It was some six months or so after my adoption that I ventured to broach a subject of more than ordinary interest to me. In fact, it was my only remaining secret from him. It had been often on the tip of my tongue, but I had been restrained from mentioning it through fear of scorn. My ideas respecting the Deity I suspected were too peculiar to trust them to speech; and yet, if someone did not enlighten me, I should remain long in ignorance of the Divine character. True, certain coincidences made me secretly believe that God heard me; nevertheless, I burned to know from an authoritative source whether I was the victim of illusions, or whether the Being of my conceptions bore any resemblance to that of the learned and old I had met. I imagined God as a personality with human features, set in the midst of celestial Glory in the Heaven of Heavens; and, whenever I prayed, it was to Him thus framed that I directed my supplications. My father did not ridicule this idea as I feared he would, and I was much relieved to hear him ask how I had come to form such a fancy. This was difficult to express in words, but, at last, I managed to explain that, probably, it was from the verse which said that God had made man after His own image, and because clergymen always looked upward when in church. I cannot give his own words, but this is the substance of my first intelligible lesson on this subject. ‘God is a spirit, as you have often read. A spirit is a thing that cannot be seen with human eyes, because it has no figure or form. A man consists of body and spirit, or, as we call it, soul. The material part of him we can see and feel; but that which animates him, and governs his every thought, is invisible. When a person dies, we say his spirit has fled, or that his soul has departed to its Maker. The body is then as insensible as clay, and will soon corrupt, and become absorbed by the earth. ‘We cannot see the air we breathe, nor the strong wind which wrecks ships, and blows houses down, yet we cannot live without air, and the effects of the winds are not disputed. We cannot see the earth move, and yet it is perpetually whirling through space. We cannot see that which draws the compass-needle to the Pole; yet we trust our ships to its guidance. No one saw the cause of that fever which killed so many people in New Orleans last summer, but we know it was in the air around the city. If you take a pinch of gunpowder and examine it, you cannot see the terrible force that is in it. So it is with the soul of man. While it is in him, you witness his lively emotions, and wonder at his intelligence and energy; but, when it has fled, it leaves behind only an inert and perishable thing, which must be buried quickly.