"That which is born of the flesh is flesh: that which is born of the spirit is spirit." As the body of the child is the derivative of a germ elaborated in the body of the parent, so the soul of the child is the derivative of a developing impulse of power imparted from the soul of the parent. And as the body is sustained by absorbing nutrition from matter, so the soul is sustained by assimilating the spiritual substances of the invisible kingdom. The most ethereal elements must combine to nourish that consummate plant whose blossom is man's mind. This representation is not materialism; for spirit belongs to a different sphere and is the subject of different predicates from matter, though equally under a constitution of laws. Nor does this view pretend to explain what is inherently transcendent: it leaves the creation of the soul within as wide a depth and margin of mystery as ever. Neither is this mode of exposing the problem atheistic. It refers the forms of life, all growths, all souls, to the indefinable Power that works everywhere, creates each thing, vivifies, governs, and contains the universe. And, however that Power be named, is it not God? And thus we still reverently hold that it is God's own hands "That reach through nature, moulding men." The ancient heroes of Greece and India were fond of tracing their genealogy up directly to their deities, and were proud to deem that in guarding them the gods stooped to watch over a race of kings, a puissant and immortal stock, "Whose glories stream'd from the same clond girt founts Whence their own dawn'd upon the infant world." After all the researches that have been made, we yet find the secret of the beginning of the soul shrouded among the fathomless mysteries of the Almighty Creator, and must ascribe our birth to the Will of God as piously as it was done in the eldest mythical epochs of the world. Notwithstanding the careless frivolity of skepticism and the garish light of science abroad in this modern time, there are still stricken and yearning depths of wonder and sorrow enough, profound and awful shadows of night and fear enough, to make us recognise, in the golden joys that visit us rarely, in the illimitable visions that emancipate us often, in the unearthly thoughts and dreams that ravish our minds, enigmatical intimations of our kinship with God, prophecies of a super earthly destiny whose splendors already break through the clouds of ignorance, the folds of flesh, and the curtains of time in which our spirits here sit pavilioned.