“I cannot understand it,” said I, sorely puzzled. “You are certainly
strangers to me, and you look so unlike any of the men I have ever seen,
that I can readily believe you are angels. Nor do I see my beloved
sisters, Martha and Mary, who, I know, would not leave my bedside for a
moment. But this body is the same body I have always had; this is the room
in which I have been sick so long; and looking out of that window, I see
the Mount of Olives and the familiar sky of Judea. Explain how this can
be.”
They looked at each other smiling, and one of them replied:
“The last impressions made upon the mind linger a while after death; so
that the transition from natural to spiritual life may not be too sudden,
and the sensation of personal identity may be fully preserved. This will
change to you presently. We do not see the room that you see, nor the
Mount of Olives, nor the Judean sky. These will all vanish from your sight
after a little, and you will find yourself differently clad and moving
about among novel and beautiful scenes.”
“But,”—said I, incredulously,—“but this body of flesh and blood, in which
I live, move and think, how came it here?”
“That body of flesh and blood you have left behind you. The soul is a
spiritual substance organized in the shape of its natural body. The
natural body resembles the spiritual as a glove resembles the hand
contained within it. You have dropped the glove. You see the naked hand.”
“Our mission,” he continued, “is now ended, and another takes our place.
We assist in the resurrection.”
They made a motion of departure, but I seized one of them by the hand.
“Oh stay!” said I, “do not go. Your words interest me beyond measure. I
would learn more of the heavenly life. Pardon my incredulity, pity my
ignorance.”
“One approaches,” said he, “who is much nearer and dearer to you than we.
Relatives delight to render to relatives these charming offices of comfort
and instruction. He comes!”
“Who?” I exclaimed, eagerly.
“Your father!”
I looked in the direction indicated by the angel’s face. Out of the
darkness—which appeared to me and not to the angels, for it proceeded from
my own mind and not from theirs—out of the darkness slowly loomed up a
human figure. It brightened as it advanced. Then there stood before me a
young man of radiant beauty, clad in a tissue of shining purple. His face
was full of eager expectation, sparkling with love and joy.
While I was gazing at this form, which seemed to me a beautiful
apparition, the other angels disappeared.
“My son! my son!” exclaimed the shining visitor in a voice of touching
sweetness, and which seemed in some way remotely familiar. “Do you not
know me?”
I was silent and troubled, for there was not the faintest resemblance
between the splendid being who stood before me and the poor father I had
buried in the wilderness.
“I am permitted for your sake,” said he, “to return back into the mental
states of my earth-life and to resume its forms. This is one of the
wonders of the spiritual world, but one which you will frequently see and
soon understand. Look steadfastly at the changes I shall undergo, and you
will believe.”
The light about him began to fade. The purple tissue darkened; his face
grew pale; the lustre passed from his hair. His features gradually
changed, becoming less and less beautiful, less and less youthful.
Wrinkles appeared; his cheeks became haggard; his eyes sunken and sad; his
head bowed and bare; his beard gray. Unsightly scars came upon his
forehead; and when he held up his withered hands, from which two or three
fingers had dropped, I knew the poor old leper whom the cruel law had
driven into the wilderness.
“My father! my father!” I exclaimed, weeping at the sight which recalled
so vividly the sorrows long buried in the soul, “I am satisfied. Return
again into the beauty and glory of your heavenly youth. Let us forget the
past. Let me see you as you are!”
His figure then underwent exactly the reverse series of changes; and when
his angelic form was restored, I fell upon his neck and wept tears of joy.
I inquired into the philosophy of the astounding metamorphoses I had
witnessed. I was taught that spiritual things—states of our affections and
thoughts—are not so perishable as natural things; that they are stored
away and preserved; and that they can be recalled and reproduced with a
fac-simile of all the surrounding concomitants and phenomena. A spirit can
be made to return into any state of his past life, when he will repeat his
conduct to the least word and motion and incident. Thus nothing can be
concealed; the entire past can be re-enacted; truth discovered and
judgment given.
It was in accordance with this great spiritual law of changing forms
corresponding with the changing states of the soul, that the disciples
beheld Jesus from such different stand-points. If Thomas Didymus could
have entered into the spiritual state of the three disciples on the mount,
he would not have seen the Christ showing the wound in his side and the
print of the nails, but he would have beheld him radiant—in his
transfigured glory. It was the varying stand-points or mental states of
the disciples, which give us such different manifestations of the
Unchangeable.
I was not, however, thinking of these things at that moment. I was
contemplating the youth and beauty of my father’s spiritual body.
“I was told,” said I, “that the spiritual body was a fac-simile of the
natural body. How comes it that yours is so totally different?”
“When I first rose from the dead,” he replied, “I seemed to myself to be
in the same leprous body that I had in the wilderness; and like all men I
found some difficulty in realizing the fact that I was living in a
different world. The spiritual body or external form of the soul, changes
rapidly according to the changes of its internal form, which is composed
of affections and thoughts. In proportion as these are purified from the
evil and false things imbibed during the natural life, the body is freed
from its imperfections, its feebleness and its want of symmetry.”
“And why do you look so young?” I inquired.
“Time,” said he, “does not belong to the spiritual world. We have no
computations here by months and years; no revolution of suns and planets,
which produce day and night and the changing seasons of the world. Our
external surroundings, what you would call our visible nature, are the
immediate outgrowth of our own spiritual states. The exterior changes
continually with the interior. All in heaven are therefore young and
beautiful, because their soul-life is good and pure, and is fitly
represented by youth and beauty.”
My father then questioned me about the dear ones I had left behind. He
manifested the deepest and tenderest sympathy in all that had happened to
us since his departure from the world. He had heard of us frequently from
new-comers into the world of spirits. We do not cease to love our earthly
friends after death. But in the heavenly life there is such a thorough,
soul-satisfying trust in the wise and merciful guidance of Divine
Providence, that fears, doubts and anxieties about our absent loved ones,
are utterly impossible.
“And my mother?” I inquired in turn,—“my mother and my little brother
Samuel, where are they?”
“In heaven,” said he, “where you shall see them, but not now. You will
undergo sundry preparations of state, inexplicable to you at present, by
which you will be fitted for the ascent into their resplendent abodes.”
The angel who assisted in my resurrection was right. The objects which
surrounded me at my death, and which lingered a while on my mental vision,
had faded away. I found myself in a strange but beautiful world, the forms
of which were similar to ours, but the laws which governed their
appearance and disappearance very different.
I must confess that I was supremely astonished to find myself living,
feeling, thinking, precisely as I did before my death. My mind indeed
seemed more active, more penetrating than ever. My body had a buoyancy, a
strength, a healthfulness pervading it, which were accompanied by a sense
of intense pleasure. But it still seemed the same body in which I had
previously lived; and I could scarcely comprehend my father when he told
me that my sisters and friends were making preparations to bury my earthly
form.
“Oh that I could look down upon them,” said I, “could speak to them, could
show them my true self, and lift their souls out of the fearful shadow of
the tomb! Why is it not granted us to cheer the hearts and illumine the
minds of those who are sorrowing so vainly over our cold dust?”
“They would not believe you, my son, if it were permitted. They would call
your manifestation to them a vision, a hallucination, a dream. They are in
such bondage to sensuous appearances, and to reasonings based upon them,
that nothing but death will break their chains. It will take generations,
ages, centuries, cycles of natural time to render higher thought on that
subject possible. New civilizations, new churches, new revelations must
arise before mankind can be delivered from this terrible darkness.”
“And that natural body,” said I, “laid in the grave, and food for worms,
is not to rise again?”
“Why should it?” said my father. “Who wants it? What use could it
subserve? Are we not in spiritual bodies clothed with all beauty and
perfection? Are we not in a spiritual world vastly more beautiful and
happy than the natural? Why should we return into nature? into a natural
body? into an envelope of flesh and blood, however purified and
etherealized?”
These ideas struck me as extremely rational and beautiful. Having passed
the lowest round of the ladder of being, why should we reverse the laws of
development and descend back to it again? Impossible! The natural body was
only a vehicle of natural life with its thoughts and emotions. Spiritual
thoughts and emotions demand a spiritual body, a spiritual world. Let
those who choose, wed themselves to the grave and the worm and the dust
and the darkness, and speak of their friends as sleeping in the cold
ground, and satisfy their hungry souls with the hope of a material
resurrection. But their ideas are far, very far from the truth; and the
minds of men will some day be emancipated from such gross naturalism.
“Imagine,” said my father, “the consternation of the good spirits, who are
happy in heaven, at the thought that they must leave it, divest themselves
of their beautiful spiritual bodies, and return to the natural world with
all its painful limitations of time and space, resuming their old cast-off
material bodies, which had been long since resolved into dust and
forgotten!”
The thought is monstrous! monstrous! And yet the poor blinded people in
the natural world dwell upon it as if there were some special consolation,
some glorious promise in it. Incomprehensible freaks of the human spirit!
He who preaches a material resurrection, has made but one feeble step
beyond the infidel who preaches none at all.
“Men still in the flesh,” said my father, “do not know that our spiritual
world inhabited by spiritual bodies fulfills all the imperative demands of
the soul for a perfect and final resting-place. We have here life and
form, organization and objects, weight and substance, sounds and colors
all more beautiful and wonderful than those in the natural world. All
these things, invisible, intangible, inaudible to men, are as real and
solid to our senses as the earth was to you when you were a man upon it.
“Yet this external world surrounding us is not material and fixed like
yours. It is what we call substantial or spiritual. It is plastic to
spiritual forces. It changes, not according to your natural laws, but
according to the changes in our own spirits. This is the key to the great
difference which exists between the world you have left and this glorious
one in which you are to live for ever.
“Our light here changes. It is day or night with us according to our own
spiritual relations to the great Fountain of life. In one state of mind we
are in the city, in another in the country. Certain emotions carry us to
the mountain-tops; others place us among the sands and shells of the
sea-shore. In one state of thought we are walking in flower-gardens of
ethereal beauty; in another we are sitting by rivulets which echo the
music of our own hearts. Thus mountains, fields, rivers, cities, houses,
animate and inanimate objects come and go, appear and disappear, according
as they represent or symbolize the interior changes of our spirits.”
“All this,” said I, “is so beautiful that it seems impossible. Liberated
now from the thraldom of time and space, I understand you; but I doubt
whether the most gifted philosopher in Athens can conceive of a world
without time or space; of a world so phantasmagoric in appearance, yet
said to be so genuine and eternal in reality.”
“Our spaces are determined,” said my father, “by spiritual affinities.
Similarity of thought and feeling determines presence; dissimilarity makes
distance or absence. When you here direct your thought to any person on
the same plane of life, as we call it, with yourself, having at the same
time a desire to see him, that person becomes aware of the fact, and,
responding to your desire, is face to face with you at once.
“Let us both,” he continued, “fix our thoughts intently upon our noble and
lovely friend, John, called the Baptist, who was beheaded in prison, and
is performing here a similar office to that which he so well executed on
the banks of the Jordan.”
We did so; and in a moment there was a beautiful flash of azure light,
like a great sheet of water reflecting the sun and sky.
“That,” said my father, “is the sphere or symbolic appearance which always
precedes and announces the coming of the gentle herald of the Lord.”
Then stood before us the young prophet of the wilderness, beautified,
etherealized, glorified beyond conception.
He saluted me with brotherly warmth, and we entered into a long
conversation which I shall not repeat; but from which I learned a thousand
interesting and wonderful things about the spiritual world—things
incredible to men in the flesh, most of whom, like birds of night, are
satisfied with the darkness of nature.
[Illustration: Ornament]
[Illustration: Ornament]