CHAPTER VII. THE BIBLE PNEUMATOLOGY. We have only indicated the more prominent among the passages of the Divine Word which contain the disclosures of a future life. We ask the reader to take his Bible, and go through with it with his mind intent on this subject, and note how large a portion of it has been ignored. We now proceed to enumerate the laws and modes of existence which are here brought clearly into view. 1. First, the reader will notice that a spiritual world is revealed whose scenery is objective; that it is a WORLD, and not a state merely; a world, not only of substances, but of bodies and forms; and that these bodies and forms glow and pulsate with a more plenary life from Him who is the life of all. Let him take note of the fact, that the exhibition of body, form, figure, and extension does not by any means cease, but, on the other hand, that these are continued with such higher and more overpowering majesty that the percipients could not bear the disclosure. So far from being unreal and spectral, it is the reality of which earth is only a dull and feeble adumbration. 2. Then take note of the fact that it is not disclosed to the natural senses of the percipients, but invariably to an inner sense touched and elevated for this very purpose. Hence, that it is a world that lies out of the range of natural space, and its substances differ from natural ones, not in tenuity, but in species. Its fields are not to be reached by travelling through the planetary distances, but by having the soul made cognizant of its presence. This may be made apprehensible by illustrations and analogies. There is a child asleep amid summer scenery, shut in to a dream-world of his own. In that dream-world he sees a variety of pleasing objects, frolics with his companions, and plashes in the brooks; and so delighted is he that his cheeks are aglow and a smile is playing around his lips. It is all real to him, and he knows for the time of no other mode of existence. But all the while he is in a world still more bright and objective, of which he has not the faintest cognizance. The fragrance of flowers is wafted over him unper ceived, and the warble of birds falls unheeded upon his ear. He is in two worlds at once, consciously in one, unconsciously in the other. How will you transfer his relations from the first to the last? How will you bring him from the dream-world into the real one? Not by taking him on a journey through space, but simply by waking him up. Close one set of senses, and open another, and the whole work is done. One world vanishes, and another opens upon him its endless range of objects. So it is with us. We dream now; we shall wake anon, and wonder at the fields which lie about us and the skies that bend over us.* * "Suppose that a man had been created without the sense of hearing or of sight. He stands by the waterfall: the wild magnificence of the surrounding scene, the rainbow softness and repose blended with its energy, the deep and awful harmony of its tones, uttering themselves in the solitude of nature, are there; but to him all is silence and darkness. He goes out as the gray dawn feebly spreads itself over the east, ray after ray shooting up into the darkness of night, till the whole horizon is glowing, and the sun comes forth amid a general burst of song from field and grove. Still to him all is darkness and silence, - no voice, no light, and no intimation that such things are. A tradition there may be, like our traditions from prophets, that to some of his race, in distant ages, strange revelations respecting these things were made; but they soon faded out, the light he supposes shone but for a day, and ever after a universal blank overshadowed the earth. But suddenly his ears are opened, and unimagined sensations throng upon him. Melodies that seem from heaven, all harmonious sounds of winds and birds and flowing streams, 3. The reader will not fail to notice another fact of the first importance What we call the soul, the immortal man, is not a metaphysical nonentity or "pure simplicity," but an organism more perfect than that of the outward body, because more replete with the Divine energies. On this break in upon the silence of centuries. Then his eyes are opened, and a new creation is before him: earth and sky, with all the changes that pass over them; the approach of morning and evening, of spring and summer; and not less than these, the human face, on which are imprinted like passing lights and shadows the various emotions of the soul; all these, amid which he has lived from childhood, come out as a new order of being "Now is it unreasonable to suppose that a new sense added to what we now have might reveal to us qualities and beings as much brighter than any we now witness, as the revelations of sight are brighter than the objects of touch? For example, we now see only effects, the plant, the tree, the man, and the coarse material out of which they are formed. But why might not a sense be given to see the causes which we know must exist? And what a revelation would this be,- to see all the secret causes that are at work in matter, producing the marvellous revolutions that are now in everything taking place on the earth! But suppose this faculty so enlarged as to take in the causes that act not only on matter, but on mind. Might it not be that spiritual influences would be revealed, surrounding us, going through our lives, coming when we least suspect it, like songs and sunbeams upon the blind and deaf, and lingering with a more exquisite beauty and melody around what seem to us the most lonely, dark, and disconsolate hours? Might we not then see that they who had seemed lost are still around us, that Jesus, that the wise and good of all times, who lived and died for man, did not close their ministry with their lives, but are still with unseen counsels helping forward the great purposes of God?"-Rev. J. H. Morison. point we refer specially to the scene of the transfiguration, when Christ appeared to the disciples as the Divine Man whom the Roman spear could not pierce, the same as after the earthly organism had been excluded, and he was revealed to St. John, év Tveúμari, from the glorified state. Man, immortally organized, does not appear as such when included within these earthly conditions, for the simple reason that immortal substance differs in species from natural, and is therefore cognizable only to a higher order of perceptive faculties. All the more, however, does the soul live, an organization in itself, though acting now through the instrumentalities of flesh and bone. and sinew. 4. Another truth dawns upon us, which we pause to notice here, without attempting to spread it out in all its bearings. It will be seen, that, while all the qualities we have enumerated form, color, figure, motion, extension, nearness, distance-pertain also to the spirit-world, there is this essential difference, that they exist there, not under natural law, but under spiritual. In other words, they exist there as the exhibition of moral and spiritual qualities, and not as the exhibition of an outward and sensuous beauty. No sensual paradise is revealed. Everything is alive and aglow with spiritual truth and celestial goodness, |