The longing in every man to meet again after death those who were most
dear to him here, to have communication with them, renewing the old
relations, will be satisfied in a more perfect degree than was ever
anticipated or hoped for.
For in that life those who were united here by a common spiritual bond
will not only meet but will have become one through this bond; there
will be for them a unified soul belonging with a common consciousness
to both. For already, indeed, are the dead with the living, as are the
living themselves, bound together by countless such common ties; but
only when death loosens the knot and removes the body which envelops
every living soul, will there be added to the union of consciousness
the consciousness of union.
Every one in the moment of death will perceive that he still has a
place and belongs in the company with those gone before, from whom
through common interests he has received help, and so will not enter
into the third world as a strange guest, but like one long expected,
to whom all with whom he was here united through a common faith,
knowledge, and love, will stretch out their hands to draw him to
themselves as a partaker of their existence.
Into similar deep fellowship shall we also enter with those great dead
who long before our time wandered through the second stage of life,
and upon whose example and teaching our own spirit was moulded. So,
whoever here lived wholly in Christ will there be also wholly in Him.
Yet his individuality will not be extinguished in the higher one, but
only gain in power from it, and at the same time reinforce the strength
of the higher. For those souls which have grown together as one through
their moments of sympathy, gain force each from the other for itself,
and at the same time confirmation as individuals through the union of
their diversities.
So, many souls will mutually strengthen each other in the greater part
of their nature; others are connected only by a few corresponding
qualities.
Not all these ties based upon certain spiritual experiences in common
will be permanent, but they will be so when they are within the realm
of truth, beauty, and virtue.
All that does not bear within itself eternal harmony, even if it
survives this life, will yet at last come to naught and will cause
a separation of those souls which for a time had been united in an
unworthy alliance.
Most spiritual perceptions which are developed in the present life,
and which we take over into the next, bear, it is true, a germ of
truth, goodness, and virtue within themselves, but enveloped in a large
addition of unessential falseness, error, and corruption. Those spirits
which remain united through such impulses may so continue or they
may separate, according as they both agree to hold fast to the good
and the best, and to abandon the evil by their separation from evil
spirits, or according as one seizes on the good and the other on the
evil.
Those souls, however, which have seized together upon a form or an idea
of truth, beauty, or goodness in their eternal purity, remain thereby
united to all eternity and in like manner possess these ideals as a
part of themselves in everlasting unity.
The comprehension of the higher thought by advanced souls means
therefore their growth through this thought into greater spiritual
organisms, and as all individual ideas have their root in the
universal, so at last will all souls, in fellowship with the highest,
be absorbed into the divine.
The spiritual world in its consummation will therefore be, not an
assembly, but a tree of souls, the root of which is planted on earth
and whose summit reaches to the heavens.
Only the highest and noblest spirits, Christ, the geniuses, the saints,
are able to reach, out of their full knowledge, the centre of divinity
face to face; the smaller and lesser ones have their roots in these, as
boughs in branches and twigs in boughs, and are thus connected midway
indirectly through them with the highest of the high.
And so dead geniuses and saints are the true mediators between God and
man; partaking of the thought of God they are able to convey it to man,
and at the same time feeling and understanding human sorrows, joys,
and desires, they are able to lead him to God.
Yet the worship of the dead stands in relation to the deified worship
of nature, at the very beginning of religion, half related and half
separated; the most savage nations have retained it in its cruder, the
most civilized in its higher form. And where to-day is there one which
does not preserve a large fragment of it as its corner-stone?
And so there should be in every town a shrine for its greatest dead,
built near or in the temple of God, and let Christ as heretofore dwell
in the same temple as God himself.