CHAPTER XXVII.
Those who have never entered into any kind of associate life where they might learn to think and act for others as well as for themselves, will have a particularly hard time on the other side.
For no one can go through life without becoming responsible for innumerable acts, even if he does nothing more than make room for himself, and defend his own footing; and if he persists in living for himself, it follows that his motives will never rise above the care of himself, and, possibly, of those who contribute to his comfort.
If such a man, by speculation or otherwise, becomes able to surround himself with the tokens of wealth, there will not be wanting those who will bow low to him; and when he is called out of life, with perhaps no particularly heavy weight on his conscience, he will strut into another world carrying with him a very large sense of his own importance.
Now, there is no need to enlarge upon the emotions he will arouse, the intense though secret hilarity with which he will be taken in hand, and the endless variety of hazing operations to which he will be subjected; but he will be sure to make the unexpected discovery that death is a lost friend, long before the last spark of self-conceit is extinguished within him.
It is scarcely possible to convey an idea of how small a part individual egotism is allowed to play in the world beyond.
In this world our race, as a race, is under protection. We are all more or less conscious of this in our own person.
Even the most stolid, when suddenly reduced to the extremity of distress, find themselves calling upon God, almost without conscious volition.
If it were not so, if this protection were withdrawn, our race would shortly cease to be.
In the spirit-world, or in that part of it which adjoins this, figuratively speaking, which we enter as individuals, this sense of a general protection disappears. We find we are to stand or fall on our own individual record. We cannot lose ourselves in the mass. There is no mass. Time and space no longer exist for us. They are gone with the bodily senses and mathematical reasoning to which they were a prime necessity.