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us lasts perpetually. And this Aristotle appears especially to intend in his treatise 'On the Soul;' as also all the Stoics; and Tully particularly in his book 'On Old Age;' this seems to say every poet who has spoken according to the faith of the Gentiles; this is expressed in every law—Jewish, Saracenic, and Tartaric, and by all other nations that live according to any kind of reason; so that if all were deceived, there would follow an impossibility, which even to put into words is horrible. It is certain that human nature is the most perfect of every created thing here below—and none deny this; Aristotle, indeed, asserts it in his work upon 'Animals,' where he says that man is the perfection of all the animals. While, therefore, many who live are entirely mortal, like the brute creation, and are, while they live, without any hope of another life, it follows that, if our hope were vain, greater would be our defects than those of any other animal; for many there are who have given this life for that; from which it would follow that the most perfect of living things—that is, man—would be the most imperfect, which is impossible; and that the part of him which is his greatest perfection—that is, his reason—would be the cause of his greatest imperfection: all of which is too strange to say. And further, it would follow that nature against herself had placed this hope in the human mind, since, as has been said, many rush to death in the body in order to live in the other life; and this, too, is impossible. Again, we have a continuous proof of our immortality in the divination of our dreams, which could not be if some part of us was not immortal; if we think closely, it is clear that the revealer must be immortal, whether in the body or out of the body: and that which is moved or informed by an immediate instructor ought to bear some proportion to the instructor; but between the mortal and the immortal there is no proportion. Again, we are made certain of this truth by the most true doctrine of Christ, which is the way, the truth, and the light: the way, because by it we go without impediment to the happiness of that immortality; the truth, because it permits no
