, tended to obscure and
complicate one's relations with other souls; but that in heaven, where
activity and energy were untiring and unceasing, one lived far more in
the emotion and work of the moment, and less in retrospect and prospect.
What mattered was actual experience and the effect of experience; memory
itself was but an artistic method of dealing with the past, and
corresponded to fanciful and delightful anticipations of the future.
"The truth is," he said, "that the indulgence of memory is to a great
extent a mere sentimental weakness; to live much in recollection is a
sign of exhausted and depleted vitality. The further you are removed
from your last earthly life, the less tempted you will be to recall it.
The highest spirits of all here," he said, "have no temptation ever to
revert to retrospect, because the pure energies of the moment are
all-sustaining and all-sufficing."

The only trace I ever noticed of any memory of my past life in heaven
was that things sometimes seemed surprisingly familiar to me, and that I
had the sense of a serene permanence, which possessed and encompassed
me. Indeed I came to believe that the strange feeling of permanence
which haunts one upon earth, when one is happy and content, even though
one knows that everything is changing and shifting around one, and that
all is precarious and uncertain, is in itself a memory of the serene and
untroubled continuance of heaven, and a desire to taste it and realise
it.

Be this as it may, from the time of my finding my settled task and
ordered place in the heavenly community the memories of my old life upon
earth began to fade from my thoughts. I could, indeed, always recall
them by an effort, but there seemed less and less inclination to do so
the more I became absorbed in my heavenly activities.

One thing I noticed in these days; it surprised me very greatly, till I
reflected that my surprise was but the consequence of the strange and
mournful blindness with regard to spiritual things in which we live
under the dark skies of earth. We have there a false idea that somehow
or other death takes all the individuality out of a man, obliterating
all the whims, prejudices, the thorny and unreasonable dislikes and
fancies, oddities, tempers, roughnesses, and subtlenesses from a
temperament. Of course there are a good many of these things which
disappear together with the body, such as the glooms, suspicions, and
cloudy irritabilities, which ar