the ability to build up soul is forever and forever lost; they having injured the heart-valves, kidneys, supra-renal capsules, prostate gland, and seminal vessels, rendering it wholly impossible for them either to propagate their kind, equal their former mental efforts, or elaborate the electro-ethereal body without which immortality can not be. There are very many in our midst who never received the proper congenital impulsion; acquired it since birth; or who have lost or wasted the power by too faithful worship at the altars of Mammon, Venus, or Onan. But it is gratifying to know that such even may escape nihility, and gain enduring life beyond the grave; aye, and by stern resolve and persistent endeavor, aspire to the sublime destiny reserved for noble souls,—that magnificent future awaiting the choice spirits of mankind—the Peers, princes, and Powers of the starry skies!
Soul, per se, I hold to be Eviternal, Sempiternal, and Eternal, just as is that Supreme Deity whom we believe to be, not because His existence is demonstrable, but because we cannot help it, for God is Soul, so is man—existere ergo sum! I It has been from Now to all past Eternity; is, and probably will be, from Now to all Eternities to come, and its one orbit is the grand Eternal year. Of course there will come a moment in the far-off æons when matter will have yielded up all its electric, magnetic, and ethereal life and essences, which it will have contributed to form the electric bodies of the Imperial hosts of the dead; when the last monad will have been incarnated, and no more new souls will be launched into being, and the mighty armies will migrate into space; the refuse of Matter prepare to again renew its forms in loftier moulds; the second act of the transcendent drama be ended, the third begun, and the true and real purpose and meaning of the vast universe begin to be realized and understood—as not Now!
Soul is an Empire, or rather a Republic of States with a central, controlling, governing power. So is Deity—a sun radiant through all space, yet central at Home, just as man lives all over his body, but mostly in a tiny point at the centre of his brain. Deity is conscious at all points; but supremely and infinitely so at the centre of that vast Brain whereof stellar galaxies are but tiny convolutions.