They may not be able fully to explain, but expressions like these point to features of the landscape in that world where the inner becomes the outer and takes on those garments of reality which belong to it by right.
The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen are eternal, and when we have broken connection with our temporal bodies, or attained a true and perfect control over them, we may enter into this knowledge, to find it truly a heavenly inheritance.
But it is not alone through figurative and poetic language that we may discover evidence of the existence of an immaterial world.
The broad fields of philosophy and literary criticism receive their light, their water, and their air, outside the world of sense almost entirely. Scarce anything in these domains has any causative relation with the world of matter.
For instance, take this passage from one of the magazines:
"But what does the work of higher criticism really mean? It means, briefly, as applied to the Old Testament, the revision of certain traditions concerning the structure, the date, the authorship of the books—traditions which had their origin in the fanciful and uncritical circles of Judaism just before, or soon after, the Christian era."[B]
A careful analysis of the meaning of this will show that it begins and ends in the domain of abstract thought. To use a figurative expression, it does not touch the ground anywhere. If our bodies and their needs, if the earth and its products which minister to those needs, if, in brief, the material universe really comprised the all that is, such a thought as is contained in the passage quoted could never have come into being. For it has no practical relation to things as such.
Yet there is nothing especially obscure about it. It was written for men and women of ordinary intelligence, who are supposed to take an interest not merely in sacred truths, which, indeed, are not dealt with in the article from which I quote, but the structural forms containing those truths.
All of which, rightly interpreted, points to another phase of existence, which is either near to or far from us according to the stage of our development, a phase which may become measurably real to us even before we enter fully upon it, and which has the strongest possible claims upon our attention.