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and maker is God." Its inhabitants are earnest and untiring in their activities. Apostles, martyrs, reformers, continue their holy missions. Newton pursues his investigations. Fulton's inventive genius finds broader scope for action. Mozart sweeps golden harp-strings, toning to harmony the discords of the spheres. Philosophers pursue their studies. Gardeners continue their pleasing vocations. Geologists probe newly-formed earths, and astronomers become enthusiastic in measuring the mighty orbs of space. Spirit life, then, is an active life, a social life, a retributive life, a constructive life, a progressive life. Reason, affection, conscience and memory, go with us into that world of conscious souls. Individualities are eternalities.

A change of clothing, or a change of place, does not change character. Entrance into the future world of spirits, will no more affect the moral tendencies of the soul, or miraculously give it new directions, desires and aims, than a voyage across the Pacific to California, would transform a thief into a saint. All grow to be angels by degrees. The process of death, with the improved surroundings and conditions incident thereto, will better each and all only in the sense of helping them to more clearly see the true relation of things.

In an inspirational discourse, H. W. Beecher said

"We shall enter upon another life divested of many of the hindrances and incumbrances of this.

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"If you take a seed that has ripened in Nova Zembla, and bring it into the tropics, and plant it, it will not be what it would have been in Nova Zembla, with a short growing season, and the scantiest supply of food. It will have, with a long summer, and an abundant supply, a growth to which no one would suspect that it could attain, who had only seen it grow in the frigid zones. Many things that are shrubs in the frigid zones, are high, waving century oaks in the tropics. And so men in this life are in conditions which, though fitted to develop the earlier stages of human growth, are not fitted to develop the full estate of that idea which God has expressed in the creation of man. And we may hope that when we bid adieu to our mortal life, we shall leave behind some things which are necessary to the exigencies of our condition here, but which will not be necessary to our state there. Our imagination, our reason, our affections, and our moral sentiments, we

shall doubtless carry with us; but the conditions of our life will be so different that we shall be like men taken from poverty into abundance; from winter into summer; from a cold climate and a frozen soil, into a soil never locked by ice, and skies that never know frost. Our life there shall be ampler, fuller, nobler than it is here."

A man cannot become scientific and holy as a garment is cleansed by washing. Volition and effort are involved in moral purity. Salvation is the result of soul-growth, not physical chemistry.

When a drowning mortal heavily encumbered with thick garments, succeeds in throwing them off, he is not saved, nor do his tremulous feet press the shore; but he is in a far better condition for reaching it. So the circumstance termed death, "one step up higher," puts all the conscious humanity of God into better conditions to attain knowledge, wisdom, purity, heaven. Salvation then is not mechanical, chemical nor cataclysmic; but a gradual interior unfoldment—a coming into harmony with divine law-a blissful sequence achieved through the exercise of the will, wisdom and love of a moral

actor.

There is no such law in the universe as absolute retrogradation. Spirit is never less than essential spirit. Downward tendencies are more in seeming than the real. The prodigal son departing for that "far-off country," was spiritually approaching the Father. He required the terrible experience. Arresting him in his course, the punishment was disciplinary. It brought him to himself. It helped the Christ triumph over the Adam.

The primary meaning of the Greek word, Kolasis-punishment-is pruning or trimming, as of a tree; severing diseased limbs, and cutting away distorted branches to restore it to a healthy condition and symmetry of form.

The growth of plants is intensified and hastened by rich soil, clear light and an increased supply of electricity. All this may be done in harmony with natural law. Such stimulants are adapted to the structure of the plants. So the

influences, incentives, spiritual light and presence of angelguides extending their shining hands, will exert a mighty moral influence in turning spirits, disenthralled from their fleshly bodies, towards the more pure and heavenly altitudes of perfection.

"God is a worker. He has thickly strewn

Infinity with grandeur. God is love.

He yet shall wipe away Creation's tears,

And all the worlds shall summer in his smile."

"One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off, divine event,

To which the whole creation moves."

"Thus heavenward all things tend. For all were once perfect, and all must be at length restored."

"Each is born for a higher destiny than that of earth; there is a realm where rainbows never fade; where the stars will be out before us like islets that slumber on the ocean; and where the loved beings that pass before us like shadows, now will stay in our presence forever!"

CHAPTER XXXVII.

HISTORIC IMMORTALITY

"Deep love, the god like in us, still believes

Its objects are immortal as itself."

"The form is in the archetype before it appears in the work; in the divine mind before it exists in the creature."

The immortality of the soul is a doctrine ancient as the remotest records. Jesus may have brought it to "light," in the estimation of Paul-originally Saul of Tarsus, then a bigoted self-willed Jew, wedded to the dim twilight shadows of the Old Testament dogmas. But Paul should not have presumed upon weighing other men's, and other nations' knowledge of "life and immortality" in his personal scales of ignorance. India's Vedas, Egypt's Hieroglyphs, and Assyria's scrolls, as well as the philosophies of Greece, were all aflame with the golden light of "life and immortality," thousands of years before the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus.

Doubtless the oldest distinctive statements of man's knowledge of a future existence are found in Egypt's sacred "Book of the Dead." These books treat upon the divine attributes of the Deity and the destinies of human souls after death, who, passing the gates of darkness, were introduced into Amenthe, place of departed spirits, to be judged. After this trial, they ascended, or descended to higher or lower spheres, according to the "deeds done in the body."

Those sublime, old Hindoo Hymns, the Vedas, richly abound in the doctrines of "life and immortality."

"The wise man, to whom pain and pleasure are the same, is formed for immortality. * * * The spirit is not a thing of which a man may say, it hath been, it is about to be, or is to be hereafter; for it is without birth, ancient, constant and eternal, and is not to be destroyed in this its mortal frame. As a man throweth away old garments and putteth on new, even so the soul, having quitted its old mortal frames, entereth into others which are new."-Bhagavat Geeta.

"May I arrive at that abode of Vishnu (God) where dwell in bliss the men who have been devoted to Him. He who has honored Vishnu with libations, becomes his friend in the world above." "Go, give to the waters and to the plants thy body which belongs to them: but there is an immortal portion; O Djatavedas, transport it to the world of the holy."-Rig Veda.

"Generation is not a creation of life, but a production of things to sense and making them manifest. Neither is change death, but a hiding of that which was."-Hermes Trismegistus.

"He who speaks wisely, moderately, kindly goes (after death) to those worlds which are the inexhaustible sources of happiness. He who is intelligent, modest, devout, who reverences wisdom, and respects his superiors and the aged, goes to the highest heaven. Sinless among

the sinful, speaking friendly words to all men, his whole soul melting with benevolence, final happiness is within his grasp."- Vishnu Purana.

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"There is another invisible, eternal existence superior to this visible one, which does not perish when all things perish. Those who attain this never return. This is my supreme abode."-Bhagavat Geeta. "The soul is immortal; again, it is incorruptible, it never dieth. * * But when a man who has lived justly dieth, his soul ascendeth to the pure heaven, and lives in the happy aevum with the blessed." -Pythagoras.

One of this Grecian's golden verses is this:

"When thou shall have laid aside thy body,

Thou shall rise freed from mortality,

And become a god (angel) of the kindly skies."

"Dying, * * * she shall be welcomed by her father, her mother, and her brother in that other world."-Sophocles.

"An honorable and virtuous man, may rest assured as to his future fate. The souls of the lawless departing this life suffer punishment. But the good lead a life without a tear, among those honored by the gods for having always delighted in virtue."-Pindar."

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