Читать книгу Young Men; In Business онлайн

14 страница из 18

The late Archbishop Whately, in some annotations on Lord Bacon’s second essay, has mentioned a very remarkable phenomenon connected with insect-life, and has recorded that it often occurred to him as a very impressive analogy of a future state. You know that every butterfly—the Greek name for which, it is remarkable, is the same that signifies also the soul, Psyche—comes from a caterpillar—in the language of naturalists, called a larva, which signifies, literally, a mask. Now there is a tribe of insects called ichneumon-flies, which inhabit and feed on these larvæ. The parasitical flies have a long, sharp sting, which pierces the body of the caterpillar, and whereby they deposit their eggs on the inward parts of their victim. But, strange to say, the caterpillar thus attacked goes on feeding, and apparently thriving quite as well as those that have escaped. But when the period arrives for the close of the larva-life, then the evil is made manifest. Caterpillars assume the pupa-state from which they emerge butterflies; and it is then that the difference appears between those that have escaped the parasites and those that were the victims of them. Beautiful and awful analogy! There are many who, as to the outside, look like other men. They dress well, look well. The sin is preying only on their immortal part; and when they have laid aside that which merely belonged to their physical life, then the soul shall stand, with all its poverty and scars and shrivelled places, naked and open. “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” said Christ to his followers; and so are the elements of hell in other men.