“This is to me the greatest wonder of all in this realm of wonders. Married in heaven! Husbands and wives living together in wedded bliss! Enlighten my darkness; tell me something of this great and beautiful mystery.”
“I perceive,” said my brother, seriously, “by the glance of your eye and the tone of your voice, that you cannot yet be initiated into the sublime and heavenly secrets of the spiritual marriage. You have not been sufficiently divested of your earthly and sensuous state of thought to penetrate those truths which are only visible in the light of heaven. Be satisfied for the present to know that sex and marriage are universal and eternal; that love is inextinguishable, and becomes purer and holier the higher it rises; and that conjugal pairs live together in heaven in eternal youth and eternal bliss.”
“A most delightful and ennobling thought,” said I; “and I am willing to believe what you say, and to wait my own spiritual development before being able to comprehend its meaning.”
I was then seized with an intense desire to see my mother. And lo! before I could give it utterance in words, she appeared before us, an angel as young and beautiful as my sister-in-law, but grown the female counterpart of my father by long and loving contemplation of his virtues.
“I was attracted hither,” she exclaimed, in charming trepidation, “by strange gushes of maternal feeling. Who is it that calls me?”
Mother and child passed simultaneously into the old forms of the earth-life, and into the long dormant states of the natural memory. She was a Jewish matron in Bethany, and I a little boy of five years old. How frantically she kissed my face and hands! How madly she pressed me to her heart! How we wept together!
When we came back to our last form and state, she exclaimed, still weeping for joy:
“Oh that I could see you continually in that charming little shape! I shall make you resume it over and over again, until I satisfy my hungry heart with the graces of your boyish form. Ah! nothing is lost. All is given back to us.”
We discoursed on a thousand topics, and floods of spiritual light were poured upon my benighted, undeveloped mind. Walking with these angelic friends on the grand piazza of the palace, and gazing at the architectural grandeur which surrounded us, I was filled with an exhilaration [pg 242]of spirits too great for earthly utterance, never to be comprehended by any one until he meets his friends, whom he calls dead, in the divine light of the heavenly world.
When I new recall these things, poor, old, desolate, heartbroken man that I am, bearing my earthly burdens again and doomed to another death, they all seem to me like a delightful dream! That I walked and talked with friends in heaven! surveyed their houses! discussed their laws, their government, their worship, their occupations, face to face as man with man! Impossible! Incredible!