When we came back to our last form and state, she exclaimed, still weeping for joy:

"Oh that I could see you continually in that charming little shape! I shall make you resume it over and over again, until I satisfy my hungry heart with the graces of your boyish form. Ah! nothing is lost. All is given back to us."

We discoursed on a thousand topics, and floods of spiritual light were poured upon my benighted, undeveloped mind. Walking with these angelic friends on the grand piazza of the palace, and gazing at the architectural grandeur which surrounded us, I was filled with an exhilaration of spirits too great for earthly utterance, never to be comprehended by any one until he meets his friends, whom he calls dead, in the divine light of the heavenly world.

When I new recall these things, poor, old, desolate, heartbroken man that I am, bearing my earthly burdens again and doomed to another death, they all seem to me like a delightful dream! That I walked and talked with friends in heaven! surveyed their houses! discussed their laws, their government, their worship, their occupations, face to face as man with man! Impossible! Incredible!

What did I say?

It was no dream. It was no hallucination. It is possible. It is credible.

It was a fact. My memory does not betray me. My imagination does not mislead me. It was all true; and I shall see them, hear them, live with them again, never to return to earth, so soon as I once more give up this mortal breath and render this feeble body back to the dust whence it came.

How long, O Lord! how long?

I learned from my brother that the societies in heaven, which are innumerable, are arranged according to the uses they perform, which depend upon the bent of the inclinations and the expansion of the intellectual faculties of those who compose them. Men on earth receive their vitalizing impulses, their attractions to all that is good and true, from these societies through the medium of good spirits in the intermediate world.

Some of these societies inspire the love of nature and art; some the genius and power for civil government; some the taste for science and practical life. Some animate especially the devotional nature; some the social; some the poetic; and others, again, act as intermediate powers, balancing and harmonizing the different activities of the soul.

The society to which my brother belonged was one which presided over and secretly vivified the architectural tastes and genius of man. Near by, upon mountains whose purple summits I saw in the distance, was a large society which presided over music. Great societies which were the secret life and soul of poetry, history, oratory, statuary, painting and other fine arts, were grouped around, more or less remote, all holding the most delightful communications and interchanges with each other.

I was astonished to learn that the peace and joy and highest happiness of the angels spring from the exercise of their faculties in the performance of useful service to each other. They are never idle, but continually engaged in doing something useful from the love of use. I learned that in this the angels find their chief delight; and that, although they occasionally meet for formal and social worship, and unite in prayer and songs of praise as people do on earth, they nevertheless regard the loving and faithful performance of the duties of their respective vocations as the highest kind of worship. This they call _real_ worship; and the _formal_ kind in which they sometimes engage, is merely to fit them for the higher and more real kind.

"Do you ever see your earthly friends," I asked, "struggling and toiling in the dark abyss of nature, before they cast off their earthly covering and rise into the light and beauty of these higher worlds?"

"Not directly!" replied my brother, "for there is no continuity between spirit and matter. To speak philosophically, there is continuity and correspondence; but spirit and matter are not degrees of the same substance, differing only in tenuity, as is commonly supposed. It is impossible for us to see or hear anything in the natural world, except through the medium of some living man whose interiors have also been opened.

"Wonderful as it may seem to you, the spirits of men still living in the flesh are really in the spiritual world, all the time connected secretly with spiritual societies. They are invisible to us, however, because their thoughts, affections and senses all open downward and outward into nature.

They become dimly visible, but do not communicate, when they are in states of profound abstraction or great spiritual elevation.

"We see them occasionally also by correspondences, which would appear to you like visions or dreams. In every society these manifestations are different, depending on the nature and functions of the society. In ours, for instance, the mental states of our earthly friends are sometimes revealed to us architecturally. That is, we see them as in a dream building houses: and without knowing their names or earthly whereabouts, we judge of their characters by the materials, the progress, the execution, even to the minutest details of the work they seem to be doing."

"Wonderful and beautiful!" I exclaimed.

"I can show you this wonderful thing more easily than I can explain it. We have here the power, incomprehensible to you at present, of recalling these symbolic images and making them appear before us again, as if they were external and real things.

"Look," he said, and the horizon toward the north seemed overcast. A thin veil of mist arose before us, and through it we discovered a dim range of hills, upon each of which a house was in process of erection.

"Every man in the flesh," said my brother, "is always engaged, unconsciously to himself, in building his future house in the spiritual world; for the entire spiritual life of a man is represented symbolically by his residence here and its appointments. All the activities of your hands, heart and brain in the good and true things of the earthly state, are so many contributions to the materials, style, form, color and finish of your eternal home.

"Observe," he continued, "that some of those houses are nearly finished, others are barely begun. Some of them are in styles of great grandeur, others are very plain. The materials, too, and the execution differ immensely. Observe also that a man alone is at work on some; a man and a woman on others."

"Why is that?"

"When a man and woman are truly married, they a.s.sist each other in building the same house; for they will live together as husband and wife for ever in heaven. Sometimes persons not married in the world, are seen working together here. Such persons have strong interior affinities, unknown it may be to each other on earth, and will be united in heaven."

"Strange and beautiful!" said I.

"And true!" he exclaimed, earnestly. "The true is always strange and beautiful.

"If you will look closely," he continued, "you will see many faint and shadowy forms that are earnestly a.s.sisting these men and women in carrying the heavy materials and putting everything into its proper place. These are attendant good spirits invisible to the workers themselves. When a house is finished, we know that the architect has been released from the bondage of the earth-life, and will soon occupy the same house vastly beautified and glorified in some heavenly society."

Thus are spiritual houses-houses not made with hands, eternal in the heavens-builded by our prayers, our faith, our hopes, our loving thoughts, our useful and unselfish deeds.

"I see some houses," I remarked, "upon which no one is working. They seem to be falling to decay."

"The builders have been led away into temptation by evil spirits. The work of regeneration appears to be arrested or retroceding. The Lord will lead them by ways they know not, and they will renew their labors."

While gazing at this strange scene and scrutinizing these shadowy architects of future homes, I suddenly recognized my own figure toiling along under a great beam which was to const.i.tute one of the door-posts on the ground-floor. My house was scarcely begun.

"See, brother," said I, "I have pa.s.sed into the spiritual world and my house is not finished."

"I never saw it so before," he said. "I would say confidently from this, that your earthly mission is not ended."

While he was speaking, my attention was arrested by a woman in a black robe on the side of the hill opposite to where my own figure was. This woman was bent almost to the earth under a great block of stone, which she was bearing to put into the walls. Several shadowy forms were busy around her a.s.sisting in the difficult task.

"And that woman?" said I.

"Is probably your future wife."

An insatiable desire immediately seized me to behold her face. Forgetting my painful experience in the imaginary heaven of the Greeks, I thought only of Helena.

"It is she," said I, to myself. "She is a pagan. She is surrounded by evil spheres. She is unregenerate. Her regeneration will be painful and difficult. The good angels are a.s.sisting her. The foundations of our house are laid; the structure will rise; the joint work of our secretly united souls. I always knew it and felt it. It cannot be otherwise!"

In this ecstasy of thought I watched the bowed figure in the black robe.

"Oh that Helena could see and know that I am with her and she with me, laying the invisible foundations of our eternal home! What felicity that would be! Let me speak to her! Let me see her face!"

The intense desire of a strong will is at once granted in the spiritual world. The woman in the black robe slowly raised her eyes to heaven and turned her face toward me.

It was the pale, sorrowing face of Mary Magdalen!

Mary Magdalen!

The blood all seemed to rush back upon my heart, and I stood with a chilling, suffocating sense of disappointment hard to describe. But the loss of Helena, grievous as it was, was not the only ingredient in my cup.

There was vexation as well as disappointment. A deep sense of mortification overpowered me at the subst.i.tution of Mary Magdalen, a woman without character or friends, recently possessed of seven devils-a creature miserable, outcast, forlorn.

Secret feelings of social superiority, self-righteousness, and offended dignity, embodied themselves in my exclamation of contempt:

"Mary Magdalen!"

I brought upon myself immediately the operation of one of those spiritual laws which excite so much astonishment in the new-comer. My angelic friends were total strangers to earthly pa.s.sions, to the frenzy of love, the rage of disappointment, the sentiment of superiority, the feeling of contempt. Loving all alike with infinite tenderness and pity, the angels of G.o.d do not see any difference between the self-righteous saint and the audacious sinner.

My outburst of unregenerate pa.s.sion separated me at once from my heavenly companions. It appeared to them that the ground opened and swallowed me up. They no doubt exclaimed to each other:

"Poor fellow! He is not yet prepared to enter upon the heavenly life. We will wait on the Lord, who bringeth all things to pa.s.s."

My sensations were different. The architectural heavens of the tribe of Benjamin vanished from my sight; all was dark for a moment; and, remitted into my former state, I found myself in the world of spirits just where I had been raised from the dead.