"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 l.u.s.tre pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sisted 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 pa.s.sed 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 sh.e.l.ls of the sea-sh.o.r.e. 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 s.p.a.ce, I understand you; but I doubt whether the most gifted philosopher in Athens can conceive of a world without time or s.p.a.ce; of a world so phantasmagoric in appearance, yet said to be so genuine and eternal in reality."

"Our s.p.a.ces 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 n.o.ble 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ornament]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ornament]

XV.

_THE WORLD OF SPIRITS._