We see then, that while Mind is crescive, Matter is not. Matter is neither crescive nor decrescive. It may be changed into divers forms, animal, vegetable, or mineral, but it never can be varied in _quantity_. The six feet of animated clay dies, it rots in the silent tomb; years pass by. The hand of affection which protected the loathsome, yet—for the once animating spirit’s sake—beloved, remains is cold and rotted too. The sepulchre, so long forgotten and deserted, again becomes of interest to the brother of the hyæna and the resurrectionist—the antiquarian. He, in his cool, business-like phraseology, opens a barrow or exhumes a tomb, and finds—what? A pound of dust! The sole visible remains of a gigantic hero or a stalwart king. Yet is not one particle of that ancient demigod perished. Every atom is, in some shape or other, in the universe. Some atoms may “have gone a passage through the guts of a beggar,” and so have nurtured an other human form; some may have stopped a beer-barrel and so “Imperious Cæsar dead, and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.” The theory of the metempsychosis is true of matter; and as the ancient sages believed the soul to be material, that theory, so far from being violently absurd (as we in the pride of better knowledge are apt to term it), was almost the only theory which the thinking and observant mind could of itself elaborate. Hence the adoption of that system by far-distant nations is no proof of inter-communication. What the Brahmin in India found a natural result of the doctrine of the materiality of the soul and its consequent analogy to everything else material, the Druid in Britain would arrive at with equal ease. But Mind is both crescive and decrescive; and it is another peculiar property of Mind, that it is never stationary,—it is always changing, increasing or decreasing. This is an important consideration; a fearful responsibility cast upon it. If the one talent (and God has so benignly ordered it, that no sane, and therefore responsible, mind is devoid of at least one talent,) is hid in a napkin, the servant is condemned and his talent taken from him. But if the talent is put out to use, it will increase and grow, and make other talents, and the lord of that servant will receive his own again with usury. For, having endowed man with this crescive power, He justly demands that power to be exercised and the mind to be enlarged and expanded “by every one according to his several ability,” so that He may reap the harvest which his well-rewarded servants have gathered in, “reaping where He hath not sown, and gathering where He hath not strewed.”