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 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. "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 cevum with the blessed." -Pythagoras. One of this Grecian's golden verses is this: "When thou shall have laid aside thy body, 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." "As they who run a race are not crowned till they have conquered, so good men believe that the reward of virtue is not given till after death. * * * * Not by lamentations and mournful chants ought we to celebrate the funerals of the good, but by hymns; for in ceasing to be numbered with mortals, they enter upon the heritage of a diviner life."-Plutarch. "If my body be overpressed, it must descend to the destined place; nevertheless, ny soul shall not descend, but, being a thing immortal, shall fly up to high heaven."--Heraclitus. "When, therefore, death approaches a man, the mortal part of him dies; but the immortal departs safe and uncorruptible, having withdrawn itself from death. The soul, therefore, is most certainly immortal and imperishable, and our souls really exist in the world of spirits. Those who shall have sufficiently purified themselves by philosophy [religion], shall live without their bodies received into more beautiful mansions. * * * * For the sake of these things, we should use every endeavor to acquire virtue and wisdom in this life; for the reward is noble and the hope is great. A man ought then to have confidence about his soul, if during this life he has made it beautiful with temperance, justice, fortitude, freedom, and truth; he waits for his entrance into the world of spirits, is one who is ready to depart when destiny calls. I shall not remain, I shall depart. Do not say then that Socrates is buried; say that you bury my body."-Socrates. "This was the end of the best, the wisest, and most just of men,-a story which Cicero professed he never read without tears."-Plato. * "The origin of souls cannot be found upon earth, for there is nothing earthly in them. They have faculties which claim to be called divine, and which can never be shown to have come to man from any source but God. That nature in us which thinks, which knows, which lives, is celestial, and for that reason necessarily eternal. God himself can be represented only as a free Spirit separate from matter, seeing all things, and moving all things, himself ceaselessly working. Of this kind, from this nature, is the human soul. * It cannot be destroyed." He represents the aged Cato as exclaiming, "O happy day when I shall remove from this crowd of mortals, to go and join the divine assembly of great souls. Not only shall I meet again there the men who have lived godlike on earth; I shall find again my son, to whom these aged hands have performed the duties which in the order of nature he should have rendered to me. His spirit has never quitted He departed, turning his eyes upon me and calling on me, for that place where he knew I should soon come. If I have borne hi loss with courage, it is not that my heart was unfeeling, but I myself with the thought that our separation would not b Cicero. me. These citations, taken as selected pebbles from an immeasurable, ocean of evidence, prove that the doctrine of future, immortal existence is as natural to the soul as a heartbeat in its casement; that, like sunlight, it has flowed into and bubbled from the spiritual affections of all seers in all ages, and become there a prophecy, yea, a positive knowledge. Even the ruder tribes of earth, less favored withthe supports of civilization, instinctively entertain this truth. The poor Indian of America's wilds, child of fate falling before the more savage monopoly of his pale brother, is nature's diorama of immortal lights and shades from the spirit hunting-grounds. When a brave chief dies, the survivors, bending down a sapling pine till the roots jut out, place under it the tenantless form, letting the tree spring back to its original position, where, spiring up a symbol of towering spirituality, it is nourished with the rich "dust to dust" and becomes greener and stronger, rising higher towards the wierd lands of the hereafter. Death strikes no class of persons with such terror as professed Christians. Their sighs, groanings, moanings and mourning apparel-black fitting their condition-a churchmenagerie of sable show and brooding despair-absolutely shock the seers and sages of India, Greece, Rome, the millions of present Spiritualists, and even the North American Indians. What consummate bigotry, then, or learned malignity— culpable in that they know no better-for clergymen, sneering at the manifestations of angel presence, to insist, as they do, that the only reliable evidence of immortality is revealed in the Bible, or "brought to light" in the historic resurrection of Jesus! Even the Hindoo Menu can teach them; "Universal instinct is transcendent law." The human soul will burst all fetters, and, child-like, find ature a perpetual paradise of immortal fore-gleams, and its own inner springs of love the future "river of life" flowing into the estuary of eternity. |