as a medium
through which to communicate with man? And who is so irreverent as to
suppose that God would now, in these days, give spirits special
permission to return to earth and take upon themselves such forms for
the mere purpose of tipping tables and piano-fortes, rapping upon doors,
windows, and empty skulls, misspelling their own names, and murdering
Lindley Murray, and performing clownish tricks for the amusement of a
gaping crowd?

But whence arises this great delusion? Simply from our total lack of
knowledge of the glory of that heaven upon which we all hope to enter.
'Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the
imagination of man to conceive' the glory of God, the splendor, the
magnificence, the supernal beauty of the Celestial. We know indeed that
we shall enter upon a world whose immensity, whose sublimity, whose
awful beauty shall far surpass the experience of man; but not even the
wildest imagination, fed by all the knowledge that astronomers have
gained of world beyond world, and system beyond system, of spheres to
which our world is but a speck, and of fiery meteors and whizzing comets
sweeping their way with the speed of thought for thousands of years
through planet-teeming space--not even such an imagination, in its
farthest stretch, is able to conceive the glory of that dwelling place
which shall be ours. If to-day we were permitted to peer but for a
moment into that heavenly abode, then should we see how impossible, to
the soul which has once entered upon that beatific state, would be a
thought of return to this grovelling earth. There their aspirations are
ever upward and onward toward the Great White Throne, with no thought
for the things left behind, even were there not a 'great gulf fixed'
between earth and heaven.

And how often do we hear the opinion expressed that the souls of the
just do pass, 'in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,' from the things
of earth to the full burst of heavenly beauty and sublimity, shooting
like the lightning's flash from its prison house of clay to the presence
of its God. Reasoning from analogy, which, in this connection, where
both experience and revelation are dumb, is the only basis we can rest
upon, such a passage would be to the soul instant annihilation; the
shock would be too great for even its enlarged susceptibilities. It must
become gradually accustomed to the new sights and sounds, and so pass
slowly up from one stage of perc