Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/139

 knowing of the catastrophe, would swear that what now he beheld was the same formerly so much admired—and he would be right. The ideas are the same, albeit the material raiment is not. John Doe is still John Doe, whether in rags or riches; why not, then, John's thought be the same?

It will be well to remember that —that the vast material universe is the visible result of a single effort of a single faculty-organ of the Deific-brain, and—tremendous thought!—that faculty-organ will yet make myriads of new movements, each one followed by results still more stupendous and magnificent than the vast array of starry suns which now light up the Halls of Silence and of Space! Again: the spiritual or rather the thinking part of man is all there is of permanency about the human being. His body is the sport of Death, and his aid-de-camp Disease! but his soul can never be touched by the former, nor forever be harmed by the latter! for soul is not to be permanently injured by any power subservient to the infinite God. All there is of man is his thought-power; the is himself. By this we know him; and he who gives forth most of himself, if he be bad, does the most injury to the species and the world. If he be good, such an one lives longest in men's hearts, on historic page, and in the traditions of the race. The Spiritual Universe! What a mighty conception! And yet, even that, grand as it is—for all the material globes of space, chained together, are, after all, but a mere little island floating, like a bottle, upon the crest of a single wavelet of the Infinite Sea!—yet, even that Spiritual Universe itself, with its amazing, made up of countless Soul-systems,