1 cult to believe that there is ever a period in which the human soul is utterly unconscious in regard to the sounds from the eternal world. If it be regenerate, eternal truths are the scenery and the atmosphere, amidst which it lives and breathes; and it loves to recognize a near, dear, and powerful relationship as to an eternal home. It "walks thoughtful on the solemn, silent shore of that vast ocean it must sail so soon!" But if men be unregenerate, then, from the existence of the same great realities, and their indestructible relationship to them, they cannot remain unconscious of what is before them. A dreadful sound is in their ears. Human nature itself, in the agitation of its constituent elements, is restless and audible. The great IDEAS of God, Spirit, Immortality, Eternity, Duty, Responsibility, Retribution, wrestle together. Warning voices rise from the unfathomed spiritual depths of the soul, instinctive shudderings shake its spiritual frame, and moanings may be heard, like the low wail of the elements before the rushing storm. And when the last hour comes, and the being is to be left forever to the dreadful elemental war, "In that dread moment, how the frantic soul Raves round the walls of her clay tenement, Not only from this constitution of our immortal nature, formed for spiritual realities, and not for temporal shadows, for an eternal spiritual abode, and not a mere tent in the desert, pitched to-day, and struck to-morrow for the passage; not only 'rom this immortal constitution, linking us to things to come, and forewarning us of them; but from the manner in which this subject is spoken of in the Word of God, we have reason to believe that there is a native, instinctive, spiritual intelligence in man, in reference to the eternal world, answering to the power of instinct in animals; an organization like that of the animal. instinct, though incomparably superior to it, combining the intuition both of the material and immortal parts of our nature; a perpetual appeal to conscience and pressure upon it, from intuitive convictions, to which, as well as to conscience, the appeal from God in his Word, and from external nature, addresses itself. In the development of body and soul together, this intuitive power is developed, and is susceptible of cultivation to an amazing degree of perfection and of certainty. An instance of this kind of instinct in animals is given in the wonderful power and certainty of the migratory impulse in birds, and their obedience to it, and God refers his own neglectful people to its development, for a lesson. "Yea," says the Prophet Jeremiah, "the stork in the heavens knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle, and the crane, and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the Lord. They have rejected the Word of the Lord, and what wisdom is in them?" There is a spiritual instinct working in man with just as unerring certainty as that which guides the turtle, the crane, and the swallow on their pathless way to climes and seasons at the distance of near half the globe; but man disobeys it, and disregards the revelation which appeals to it, and which was given for its cultivation and its guidance. Of course, the longer it is neglected and disobeyed, the less perceptible and the weaker it becomes. Still, it never goes out of existence; there always remains the consciousness of immortality, the instinctive feeling of the necessity of preparing for the future world, and an instinctive warning and prediction of evil to come, if there be not this prepara tion. The direction in which this instinct impels the soul, is always towards God, and to the exercise of prayer; and men experience it and disobey it, countless millions of times in their habitual existence, experience it and disobey it, almost unconsciously. If they yielded to the instinctive warning impulse and obeyed it, under guidance of God's Word, it would become a power of discernment and of knowledge in reference to the spiritual world, infinitely more wonderful in precision and farreaching insight, even prophetic insight, than the instinct of animals in regard to the sphere of their existence in this world. The instinct of animals is always the same, admitting of neither cultivation nor increase. If a black-bird could live long enough to have migrated a thousand seasons, it would have a power of instinct no keener in discernment, no more intense in impulse, the thousandth year than the first. So the beavers for a thousand generations would build their dams exactly as the first beaver built them; and the bees, if they could live a thousand years, would construct their cells unvaryingly the thousandth year as they did the first, and would gain nothing from experience, and add nothing to the power of instinct. But with man it is different. Every act of obedience to his spiritual instincts strengthens their power. If he always obeyed their impulses under guidance of the Word of God, there is no saying to what amazing knowledge of the future world, instinctively, he might arrive. He might almost pierce the veil that separates between himself and spiritual realities, and behold them and commune with them, as if the barrier that disconnects, or rather dissevers him, from the invisible world, were broken down. He would attain to such a knowledge of spiritual things, as would appear incredible to a worldly mind, and supernatural to a Christian. But the instinct which would be thus quickened and expanded almost into the vision of inspiration by habits of obedience to it in communion with God, and under the light of his Word, grows weaker and weaker by being disobeyed, till it almost dies out, and leaves the soul in perfect darkness. Sensibility dies with it, and stupor and blindness united form the characteristic of the soul. The man becomes so hardened, that it is difficult to believe that such a mass of insensibility is really destined to the judgment; so hardened, that the spectator almost questions concerning his immortality. And yet, even in such hardened natures, there is sometimes a sudden waking into life of the spiritual instinct, not to be accounted for on the principles of our common physiology. Sometimes, just as a dying lamp leaps up fitfully before it expires, this spiritual instinct in man, so long neglected and beaten down beneath sin and passion and evil habits of every kind, rises into a flame, that throws a strong and fearful light upon the world into which the man is speedily to enter. We have known authenticated cases of men predicting their own death, and at the same time declaring that they were given over to hopeless perdition. And may it not be that the singular intimations which men sometimes have of the nearness of death are the results of this mysterious, hidden, spiritual instinct, roused into great activity and acuteness by the nearness of the eternal world, and feeling that nearness, when there is, to sense, no perceptible evidence of it? We say God sends such intimations often in mercy, and no doubt he does; but often they may soring from the very nature of man's immortal being, sc fearfully and wonderfully made, which may predict to him sometimes his near entrance into eternity, with as unerring an impulse, as that with which the instinct of the birds predicts the time for their migration. We have compared the spiritual instinct which is inwrought in man's constitution in regard to the spiritual world, warning and impelling him to prepare for that world, with the instinctive impulses of the birds and beasts. In the animal creation, the instinct is evidently blind, unreasoning, and mechanical. It is not voluntary, but irresistible; they cannot help it, and they must obey it. Birds imprisoned have manifested, when the season of emigration came round, the same uneasiness and desire to remove, that they would have done in the midst of the wild flock in freedom. Beavers, even when tamed from infancy, will build dams in any pool of water, or even ditch, to which it may be possible for them to resort. We should probably find the same thing true of the impulses of instinct throughout the entire animal creation. The will has little or nothing to do with them, nor can they, as in man, be warped, or blinded, or destroyed by voluntary resistance. But suppose it were otherwise. Suppose that in these cases the impulse of instinct looking to the future and inwrought into the frame as a provision for the future, could be evaded, and should be turned aside, neglected, or perverted, for the sake of indulging in impulses of passion for the present. Suppose, for example, that the blackbird, when the mysterious inworking law begins to be felt, warning it to take wing for a warmer clime, should be enticed by the delights of some pleasant nest, or lovely, warm seclusion, or unexpected supply of present wants from day to day, into a habit of procrastination in reference to that migra |