have a moral life, which nothing in time can extinguish; the instant they exist, they start for Eternity.  How, then, can a man who has once sinned, and who has not of himself cleansed his soul, be fit for heaven where no sin can enter?  I seek not to enter into the mystery of the atonement, “which even the angels sought to comprehend and could not”; but I feel its truth in an unutterable conviction, and that, without it, all flesh must perish.  Equally deep, too, and unalienable, is my conviction that “the fruit of sin is misery.”  A second birth to the soul is therefore a necessity which sin forces upon us.  Ay,—­but not against the desperate will that rejects it.

This conclusion was not anticipated when I wrote the first sentence of the preceding paragraph.  But it does not surprise me.  For it is but a recurrence of what I have repeatedly experienced; namely, that I never lighted on any truth which I inwardly felt as such, however apparently remote from our religious being, (as, for instance, in the philosophy of my art,) that, by following it out, did not find its illustration and confirmation in some great doctrine of the Bible,—­the only true philosophy, the sole fountain of light, where the dark questions of the understanding which have so long stood, like chaotic spectres, between the fallen soul and its reason, at once lose their darkness and their terror.

The Hypochondriac.[4]

  He would not taste, but swallowed life at once;
  And scarce had reached his prime ere he had bolted,
  With all its garnish, mixed of sweet and sour,
  Full fourscore years.  For he, in truth, did wot not
  What most he craved, and so devoured all;
  Then, with his gases, followed Indigestion,
  Making it food for night-mares and their foals.

  Bridgen.[5]

It was the opinion of an ancient philosopher, that we can have no want for which Nature does not provide an appropriate gratification.  As it regards our physical wants, this appears to be true.  But there are moral cravings which extend beyond the world we live in; and, were we in a heathen age, would serve us with an unanswerable argument for the immortality of the soul.  That these cravings are felt by all, there can be no doubt; yet that all feel them in the same degree would be as absurd to suppose, as that every man possesses equal sensibility or understanding.  Boswell’s desires, from his own account, seem to have been limited to reading Shakspeare in the other world,—­whether with or without his commentators, he has left us to guess; and Newton probably pined for the sight of those distant stars whose light has not yet reached us.  What originally was the particular craving of my own mind I cannot now recall; but that I had, even in my boyish days, an insatiable desire after something which always eluded me, I well remember.  As I grew into manhood, my desires became less definite; and by the time I had passed through college, they seemed to have resolved themselves into a general passion for doing.