I recur, with new and unsated satisfaction, to these arguments for the soul’s immortality. I love to evoke the venerable shades of Socrates and Plato and Cicero, and hear them, each in his own way, persuade himself, that the thoughts and affections, of which he was conscious, could only belong to an immortal spirit. I listen to the eloquent and impressive apostrophe of Tacitus, to the conscious spirit of him, whose life he had so charmingly delineated, with feelings which I cannot well describe. ‘Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore extinguontur magnæ animæ, placide quiescas; nosque, domum tuam, ab infirmo desiderio, et muliebribus lamentis, ad contemplationem virtutum tuarum voces, quas neque lugeri, neque plangi fas est: admiratione te potius temporalibus laudibus, et, si natura suppeditet, similitudine decoremus.’[H] I repair with new confidence and hope to the gospel, and strive to imbibe the cheering conviction, as I hear Paul sublimely declare, _that this corruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal immortality, and that death shall be swallowed up in victory_. I have no disposition to deny that these arguments would be, in themselves, insufficient to turn the balance against the evidence of the senses, and produce the conviction of immortality from the deductions of simple reason, if religion were an impression to be raised and sustained by argument. But, if we are religious, in some form, from our very constitution, if immortality be felt as a sentiment, with more or less clearness and force, I deem that these arguments have their appropriate effect, in giving form and direction to this interior sentiment; that believers have been such, because these doctrines have found a concurrent sympathy in their spirit, a suitableness to the wants of their heart, a development of the germ of their hopes. It seems to me, that whoever has a heart, cannot look upon the earth and the firmament, without exclaiming ‘there is a God,’ nor within himself, without a conviction, that his soul is immortal. I see in the enthusiasm,--the embraces, cries, tears, swoonings and the revolting extravagances of various sects under the influence of high religious excitement, nothing more than the morbid development of this latent religious sentiment. Instead of being, as scoffers affirm, subjects of a mere factitious intoxication, these people, who seem only to demand wings, to soar aloft, are only manifesting the unregulated action of nature working at the bottom of their hearts.