To me, the presumption of the inextinguishable vitality of the spirit afforded by the experience of material decay, is the strongest I am acquainted with. No amount of evidence of any fact before the reason, no demonstration of any truth to the understanding, affords to me such a sense of certainty as the action of the spirit yields, with regard to its own immortality, at times when there can be no deception from animal spirits, or from immediate sympathy with other minds, or from what is called the natural desire for life. It is a mistake to say, as is frequently said, that, with regard to a future life, “the wish is father to the thought,” always or generally. Long-suffering invalids can tell that there are seasons, neither few nor short, when the wishes are all the other way,--when life is so oppressive to the frame that the happiest news would be that we should soon be non-existent,--when, thankful as we are that our beloved friends, the departed and the remaining, are to live for evermore with God, and enjoy his universe and its intercourses, we should be glad to, decline it for ourselves, and to lie down in an eternal, unbroken rest. At these seasons, when, though we _know_ all that can be said of renewed powers and relish, and a more elevated and privileged life beyond the grave, we cannot _feel_ it; and, while admitting all such consolations as truth, we cannot enjoy them, but, as a mere matter of inclination, had rather resign our privileges;--in these seasons, when the wish would be father to an opposite thought, the belief in our immortality is at the strongest; the truth of our inability to die becomes overwhelming, and the sleep of the grave appears too light to satisfy our need of rest. I believe it to be owing to this natural and unconquerable belief in our immortality, that suicide is not more common than it is among sufferers. I am persuaded that the almost intolerable weariness of long sicknesses, unrelieved by occasional fits of severe pain, would impel many to put out a hand to the laudanum-bottle, in hours when religious considerations and emotions cannot operate through the indisposition of the frame, if it were not for the intense conviction that life would not thus be extinguished, nor even suspended. I do not believe much in the “natural love of life,” which is usually said to be the preventive in such cases. I do believe in the vast operation of religious affections in withholding from the act: but I also believe in frequent instances of abstinence from death, from a mere despair of getting rid of life--a sense of necessary immortality.