On the other hand, if anywhere along your life-journey you have
scattered any seeds of kindness, they will every one of them bear fruit
in the Beyond.
From the moment when you perceive and acknowledge to yourself that you
are not in every way fitted to enter the courts of heaven and become
associated with those to whom selfish thoughts have become simply
memories, you are likely to have experiences tending to refine and
purify your nature. No longer active in the outward, you must bear what
influences come upon you from without as best you may. An infant in the
cradle is not more helpless than the great majority of those who enter
the Beyond; and the invisible nurse that may have you in charge will
not ask you what kind of medicine is most agreeable, but will administer
what is best for you.
Picture to your mind, if possible, what it would be like to lie
physically helpless, with your outward consciousness telling you that
you no longer appear as a man, or as a woman, but only as an infant to
any eyes able to see you, while at the same time your mental vision is
perfectly clear and takes in all your past life in every aspect of its
relation to other lives, and especially in its relations to the great
all-pervading life which seems now to be somehow lost out of all
possible reach.
Suppose that while those reactions called pain and pleasure are more
vitally potent than ever, because of a vastly heightened sensitiveness,
mental as well as physical exertion has become impossible, a succession
of states of consciousness taking their place; and then suppose a
master hand, with all the resources of mesmerism at his command, should
begin playing upon your organism, proving to you by every touch that not
a line of all your past history but is an open book to him, and his only
aim is to bring you to a willingness to confess your weaknesses
and follies, your neglect of duties, as well as your open
transgressions--one thing at least would surely result: you would
discover, and never forget, that spiritual things are not less, but
immensely _more_ real than any physical entities with which you ever
came in contact.
It is such a great mistake to suppose that because you have nothing in
your experience corresponding to such a condition as that which I have
just described, therefore you never will have.
What kind of reasoning can be weaker than this? Have you not two kinds
of consciousness, one of the world and all it contains, and one of
personal existence in its various relations? Do you not perceive that
your body, vitally active as it is, and swayed by every thought you send
out, belongs properly to the first of these fields of consciousness,
while that which makes up your character--your preferences, your
predilections, your faults, your foibles, your beliefs, and your
prejudices--belongs to the second?
Can you not see that a suspension of the outward consciousness, in other
words, a suspension of your power to sense the material world through
your material senses, has no necessary connection with any suspension of
your inner consciousness by which you might be able to say, I cannot
move; I cannot see, hear, or feel anything, but I am still a white man,
ready to swear by the flag and by my right to my personal liberty, and
if any one takes the trouble to hunt me out he will find me the same man
I always was?
Hundreds of thousands thus lie in their graves, thankful if they know
its location, and waiting as only the dead can for the time of their
deliverance.