Mr. Canning died in agonies of this sort.

As the destructive

inflammation increased upon him, his shrieks were heard even in the street, as I was informed at the time. This again corresponds with the undying nature of the soul; that, as such, must feel pain when the causes of pain act upon it, as much in its dying as in its vigorous hour, but not that which has no existence as a personality; no self-identity, no continued being, but a mere succession of the results of a material arrangement. Thus, both the pleasure and the pain which are felt, as death is parting the union between our soul and its corporeal mechanism, attest its immortality as forcibly as the activities, feelings, thoughts, and aspirations at that termination of our earthly association.

That the separation and departure of the soul are involved in mystery which we cannot elucidate, arises from its invisibility. What we cannot see or feel, we cannot describe. The decomposition of the body is the only certain evidence to us that the principle of life has left it, and this is decisive to prove that the soul has left it; because it is a remarkable fact, that, as long as life is in the body, its dissolution cannot take place. The vital energy resists all the decomposing effects of the natural agencies which surround us, as long as it is within our frame; but, from the moment of its departure from it, the dissolving causes, whose action the principle of life had suspended while within the body, begin immediately to operate destructively upon it.

At what time the animating spirit quits its material organization we have no certain knowledge. The last gasping of the breath, or the ultimate sigh, seems like the separation where they take place; but in many these are imperceptible. Two circumstances induce me to think that the total cessation of all functional action and insensibility, which are usually deemed and usually are the actual death, may not also be the emancipation of the spirit. One is the unexpected resuscitation of some in their coffins, after every mark of a certain demise, which proved that the soul was lingering within, notwithstanding the apparent death.* The other fact is the restoration to life, a very rare incident, yet which has occasionally

I remember my father showing me in the street a man to whom this had happened. He had a violent asthmatic cough after his recovery, which was shaking him when I saw him, and which was ascribed to his being laid out and in his coffin for some days in very severe weather,

occurred, of a criminal who had been hanged for the appointed time, and who seemed to be a lifeless corpse.* In both these kinds of cases the soul loses wholly for a time its consciousness, and all its power over its bodily senses, and yet has not, therefore, left its bodily tenement. The precise moment of the spirit's leaving its body is therefore as little known as the exact time of its uniting with it. Birth and death are alike mysterious and inscrutable. Pain from earthly cause appears to cease entirely when the latter has completed its agency; but we have reason to believe that pain is felt by the forming being even before its human nativity.t

I will add a short statement of three more deaths of distinguished persons, which concur with those before mentioned to show such a possession and action of their intellectual principle of life as mark it to be a personal being different from its body, or at least as thinking and acting precisely as if it were so.

At

GENERAL WASHINGTON." He died 14th December, 1799, in his sixtyeighth year. On the day before, while attending to some improvements on his estate, his neck and hair became wet from a slight rain. night, an inflammatory affection of his windpipe came on, succeeded by fever and a laborious respiration. He was bled in the night, and in the morning three physicians attended him; but before midnight, and in about thirty-five hours from the time that he was in his usual health, he expired, without a struggle, and in the perfect use of his reason.

"After the attack had come on, he thought it would be fatal. He submitted to the prescriptions of his physicians; but after a trial of their remedies, he expressed a wish that he might be permitted to die without further interruption; after his power of deglutition was gone, he undressed himself and went to bed, to die there. To his friend and physician, Dr. Creik, he said, I am dying, and have been dying for some time; but I am not afraid to die.' His biographer, Ramsay, adds, that he submitted to the issue with the dignity of a man, the calmness of a

*Mr. Green, in his "Diary," has noted an individual's feelings to whom this kind of death was beginning:"1805, August 3d. Walked with Fesin round the Gave. Fesin said a friend of his had inquired of a person who had been turned off, and cut down on a reprieve, what his sensations had been. He answered, That the preparations were dreadful beyond all expression. On being dropped, he found himself midst fields and rivers of blood, which gradually acquired a greenish tinge, and imagined that, if he could reach a certain spot in the same, he should be easy. He struggled forcibly to attain this, and felt no more.'"-Gent. Mag., 1834, p. 475.

†This inference is made from the uncommon circumstance related in 1709 by Dr. Derham, from his own examination, to the Royal Society, and printed in its "Transactions." "The child cried almost every day for six weeks before delivery, and so loud that it could be heard in the next room."-Phil. Trans, 1709, vol. xxvi., p. 485.

philosopher, and the resignation and confidence of a Christian.""—Clissold, 532.

Dr. PARR, 6th March, 1833, aged seventy-eight. "He was to the last serene and placid; calmly, even cheerfully resigned. Even in his last hours it seemed to be still his delight, as it had been in his previous life, to range through the whole compass of the rational creation, embracing, within his kindest thoughts and wishes, all human beings; and interesting himself in every event, in every part of the world, which wore a favourable aspect towards human improvement and human happiness. He gave minute directions respecting his funeral."-Ib., 544.

HALLER, so distinguished for his anatomical writings and science, died 12th December, 1777, aged sixty-nine. "But a few days before his death he employed himself in his favourite occupation of retouching his works. In the midst of his great sufferings he put the finishing hand to his physiology. In his last moments he employed himself in marking the decay of his organs. He felt his pulse from time to time, till he said to his physician, with great tranquillity, My friend, the artery no longer beats and immediately expired."-Mem. of Haller, Chalmers's Biog.

Mr. Malthus is an instance of death advancing on the body without the intellectual nature having the least consciousness or feeling that such a catastrophe was approaching. His mind had no perception of the mortal change which his bodily functions were undergoing, nor altered as their fatal action was preparing. The account of it was: Mr. Malthus died at Bath on the 29th December, 1834. "He had just entered his seventieth year, but was in the full enjoyment of all his faculties, and his death was totally unexpected by his friends. He left London about three weeks ago, on a visit to his father-in-law, at Bath, in good spirits, and apparently in strong health, anticipating a cheerful Christmas with his children and other members of his family invited to meet him. But he was taken ill soon after his arrival with a disorder of the heart, which in a few days hurried him to the grave.”—Athen., 10th Jan., 1835.

LETTER XXVIII.

Mankind have been created on the Principle that Subsistence should be essential to them.-Instances showing that this was not an indispensable Condition of Human existence.-But, having been made the Law of it, we may be certain always of a sufficient Supply.

MY DEAR SYDNEY,

Having endeavoured to lay before you the principal facts and laws which concern our population, and the birth, life, and death through which it passes, as elucidating the Divine plans and purposes which have hitherto been pursued and effectuated in them, we will now proceed to consider the

system which has been devised and established for the SUBSISTENCE of those who thus come into being in our world.

Our bodies have been so composed in their substance and so constructed in their frame as to require this subsistence, as an indispensable condition of their existence, in the manner in which mankind have ever lived. They might have been otherwise made, but they have not. The original design of their Creator was, that food should be as necessary to them as air and warmth. He chose to subject them to this necessity, and so arranged their frame as purposely to compel them to seek and use the things external to them, which they would find on the earth, in order to exist upon it.

But these external things could not originate from mankind, He who made them could because they cannot create them. alone cause this provision to coexist with them, according to his primeval plan of creation. He therefore imposed upon himself the necessity of accompanying the earthly life of his human race with a continual and sufficient supply of the exterior aliment, which he thus made voluntarily and designedly indispensable to them when he created mankind. He therefore spontaneously, of his own free choice, undertook to create also the subsistence for them which they would, from his selected mode of framing them, perpetually require.

But he did not choose to create at once the millions of human beings whom he designed to constitute his earthly population. He did not bid tribes and nations spring up from the earth, as he commanded all the vegetables to arise from

it.

He preferred to adopt the plan of making only two human beings in his first paradise, and of preserving only six young parents after his diluvian revolution, with the law of such a gradual series and multiplication of offspring from them, in successive generations, as would place upon the globe, from age to age, such quantities of the human race as he meant to inhabit it. He therefore formed his scheme of mankind on the express plan that they should be always multiplying in continual reproductions; that every one should require a competent supply of daily food in order to keep alive; and that, as this must originate also from him, he would provide it adequately for them as long as he should choose that they should continue living beings on this earth. This is the simple and correct state of the case. His system of creation made the due provision of subsistence, from

the external nature in which he stationed his human beings, an essential part of his plan of human beings, and of their life on earth as perpetually multiplying beings. By such a plan he voluntarily imposed upon himself the necessity to make it a perpetual law in such a creation, that sufficient food should always arise to the populations that would exist, and for that purpose should increase as they did, and be always in a concurrent ratio, and never in a contradictory one.

There is no speculation in these ideas; they are the natural conclusions of our reason on such a subject. Our Creator chose to make us so that we cannot exist without our food. To suppose that he did not also intend us to have it would be absurd; but as we are not the creators of it, we could have it only from him. He must, then, create the provisions for us which he has framed us to need, or he would defeat his own purpose, and prevent that human race from arising whom he desired to perpetuate. No deduction of science, therefore, seems to be clearer than the certainty that the subsistence of mankind has been, is, and always will be, carefully superintended and competently provided, in the course and system of created nature, in due proportion to the numbers in which they are living on the earth.

I put this plainly before you as an irresistible inference, which should be fixed as the standard principle of your mind on this much mistaken subject. He who created us to live, and to multiply, and to need continual food, must have made the system of the one as certain in its operation as the system of the other. External nature has therefore been so constituted, as well as our frame, that the subsistence shall be as assuredly and as constantly supplied by the laws and agencies of nature which relate to us, as by those which concern our body it is perpetually required. No other conclusion than this can be drawn by those who believe that we are part of the designed and deliberate creation of an intelligent Creator; not wilfully malignant: for it is impossible to suppose that such a Creator would have made his human race on the principle that the laws of their multiplication and of their subsistence shall be hostile and contradictory to each other; that we shall increase with a geometrical rapidity, but that the needed food shall be supplied only by an arithmetical scantiness, certain to famish and destroy those who were im pelled to multiply and intended to exist in successive genera、