Busy with these researches, and elated with this success in reading the history of the past in the rude hieroglyphics thus carved upon the materials of earth, it fancies that here is the end of the matter, and becomes skeptical of all other histories; and thus absorbed in the contemplation of the visible, it forgets the mighty forces, and the invisible realities, that moulded and compacted the earth, and gave solidity to the rock of adamant. It asks not whether is more real and more substantial, the earth, or the power that gave it form and being. It sees in the material and visible, the positive entities of the universe, and thinks all else are shadows; and the idea lurks at the bottom of the faith of the world, that the spiritual world, if indeed there is any such thing, is ethereal and unreal. We are satisfied that this thought, though often latent and half concealed from consciousness itself, is the fruitful source of much skepticism in reference to future life. propose, therefore, to consider it at length. We wish to show that it is not true that all, nor even a greater portion, of the enduring forces and permanent realities of the universe are in material forms, visible to the eye and tangible to the senses.

We

As a general principle, it is not true that agents are weak, and things unreal, in proportion as they are attenuated or ethereal. On the contrary, the conviction is half settled upon the scientific world that only subtile fluids act, while grosser forms of matter are acted upon.

However this may be, it is certain, that by far the most mighty things of the universe; those gigantic and resistless forces that control all forms of matter, and diffuse order and harmony through all creation; those stupendous powers that command even chaos itself to submit to law and order, and of whose validity and reality none can, by any possibility, harbor a shadow of a doubt,-all these are among the things that are not seen, and must be placed upon the category of the invisible things of the universe.

Take that all-pervading and mysterious force that we call attraction or gravitation, as an illustration. If we seek to overcome it by lifting a block of marble of a few cubic feet in contents, we shall find that in its weakness it is stronger than we are. That little block is held to the

earth's surface by a power that our arm cannot overcome or resist. Let that power be deemed inherent in matter, as such, or the result of the operation of some ethereal fluid, as electricity no matter what names we give it or what causes we assign for it-the thing itself is unmis takable; but it is invisible. Only its effects may be seen. Yet, how absolute, how real, how constant and immutable. It rears the mountains and sinks the val leys and compacts the rocks. But for this force, those giant forms whose hoary heads are above the clouds, and those solid rocks that frown like battlements upon their sides, would expand and vanish into smoke, and float away upon the wings of the wind. It moulded the ponderous globe of earth, gave it form, and holds it, "selfbalanced on its centre hung." It compacts the materials of which the worlds are made, and dwells alike in the solid ground and the watery seas. It moves in the ocean's rolling tide, and raises the stormy waves as easily as the feather is moved by human hands. It controls alike the spheres and the grain of sand, and compels obedience from the mountain, as from the mote that floats in the sunbeam. It is mightier far than all the combined forces of our race; and all the powers that man can invent or exert are, as compared with it, feeble as an infant.

That power which can move the huge floating palace against wind and tide is wonderful, and none doubt or question its reality. But that agent of which we are treating, can lift the ocean's bed, and hold the great deep in the hollow of its hand. It can cause the mountains to topple upon their foundations, and hurl them as pebbles into the abyss that it has opened below. It can clasp the giant earth in its embrace, and hold it as a kid in the coil of a serpent, and bind the distant planets in bands that cannot be sundered.

That power which can hurl a cannon ball with force to batter down a wall of adamant, is marvellous; and when we have discovered an agency that can speed the car upon its iron track at the rate of forty miles an hour, we gaze and admire, and think we have reached the summit of all power. But there is an agency that shoots the earth like a marble from its hand, and sends it spinning in its orbit at the rate of some seventy thousand miles an hour, and

has preserved that inconceivable velocity from the time the stars were born, unto the present moment. Nor is this all. Those vast worlds that shine in the night sky and perform their revolutions forever are, every one of them, controlled by this power. It moves the ponderous orbs of Jupiter and Uranus, and all the constellations that throng the regions of illimitable space do yield a constant and implicit obedience to its mandates. And thus the order and the harmony that dwell among the congregated worlds are but the results of the operations of this stupendous force. No unreal thing, no dreamy or unsubstantial figment was that which Newton discovered, when he opened to the world the law of attraction and gravitation; for simplicity itself may ask, whether is greater the earth, or the power that moulded it; the planets, or the agency that hurls them along their orbits, as a stone let loose from a sling.

And yet that power, so vast and wonderful, the very thought of which is so overwhelming, is an invisible thing. No eye can see it, no ear can hear it, no analysis can detect its substance or its essence. But it dwells in darkness and in silence, inscrutable and unapproachable; nor ever designs to put on a form that can meet the vis ion of man. What is it? No philosophy can answer. Where is it? None can say, except that it is every where. To describe it in the verity of its being, is impossible, for it is as intangible as a spirit, and ethereal as the spirit's home, and in its essence, incomprehensible as God himself. Only its effects may be seen. And yet it is; and none dare affirm that it is not, or dreams that it is the less real because it is invisible.

Take again that inscrutable essence or substance that we call electricity. Whether it be the cause of which gravitation is the effect, is of no consequence. That it pervades this world, and exerts a power that is akin to omnipotence, is beyond all question. But normally and essentially it is invisible. If ever it is seen, as in the fitful lightning's flash, or heard, as in the thunder's report, in that form it is gone in the twinkling of an eye. While unseen and invisible, it worketh in the mighty forces of the earth from age to age; but no sooner does it come among the things that are seen, than it is temporal.

Consider further, that the changes of centuries, the revolutions of ages, the progress of humanity, and all the materials for human history have found their causes in the invisible and intangible forces of the universe. What is it that has moved in human hearts and human hands, and been the mainspring of all man's efforts for the achievement of his God-given dominion over the beasts of the field, and the fowls of the air, and over the earth, and every thing that liveth upon its surface. It is mind; nothing more, nothing less. He reads in vain, who perceives in all human history nothing but material and tangible things; or who fails to perceive the wonderful forces of mind in the great movements of humanity. It was mind that made Moses the legislator, and Israel mighty in war. It was mind that made Greece the eye of the world, and Rome its mistress. It was mind that built the gates of Tyre, and the walls of Babylon, and reared the Temple, and made Jerusalem glorious. It chiselled the marble columns of the Pantheon and Coliseum, and turned the arches and gilded the dome of St. Peter's and St. Paul's. It guided the chisel of the sculptor, and the pencil of the painter. It invented the alphabet and the printing press. It cleaves the waves of the ocean with the prow of its thousand steamships, which shoot like arrows across the mighty waters, and bind the nations together in common labors and common interests. It traverses the land on iron roads that tunnel the mountains and thread the valleys and make the earth a plain. It has gone up into the clouds and grasped the red lightning, and muzzled the thunder, and plucked the bolt from the hand of Jove, and conducted it harmlessly to the ground. It was but yesterday that we stood by the obscure grave of the man whose giant mind sent up his kite from the city of Philadelphia, and plucked the terrors from the brow of Olympus; and told the fabled thunder-god to his face that he might hurl his bolts with all his power and skill, and he would catch them on the end of his wand, and make them toys for children to play with. And who is he that shall dare to say, that Franklin's body was something and his mind nothing.

But mind endures and is busy to-day. It tasks itself in school and college. It muses in the study of the phi

losopher, and gazes out through telescopic eyes from the observatory of the astronomer, to measure the volume and the distances of the stars; to call them all by names, and note their times and seasons. It extorts the secrets from nature in the laboratory of the chemist, and speaks with the myriad tongues of art and science. It pleads the cause of justice in the halls of legislation and the courts of equity and law, and thunders in the senate, where the fate of nations is decided. It moves in the busy marts of trade and commerce, and works with tireless energy in the fields of labor and industry. It transforms the wilderness to a fruitful field, and raises the savage from the depths of ignorance to the blessedness of knowledge.

Material obstacles are but mole-hills and cobwebs in the way of its march. The giants of Anak are but pigmies in its presence. The mighty man of Goth, with his brawny arm and his spear like a weaver's beam, may walk forth a visible thing, with stately tread and menacing brow; but the invisible mind of the stripling David shall smite him that he die. And shall we say that body is every thing and mind nothing? But mind invisible and intangible. No eye can see it; no hands may handle it; no scales may weigh it; no ear may hear it; no crucible may melt it. And yet it is.

The mysterious forces that people the earth, and make it green and beautiful and all life, are things that meet not the eye or the ear. The frost falls upon the earth in the autumn, or, rather, the caloric departs, and vegetation withers and dies, so far as its outward form is concerned, but the unseen life that the winter cannot kill, remains. When the sun comes again to northern skies, the seed shoots out the blade, and the leaves come in season, and the earth is again green and beautiful. But those forces and energies that thus remain unchanged from year to year, and from age to age, and bring forth a new creation from the ashes of the old, are invisible. They work in silence, and perform their wonders unseen by mortal eye. Only their effects can be seen. It may be that death is but the winter of life, and that when the fragile flower in human form fades and dies, it is but the form that passes away, while the real entity remains, though unseen, to bloom in newness of life forever and forevermore.