rth, were opened to the Brightness
of Heaven.

Though, like the Seers of old called Prophets by men, they were filled
with the terror of the Most High, yet like them they continued firm
when they found themselves within the radiance where the Glory of the
_Spirit_ shone.

The veil of flesh, which, until now, had hidden that glory from their
eyes, dissolved imperceptibly away, and left them free to behold the
Divine substance.

They stood in the twilight of the Coming Dawn, whose feeble rays
prepared them to look upon the True Light, to hear the Living Word, and
yet not die.

In this state they began to perceive the immeasurable differences which
separate the things of earth from the things of Heaven.

_Life_, on the borders of which they stood, leaning upon each other,
trembling and illuminated, like two children standing under shelter
in presence of a conflagration, That Life offered no lodgment to the
senses.

The ideas they used to interpret their vision to themselves were to
the things seen what the visible senses of a man are to his soul, the
material covering of a divine essence.

The departing _spirit_ was above them, shedding incense without odor,
melody without sound. About them, where they stood, were neither
surfaces, nor angles, nor atmosphere.

They dared neither question him nor contemplate him; they stood in the
shadow of that Presence as beneath the burning rays of a tropical sun,
fearing to raise their eyes lest the light should blast them.

They knew they were beside him, without being able to perceive how it
was that they stood, as in a dream, on the confines of the Visible and
the Invisible, nor how they had lost sight of the Visible and how they
beheld the Invisible.

To each other they said: "If he touches us, we can die!" But the
_spirit_ was now within the Infinite, and they knew not that neither
time, nor space, nor death, existed there, and that a great gulf lay
between them, although they thought themselves beside him.

Their souls were not prepared to receive in its fulness a knowledge
of the faculties of that Life; they could have only faint and confused
perceptions of it, suited to their weakness.

Were it not so, the thunder of the _Living Word_, whose far-off tones
now reached their ears, and whose meaning entered their souls as life
unites with body,--one echo of that Word would have consumed their being
as a whirlwind of fire laps up a fragile straw.

Therefore they sa