It is a commonplace of physiology that there is not a particle in the body to-day that was in it a few years ago.

Shall we say that none of these bodies has a soul except the last, merely because the last decays more suddenly than the others?
"Or is it maintained that, although there is such utter diversity-- physical, mental, moral--between infancy and manhood, youth and age, nevertheless, there is a certain essence common to them all, and persisting unchanged through them all, and that this is the soul of the individual?
But such an essence as should be the same in the babe and the man, the youth and the dotard, could be nothing more than a colourless abstraction, without distinctive qualities of any kind--a mere principle of life like the fabled jelly protoplasm.

Such a fancy reduces the hope of immortality to an absurdity.
"No! no! It is not any such grotesque or fragmentary immortality that God has given us.

The Creator does not administer the universe on so niggardly a plan.

Either there is no immortality for us which is intelligible or satisfying, or childhood, youth, manhood, age, and all the other persons who make up an individual, live for ever, and one day will meet and be together in God's eternal present; and when the several souls of an individual are in harmony no doubt He will perfect their felicity by joining them with a tie that shall be incomparably more tender and intimate than any earthly union ever dreamed of, constituting a life one yet manifold--a harp of many strings, not struck successively as here on earth, but blending in rich accord.
"And now I beg you not to suppose that what I have tried to demonstrate is any hasty or ill-considered fancy.