CARDINAL JAMES GIBBONS: It is well known that there is a constant waste going on in every part of the human body which has to be renovated by daily nutriment. So steady is this exhaustion that, in the judgment of medical science, an entire transformation of the physical system occurs every six or eight years. New flesh and bones and tissues are substituted for those you had before. The hand with which you write, the brain which you exercise in thinking are composed of entirely different materials. And yet you comprehend to-day what you learned ten years ago, you remember and love those with whom you were then associated. How is this? You no longer use the identical organic substance you then possessed. Does it not prove that the faculty, called the soul, by which you think, remember and love, is distinct from organic matter; that while the body is constantly changing, the soul remains the same; that it does not share in the process of decomposition and renewal through which the human frame is passing, and therefore that it is a spiritual substance? All nations, moreover, have believed in the immortality of the soul. Such was the faith of the people of ancient Greece and Rome, as we learn from the writings of Virgil and Ovid. Nor was this belief in a future life confined to the uncultivated masses; it was taught by the most eminent writers and philosophers of those polished nations. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and other sages of Pagan antiquity, guided only by the light of reason, proclaimed their belief in the soul's immortality. The same views were held by the ancient Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and Persians, indeed by all the nations of Asia whose history has come down to us, and by the Germans, Gauls, Britons, and other ancient tribes of Europe. If we question the Indian of North or South America on this point, he will tell us of the happy hunting-grounds reserved in afterlife for the brave. We may find nations without cities, without the arts and sciences, without mechanical inventions, or any of the refinements of civilized life; but a nation without some presentiment of the existence of a future state, we shall search for in vain.
STANLEY WATERLOO: Through our senses we recognize that the universe is conducted on a plan which, of course, involves a Power behind all, an intelligent Power. We are in the hands of that Power and its general course is beneficence, for death may be but an incident in progress. There is a change to something beyond our power to understand, and we can but reason by our weak human deductions. We may as well give it up. As to continued identity, supposing there be a soul, we know that in all nature the death, or change phenomenon, produces like. The plant dies in the autumn, but when its seed awakens in the spring it produces that same plant. No pink comes from the seed or soul of a rose. There is another thing which appeals most strongly to me as evidence of another life with the same identity. It is the fact that we all want it. Now, Nature, or the Power, does nothing without intent. If the life we want were not to come to us we would not have the longing, it seems to me. A thought is as much a real product of the Power as is a plant. These are the ideas that aid and strengthen me.
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