What did I say?
It was no dream. It was no hallucination. It is possible. It is credible. It was a fact. My memory does not betray me. My imagination does not mislead me. It was all true; and I shall see them, hear them, live with them again, never to return to earth, so soon as I once more give up this mortal breath and render this feeble body back to the dust whence it came.
How long, O Lord! how long?
I learned from my brother that the societies in heaven, which are innumerable, are arranged according to the uses they perform, which depend upon the bent of the inclinations and the expansion of the intellectual faculties of those who compose them. Men on earth receive their vitalizing impulses, their attractions to all that is good and true, from these societies through the medium of good spirits in the intermediate world.
Some of these societies inspire the love of nature and art; some the genius and power for civil government; [pg 243]some the taste for science and practical life. Some animate especially the devotional nature; some the social; some the poetic; and others, again, act as intermediate powers, balancing and harmonizing the different activities of the soul.
The society to which my brother belonged was one which presided over and secretly vivified the architectural tastes and genius of man. Near by, upon mountains whose purple summits I saw in the distance, was a large society which presided over music. Great societies which were the secret life and soul of poetry, history, oratory, statuary, painting and other fine arts, were grouped around, more or less remote, all holding the most delightful communications and interchanges with each other.
I was astonished to learn that the peace and joy and highest happiness of the angels spring from the exercise of their faculties in the performance of useful service to each other. They are never idle, but continually engaged in doing something useful from the love of use. I learned that in this the angels find their chief delight; and that, although they occasionally meet for formal and social worship, and unite in prayer and songs of praise as people do on earth, they nevertheless regard the loving and faithful performance of the duties of their respective vocations as the highest kind of worship. This they call real worship; and the formal kind in which they sometimes engage, is merely to fit them for the higher and more real kind.
“Do you ever see your earthly friends,” I asked, “struggling and toiling in the dark abyss of nature, [pg 244]before they cast off their earthly covering and rise into the light and beauty of these higher worlds?”
“Not directly!” replied my brother, “for there is no continuity between spirit and matter. To speak philosophically, there is continuity and correspondence; but spirit and matter are not degrees of the same substance, differing only in tenuity, as is commonly supposed. It is impossible for us to see or hear anything in the natural world, except through the medium of some living man whose interiors have also been opened.
“Wonderful as it may seem to you, the spirits of men still living in the flesh are really in the spiritual world, all the time connected secretly with spiritual societies. They are invisible to us, however, because their thoughts, affections and senses all open downward and outward into nature. They become dimly visible, but do not communicate, when they are in states of profound abstraction or great spiritual elevation.