Of what avail is it to us if future generations are wise and noble, if we pass into nonentity? Of what avail to them to be wise and noble, if life is only the fleeting hour? Not yet can we believe Nature to be such a sham--such a cruel failure. The spirit rebels against the supposition of its mortality. The body is its habiliment. Shall the coat be claimed to be the entire man? Shall the garments ignore the wearer? This is the animal side of man. Physically composed of the same elements, and having passed through these innumerable changes, he is an epitome of the universe. As man was foreshadowed in remotest ages as the crowning type in the series of organic life, so man foreshadows superior excellence. Springing out of his physical perfectibility, arises a new world of spiritual wants and aspirations, unanswered and unanswerable in mortal life. MAN A DUAL BEING.--While Theology, Brahminical, Buddhistical or Christian, teaches that man is an incarnate spirit, independent of the physical body, created by miracle, supported by a succession of miracles, and saved by a miracle from eternal death, material science, as at present taught by its leading exponents, wholly ignores his spiritual life, and declares him to be a physical being only. It is not my purpose to reconcile these conflicting views. Truths never require reconciliation. They never conflict; and if the results of two different methods of investigation are at variance, one or the other is in error, or both, perchance, and the only reconciliation is the elimination of that error. The egotisms of theology and the pride of science array their votaries in opposition, while the truth remains unquestioned in the unexplored middle ground. Man is neither a spirit nor a body; he is the intimate union of both. In and through his physical being, the spiritual nature is evolved from the forces of the elements and is expressed. There is somewhat more enduring than the resultants of chemical unions, action and reactions in his physical body. Beneath this organic construction is that which remains, to which it is the scaffolding which assists, while it conceals the development of the real edifice.