to the spirit, whose attributes are consciousness, memory, mind, LOVE! Really, the very idea is preposterous. The more we think and the more we learn, the more difficult it becomes for us to account for the atheism of the scientist. We may readily understand that a man ignorant of the laws of nature, unlearned in either chemistry or physics, may be fatally drawn into materialism through his very {115} ignorance; his incapacity of understanding the philosophy of the exact sciences, or drawing any inference by analogy from the _visible_ to the _invisible_. A natural-born metaphysician, an ignorant dreamer, may awake abruptly and say to himself: “I dreamed it; I have no tangible proof of that which I imagined; it is all illusion,” etc. But for a man of science, acquainted with the characteristics of the universal energy, to maintain that _life_ is merely a phenomenon of matter, a species of energy, amounts simply to a confession of his own incapability of analyzing and properly understanding the alpha and the omega even of that—matter.