It seems to me, that this universal agreement of religious ideas is the most unequivocal manifestation, that the sentiment of religion is an instinct, that is exhibited in the whole range of animated nature. If so, it is the offered pledge of the divine veracity, that the soul is immortal; and that as certain as the instinct of migrating birds is proof, that the milder skies which they seek, exist, and are prepared for them, so surely the undeveloped powers of the spirit, which have no range on the earth, have a country prepared also for them. Our aspirations, our _longings after immortality_, every mode of worship, and every form of faith--are the rudiments, the germs, the starting pinions of the embryo spirit, which is to escape from its nest at death, and fly in the celestial atmosphere, in which it was formed to move. To me these universal religious manifestations are proofs, that religion springs not, as some suppose, from tradition; or, as others think, from reasoning. It is a sentiment. It is an inwrought feeling in our mental constitution, an unwritten, universal, and everlasting gospel, pointing to God and immortality. Bring the most uninstructed peasant, who has seen nothing of the earth, but its plains, in sight of Chimborazo. The thrill of awe and sublimity, that springs within him at the view, and lifts his spirit above the blue summits to the divinity, is one of the forms, in which this sentiment acts. The natural mental movements, in view of the illimitable main, of the starry firmament, of elevated mountains, of whatever is vast in dimension, irresistible in power, terrible in the exercise of anger, in short, all those emotions, which we call the sublime, are modified actings of the religious sentiment. Justly has the author pronounced the universality of these ideas the highest testimony to the elevation of human nature. It is the most impressive and interesting attribute of the soul, that it is subject to these impulses. It is a standing index, that the godlike stranger, imprisoned in clay, has, inwrought in its consciousness, indelible impressions of its future destiny. Note 25, page 101.