CHAPTER XXV.

RESURRECTION FROM THE BODY, OR THE LIBERTY OF THE SONS OF GOD.

ACCORDING to Plato, there was once a winged race of men on the earth. Of course this is symbolical of a race who could emancipate themselves from the limitations and thraldom of the body, and who could rise in their thoughts above the plane of sense. According to Swedenborg's science of correspondence, wings denote spiritual truths, and to rise on eagles' wings signifies to be elevated by spiritual truths to celestial light. (“Arcana Celestia,” 8764.)

The great majority of mankind have lost their wings, and are grovelling in the dust.

“ Here man, fool man, inters celestial hopes,
Without one sigh, and prisoner of earth,
And pent beneath the moon, here pinions all
His wishes, winged of God to fly at infinite,
And reach it there where seraphs gather
Immortality on life's fair tree, fast by
The throne of God."

The higher soul of man, imprisoned in the body and buried in the sepulchre of irrational sense, loses the use of its wings, and its angelic powers are latent and dormant. Instead of soaring into the heavens, it can at best only wade in the mud.

The true wings of the soul are faith and love, or the perception of real truth and the pure emotional state its essential accompaniment.

How to emancipate the soul from the body and the mind

from the illusions of sense, so that we may attain to a truly spiritual mode of thought and feeling, and to the almost deific powers belonging to such a condition, is the great problem of religion and philosophy. Momentous consequences are involved in its solution. The importance and necessity of the resurrection of the soul from the body in order to the attainment of a spiritual life on earth is well stated by Sokrates in the "Phædo of Plato. He says: "In fact it is quite plain that if we are ever to know anything clearly, we must be released from the body, that the soul by itself may see things by themselves as they really are. And then only, methinks, shall we have that which we desire, and of which we call ourselves lovers, namely, wisdom." Here, then, is the only pathway which leads up to the temple of a true spiritual knowledge. For as Sokrates, or rather Plato through him, says, "We shall be so much nearer to true knowledge the more we refrain from such contact and fellowship with the body as is not absolutely necessary." The way to effect this emancipation of the soul, imprisoned in the body, from material limitations, at which all the ancient philosophies aimed, is as well stated by Sokrates in the "Phædo" as it can be expressed. He says: "They who love knowledge know that their soul when first received by philosophy is absolutely bound up in the body and glued fast to it, and compelled to survey the things that really exist through it as through the bars of a dungeon, and not in her own nature; and that she is wallowing in all ignorance as in a mire, and is not aware that the strength of her prison comes from her own desires, so that the prisoner actually conspires to his own captivity."

"Well, as I said, lovers of knowledge know that philosophy, receiving the soul in this condition, gently encourages her, and tries to effect her release by showing that perception by means of the eyes and ears and other senses is altogether deceitful, persuading her, moreover, to withdraw the senses so

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far as she can dispense with them, and exhorting her to retire into herself and be self-collected, and to believe none other than herself, and that part of real independent existence which she contemplates directly in herself; but to hold as untrue whatever things, by means of different faculties, she may perceive to be varying in their different manifestations; knowing that such as these belong to the visible and to the realm of sense, but that what she sees in herself alone belongs to the invisible and to the realm of thought. She withdraws herself as much as possible from pleasures, and desires, and pains, and fears, deeming that when any one is powerfully affected by pleasure, or fear, or grief, or desire, he brings upon himself no slight evil, as might be expected, like sickness, or waste of property, occasioned by indulging the passions, but he suffers the last and worst of all evils, and yet takes no account of it."

"And what is that evil? It is this. The soul of every man at the time of undergoing intense joy or intense sorrow is led to believe that whatever causes these is most real and true, although in reality it is not so. And this applies especially to things visible. And it is in this state of feeling that the soul is most effectually imprisoned in the body. Because every pleasure and every pain is, as it were, a nail which nails and clamps the soul to the body, and fashions her in the image of the body, causing her to believe that to be true which the body affirms to be true, and from agreeing with the body and rejoicing in what appertains thereto, she must perforce, I think, end by acquiring a like nature and habits." ("Phædo," sec. 83.)

These are golden words, uttered by one who represents the ancient wisdom, the old wine of the kingdom of God. We need to learn to close the senses to the external world of illusion, and turn the mind inward towards the light of the unseen and real world. We must for ever fix it in our minds that

things seen by the senses are temporal, unreal, and evanescent shadows, but things not seen by the mortal eye, but lying wholly beyond its ken, are the only eternal and enduring realities. We must as much as possible divest the soul, the inner man, of all its material and sensuous integuments, "the coats of skin" with which it has been clothed, and free it from the finite limitations of its personal existence, and leave it in its primitive innocent nakedness to absorb the light and life of "true being," and to become one with that boundless realm of uncreated spiritual effulgence. We must close the lower windows, and, like the ancient temples, let the light in at the top. Then

"The world that time and sense have known,
Falls off, and leaves us God alone."

It is a fundamental doctrine of the Hermetic philosophy that the soul of man is not of necessity included in the body, nor bounded and circumscribed by it. The body exists in the soul, and is included in its existence, but the body does not and cannot limit and contain the soul. This is the divine method of viewing it, and is in direct contradiction to the common popular conception of it. According to Plato in the "Timæus," God first creates the world-soul, the anima mundi, and then the world is created or generated in it. The world-soul is not limited by the world, but fills all space, and is space itself, in which everything exists. So the soul of man, according to the Platonic philosophy, was made out of the universal soul, of which it is a personal and finite limitation, and in the interior of the soul the body was formed. The body, to use an imperfect illustration and analogy, is like an island in a lake or ocean. While it is true that the island is pervaded by the water, it does not contain, measure, or bound it. He who views the body as containing the soul is like the man who should suppose that the water he finds by digging in the sand of an island is

all there is in the lake or ocean which surrounds it. So the soul of man is much more than what is included in the body. It is by divine right a freeman of infinitude, as it is not, except in our unbelief or misbelief, separated and disjoined from the divine soul of the universe. This is a principle of the ancient wisdom, and is one of far-reaching importance. When the soul is freed from the bondage of the enfeebling conception that it is in the body, its fetters are broken, and the stone is removed from the door of its sepulchre. It is no longer subject to the body, which is an inverted order of its life, but it becomes its rightful sovereign. If the body is not external to the soul, but is internal, then the soul, being more than the body, when properly instructed and reinforced by the higher divine spirit, can form the body after the pattern of any idea it pleases. Men on the stage form an idea of a certain state which they would represent, and even children in their sports do this, and then the idea moulds the body into its outward expression. Can we not make these bodily representations of an inward idea permanent? We can become the part we play. In the drama of life we can assume the character of perfect health, and the body will come into harmony with that idea. For the body is passive and inert clay, and the soul is the potter. That the soul is not of necessity imprisoned in the body like a bird in a cage, but as a part of the divine Soul of the world, from which it is never sundered, may attain to a boundless freedom, with its senses almost unlimited in their range, is a truth which has always been known to the initiates of the inner sanctuary. This is the liberty of the " sons of God," of which Paul speaks, and which is enjoyed by the adepts of the Himalaya Mountains to-day. A soul imprisoned in the body is subject to the laws of matter; freed from the body, it is subject only to the laws of thought.

But how reach this state? Not as long as the soul is bound to matter, and views matter and the body as really existing