that, death must be its conductor, and has been appointed to be so These views induce me to believe that what are called or found to be the miseries or dotage of old age arise always from material causes, extrinsic to our principle of life, and not essentially or necessarily connected with longevity; but are accidents occurring to it from external things. As such they are avertible or remedial by human skill and means, so far as it is the will of Providence as to the individual that he should or should not be subjected to them. The Divine will either leaves us to ourselves, or, if we seek its direction and government, will regulate for us what is most momentous to us, according to its own wisdom and purposes. But, reasoning on natural and human causation only, my inference from all that I have read, or seen, or felt, cannot but be, that the grievar.ces of old age spring oftenest and principally from previous cr continued wrong habits in ourselves, which have disordered some of the functions, which affect the vascularities, or which have injured or oppressed the nervous or brainous system of our frame.* If this be the fact, then, so far as it is operating, the evil operation may be checked or lessened when our knowledge and discernment have discovered and can apply the available correctives; and the benefit which they may impart, our increased and sustained self-government may for some time A * A circumstance appears in our periodical papers while these pages are preparing for the press, which illustrates the action of bodily causes on the mind, and the benefit arising from the removal of the depressing matter. M. Nobil lately read a paper to the Medical Society at Ghent ca the effects of the loss of a great part of the substance of the brain. youth, of a gloomy and saturnine disposition, and of a limited degree of intelligence, fancying that a girl to whom he was attached was deceiving him, fired a pistol with two balls at his own head. They passed out t the same orifice, and with them a portion of the brain sufficient to fil two moderately-sized teacups. He became immediately insensible; but in twenty-four hours recovered his consciousness, but with loss of sight. Each day, when the wound was dressed, portions of the brain came away with the dressings; but by the twenty-eighth day the injured part was healed. After the healing a surprising change took place in the character of the youth. Instead of being, as before, gloomy and taciturn, le became lively, intelligent, and talkative; and suggested a variety of inprovements in matters which seemed previously beyond his comprehe:sion. He did not recover his sight, but his other senses remained intact. though the loss of cerebral substance amounted probably to the whole of the left anterior lobe of the brain. He survived the injury two years. New Monthly Mag., 1837, p. 144. perpetuate. Believing the principle of life and thought to be undying and immutable by any temporary association of material particles, I cannot but think that any dotage or deficiency of mind which individuals may exhibit as they grow old is a contingence of disease, and no deterioration of its personal essentiality. It may not be remediable when it has once fully taken place, because in all ossifications and schirrous indurations the parts may be in time so altered that no art can reduce or restore them to their former and efficient state. But what cannot be cured when it has come fully, may be prevented by preceding care, under the guidance of an enlightened judgment and persevering resolution. Dotage or imbecility must be unnatural to our vital and intellectual principle, because that can never grow old. To be eternal, it must always retain its same living energy and power. If it could in itself decline into idiocy here during the limited term of our longest life, the debilitation would increase with the continuity of its existence, and therefore it would be utterly unfit for an immortal being hereafter; for to be impaired in that infancy of it which its human life comprises would present a hopeless prospect of its future talent and efficiency. It must be, therefore, an essential principle of the soul's vital nature, that no prolongation of its conscious existence shall anywhere injure it, if it has been created to be a resident in an everlasting kingdom. But on this fact of its future eternity the whole system of our divine revelation has been based. We die here to rise to immortal life from the death we undergo. To procure and ensure this blessing to us our Saviour came to our earth, taught, lived, and suffered as our Christian records state; and his resurrection from his Judean tomb has been declared to be, and to be meant to be, the pledge, and representation, and assurance of our own. Certain, from this, that we are destined to enjoy an immortal existence hereafter, the longevity of the soul must be always a continuity of its natural self, undecaying as undying; for decay and eternity are incompatible with each other; and what has been made to last for ever cannot be, in any part of its existence, a declining or debilitated being. It is, therefore, bodily disease which gives to our senses the appearance of imbecility; and if this could be removed, the soul would resume its preceding efficiency. The sacred history of the world, its plan, the Divine pur poses in human life, the great truths and prospects revealed to us by our Saviour, seem to me to be founded on the two great principles of our intellectual nature-its immortality and its improvability. That mankind have not been generally what they ought to be, no one will dispute: that they are better than they have been, almost, if not quite universally, who can study history and geography without perceiving? That mortality was attached to their earthly life because they would not obey their Creator, nor be and do what he commanded and counselled, is the language of revelation at every period of its communications. That the Deity, in all his interferences and legislations, has sought to meliorate his human race by enjoining and desiring them to live and act in conformity with his wishes, is manifest to all who read what has been expressed by his authority and in his name. These facts and principles appear in all the Sacred Writings before our Saviour came. But when he disclosed his purposes and instructions, they were connected inseparably with our improvement and immortality. His future kingdom, the world of eternity of which we are to be inhabitants, was presented by him to our view as the certain sequel of our present being; and to this the everlasting nature of the soul has been adapted. But to make this state of our existence as happy as it will be desirable, he called upon us to acquire the feelings, the qualities, and the habits; to adopt the ideas and views, and to accustom ourselves to the practice of the virtues and actions which he enjoined and illustrated. These requisitions attest the improvability of our nature; for, if this could not be improved into them, it was useless to teach them. His principle was, that we were, in our usual state, sinning and offending beings; but that we were convertible and alterable from this condition into the meliorations which he encouraged us to attain, and which would make human nature pleasing to its God. But this great change could be effectuated only by his assistance. This aid was promised if sought for; and what he taught as to the agency and efficacy of the Holy Spirit on the human mind, and of that spiritual regeneration which he mentioned, discloses and confirms to us the fact that improvability is the natural property of every individual mind; and therefore, at every period of our life, we shoudl remember that the two great certainties which are attached to our present personality, in its living state on this earth, are its immortality and its improvability; and it is indispensable to our welfare that we should always conduct and regulate it with reference to these its qualities, which are unalienable from it, and which, being so, require such a use and course of our present life as will be consistent with them and congruous with their inextinguishable reality. These considerations present to us one vast advantage of lengthened life, to which every one may make it conducive, and which attaches to it a value so inestimable as to be an object for our earnest desire: this is, that the longer we live, the more improvements we may acquire in our present state of being, and the more advanced we then shall be in that progression and melioration of our nature to which the inspired Christian teachers so emphatically invite us. Age and longevity are peculiarly favourable to these results, and have been designed to be so. The stimulations of those passions and appetites which in younger life create a contest between inclination and duty, have then ceased or become feeble, and are more easily governed. Our impulsive projects, hopes, and activities have subsided into sober reasoning and experienced judgment. The world around us has lost inuch of that enchantment which so much fascinates in its first novelties, and in the delusive expectations which it excites. What we have ardently wished we have by that time attained, or have relinquished as either unattainable or undesirable. The mind is therefore less agitated and deceived; so much of its term of existence here has been passed, that our common sense becomes our counsellor to look more steadily on our next stage of being, and to be doing whatever will most tend to make that safe and comfortable to us. But when these feelings and thoughts really predominate in our mind, and occupy our attention in any proportion to their just claims upon us and to their insuppressible importance, then every year of added life brings with it the opportunity, the scene, the incitation, and the means of the further improvements which we need, and which will be so richly profitable to us hereafter, as we enlarge their amount. No one can live longer with these ideas and on these principles but he will have reason to perceive and to acknowledge that every additional year has been a paternal benefaction to him. Such results will give longevity a utility and a charm which will make it one of the greatest blessings we can receive. The parable of the "Talents" intimates that the greater improvements we acquire and use in this life, the grander will be the benediction conferred in the next.* LETTER XXVII. Inquiry into the State of the Mind at the Time of our Earthly Death.And on the Indications then given of the Immortality of its Nature. -Illustrative Incidents from the Dying Moments of many Persons more or less distinguished. MY DEAR SON, Considering our vital and intellectual self the spirit which feels and thinks in all that we are conscious of, which acts in all that we do, and which constitutes our individualized personality, to be an immortal principle of being we may expect not only that longevity should not impair or diminish it, but that death should also be unable to destroy it. Death must be only a medium to a new scene of life, as birth visibly is. It will be congruous with the eternal durability of our nature, that, both in the commencement of its entrance into its earthly drama, and at its exit in the last scene of its appearance, it should give some tokens of its imperishable essence, and indicate that it is itself independent of the approaching mortality of its united but temporary body. To ascertain what is true on this interesting point, I have examined the state of individual minds as their last moments approached, as it has been described, to see what information could be drawn from it that would illustrate the inquiry; and I will submit to your consideration some of the most remark * You will be gratified by a passage in Sir Humphrey Davy's letter to one of his early home friends. "We can trace back our existence almost to a point. Former time presents us with trains of thoughts gradually diminishing to nothing. But our ideas of futurity are perpetually expanding. Our desires and our hopes, even when modified by our fears, seem to grasp at immensity. This alone would be sufficient to prove the PROGRESSIVENESS of our nature; and that this little earth is but a point, from which we start towards a perfection that is bounded only by infinity."-Dr. Davy's Memoirs of his Brother, vol. i., p. 130. VOL. III.-Y |