art, and be with Christ, is far better. When the dust
returns to the earth as it was, the spirit ascends to God, who gave it.
The soul is more vigorous and active than when shut up in the body,
because a higher form of life is required in being with God and angels.
We are told that the pious dead are "the spirits of just men made
perfect." All imperfection arising from bodily organization, as well as
from our fallen state here, has ceased, and the soul has become a pure
spirit, in a spiritual world, engaged in spiritual pursuits. Memory is
awake; every perceptive faculty is in perfection; the soul that sees far
distant places, in a moment, in sleep,--that holds converse with other,
but absent, minds, while the body is sealed in slumber,--not only does
not need the present body to make it capable of perception, but when
escaped from this material condition, and from dependence upon these
bodily senses, which now are like colored glass to the eyes, it will be
far more capable than before; though the spiritual body, at the last,
will advance it to a still higher condition. Its judgment is sound, its
sensibilities are quick, its thoughts are full of unmixed joy. But we
probably could not understand the nature of its employments, nor its
discoveries, nor its sensations, any further than we now do from the
word of God. We have no record, nor tradition, of any disclosures made
by Lazarus, or the widow of Nain's son, or the dead who came out of
their graves at the crucifixion, and went into the Holy City, and
appeared unto many. The only way to account for this seems to be, to
suppose that they told nothing of what they had seen or heard. Had they
made any disclosures of the unseen world, those disclosures would never
have been forgotten. They would have been preserved in the memories of
men, to be handed down from age to age. Paul himself had no very
distinct recollection of what he had heard and seen in Paradise; for he
says that he could not tell whether he was in the body or out of the
body. We think in words, which at the time are intelligible, but we
often fail when we try to produce them; so that Paul's expression, very
singular in each part of it,--"heard unspeakable words,"--may refer to
the impressions made on his own mind in his revelations, as not possible
to be clothed in speech. It may have been with him, upon his return to
the body, and with the risen dead, as it was with Nebuchadnezzar, who
knew that he had dreame