Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations / Demonstrating the existence of spirits and their communion with mortals. Doctrine of the spirit world respecting heaven, hell, morality, and God. Also, the influence of Scripture on the morals of Christians.

by Robert Hare

DISCORDANCE AS TO THE WHEREABOUT OF THE SCRIPTURAL HEAVEN.—INSTINCTIVE IMPRESSION AS TO HEAVEN BEING OVERHEAD.

764. There is no small degree of contradiction in Scripture respecting the locality of heaven. In addressing the thief, paradise is identified with heaven by Christ. “St. Paul is alleged to have been taken up into paradise,” says Harbaugh; yet, according to the map accompanying the work of Josephus, Paradise is represented as being upon the river Tigris, near the Persian Gulf. The idea given of the abode of Adam and Eve, in Genesis, conveys the impression that it was a terrestrial locality.

765. In the Decalogue the abbreviation of life is threatened as the punishment for not honouring parents, and God is alleged to have held out the promised land to Moses, instead of comforting him by a clairvoyant view of a place of blissful enjoyment in some celestial region.

766. Elijah was carried up to heaven in the sight of Elisha. The commandment makes heaven above, the earth beneath. Christ was seen ascending by his disciples, and according to the apostles’ creed, after descending into hell, he arose on the third day and ascended into heaven. Yet Josephus consigns both heaven and hell to a subterranean region, like the Elysian Fields and Erebus of the heathen, but places them on each side of a lake of everlasting fire. This representation is sanctioned in the allusion by Christ to Dives, Lazarus, and Abraham; the former, broiling to eternity, requests that Lazarus should get a little water to cool the tip of his tongue. This Abraham declares to be impossible. Hence it appears the parties were so near as to converse with each other, and for those who were blest to witness the sufferings of the damned. Thus, according to Christ as well as Josephus, heaven and hell are in immediate proximity, and both must be in the infernal regions.

767. The actual effects of the old Bible were to produce either unbelievers in immortality, like the Sadducees, or immoral believers, like the Pharisees, whom Christ especially denounces as vipers, and internally corrupt, like whited sepulchres holding dead men’s bones.

768. Christ never singles out the Sadducees for denunciation, but speaks of the Pharisees particularly as hypocritical and corrupt. But in what did their hypocrisy consist, if it was not in that insincerity of their professions as respects belief in futurity which was shown by their worldliness.

769. Thus the evidence of the existence of a future state was such as to produce avowed unbelievers, or professed believers whose morality was so deficient as to create an expression that they were corrupt hypocrites, as odious as vipers.

770. It is not the feebleness of the impressions respecting the existence of another world, where happiness is proportional to good conduct, that renders the existing system so inoperative in preventing those vices which it especially interdicts; as, for instance, combativeness, cupidity, and revengefulness; so that the course usually pursued by professed Christians, does not merely amount to a neglect of Christ’s precepts, but renders an adherence to them disreputable? Nothing is more degrading throughout Christendom than poverty or tame submission to blows. The last excuse Christians in general will make for any omission or deficiency is their poverty.

771. If they really believed that they would broil to eternity, like the rich man, merely for seeking the good things of this life, would the attainment of those good things be made the great object of their existence?

772. Notwithstanding the representations of Josephus, sanctioned, as above shown, by Christ, of the subterranean localization of Elysium, there seems, nevertheless, an instinctive propensity to assume that heaven is overhead. Clergymen all look upward when they address God, and the Thespian artists universally follow their example. Whenever heaven is referred to, it is customary, I believe, for all devout persons to turn their eyes in the same direction.

773. But if heaven be above, what does this term above mean? It practically designates a vertical direction relatively to this globe at any point over which a speaker who uses the word may stand. Consequently, it indicates a space overhead, having everywhere the same relative position to the terrestrial surface; in other words, a region concentric with that surface, like that within which the clouds float. This floating takes place rarely at a less distance than two, or more than six, miles.

774. The spiritual spheres are estimated, as already mentioned, as being between sixty and one hundred and twenty miles from the earth’s surface. They are, therefore, analogous in position to the region of the clouds, though at a much greater distance and vastly more capacious.

775. According to Christianity, there is no immortality for animals below the grade of humanity; but according to Spiritualism, animals that are favourites of man in this world are his companions in the next. Much stress is laid on the singing of birds in the account given of the spheres. There is a line of demarcation below which the privilege of an existence after death is not enjoyed. Respecting that boundary my information is at present incomplete.

776. In order to do justice to the excellent and learned clergyman to whom I have so often referred, I will annex the whole of those pages in which he conceives himself to give the “true doctrine” respecting heaven. However unsatisfactory it may be to me, I hope it will be found interesting to those who, like the author, look only to the Bible for information respecting their existence beyond the grave.

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