Immortality, and our employments hereafter

Front matter

vV

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,0^ ^- o

Preface

Give us details — details and accurate delineations of life in the Spirit World! — is the constant appeal of thoughtful minds. Death is approaching. Whither — oh, whither! Shall I know my friends be} T ond the tomb ? Will they know me ? What is their present condition, and what their occupations?

Too long, perhaps, have we listened to generalities and vague imaginations touching that so-called shadowy realm of existence whither we are hastening.

When a traveler starts out for some distant country, it is not enough for him to know that he must cross some stornry ocean, but he asks, " What is the distance to those foreign countries? What is the character of the climate ? What modes of living distinguish the inhabitants, and what preparation will I need to make for comfort and success in that far-away country ? " If this be true of the earthly traveler, how much more important are inquiries and a right understanding relative to the journey across the River of Death ; the conditions and modes of life in the World of Spirits ? These are pressing questions ! And as travelers return to tell us of the countries they have visited, so spirits return from different spheres and golden zones, describing their homes and their employments.

In this volume the Spirits, differing as they may, are allowed to speak for themselves. Though sometimes condensing and modifying their language, I have carefully preserved the essential ideas

6 PREFACE.

embodied in their messages. And in the last chapter I have given

a resume of their teachings without the mention of the names of

the controlling intelligences.

I send this volume forth with my pikers and best wishes, hoping

it may answer the soul questions of many earnest inquirers, and

inspire to an active faith in the glorious realities of our Heavenly

Home, and to earnest labors for the upbuilding of the Spiritual

Kingdom on earth.

J. M. P.

Hammonton, N. J., 1879.

INTBODUCTION.

We stand to-day on the border land between two eternities — one past and full of treasured histories and multiplied experiences ; the other, future, teeming with possibilities which await us, and fraught with destinies whose moral grandeur we desire to fathom. Souls, allied to God, are eternal. We embrace in our present memory and knowledge but a fragment of life's past careers. The future, too, is a page we have scarcely opened. Its prophecies are golden. As the past yields up its vast treasures, the future becomes more easily interpreted. Events flow in an orderly succession. The accumulations of past time yield their wealth to the uncounted years. The cycles of growth repeat themselves for ever upon higher planes of expression. The soul is ever a questioner. From its earliest recorded experiences it has interrogated itself and the surrounding universe for a solution of the mystery of its being and the momentous changes that necessarily await it.

The earliest literature of any people is sacred literature. The most exhaustive inquiries of the greatest minds of every age and nation have been inquiries pertaining to man's moral relations and the soul's future destiny. The religious literature of the race approaches nearest the character of immortality of all its mental products. When other books are forgotten, the sacred books continue a perennial fountain of thought and inspiration. This is true of Egypt, India, Babylon, and all the countries of the Orient. The

8 INTRODUCTION.

ethics and religious teachings of Gautama Buddha exert a profounder influence over five hundred millions of the earth's inhabitants than all the other literature in the East, save the moral teachings of Confucius.

The lyric songs of the prophets of Israel exert a sweeter influence on the hearts of struggling and sorrowing millions than do the epics of Homer or Virgil. And what name imparts to us so much of obedience to the divine law, of devotion to principle, of love and sweetness and mercy, as that of Jesus Christ? What character among the pure and great equals his as a moral magnet to draw the world toward the good and beautiful, and to inspire the millions with hope and childlike trust ? The victories of the primitive Christians, inspired by Jesus Christ, were the victories of peace and love. Before Constantine's day the Christian religion was a lamb ; afterward it became an aggressive lion. Now it is a tomb, comparatively cold and voiceless !

When we consider that it is as natural for men to think, to reason, as to breathe, how reasonable, then, these ever-recurring inquiries : Whence did man originate? What is he in his essential being? And what is to be his future and final destiny? To go deeper, and get, if possible, to the foundation, What is matter? What is the nature of that spirit substance which constitutes the spiritual body ? And what is the soul, that potentialized portion of the infinite Over-Soul, that thinks, wills, reasons, and aspires after immortality ?

".-... Nor yet to all

These prophecies and hints are given ; Only as signals, sparsely set, Along the battlements of Heaven.

Yet some day, every waiting soul Shall see the mists slow rolling back, And, freed from clogs of earth and sin, "Walk calmly up the shining track ! "

Are the planetary worlds that stud the firmament inhabited ? and

INTEODUCTION. 9

if so, are they morally related to us, and do they psychologically affect us ? What shall we be in the far-distant seons ? Upon what shall we subsist, and what shall be our employments during the measureless years of eternity ?

If the moon is already dead, as Proctor teaches — if planets and satellites have their births and deaths, are there not then funeral processions among the stars? All change, negatively considered, is death. The Seer sees in ever}' pulse-beat change and waste — hears in every tremulous step the measured march of death. Every tick of the clock tells of the sufferings and stragglings of departed souls !

The seemingly dead tree of winter buds and blossoms in the spring-time. The Egyptian wheat, retaining the vitalizing life principle, lived and waved again though buried in darkness for thousands of years. But will the thinking soul live ? — live individualized — live to know and be known — live in immortal freshness and beauty after the body dies and is laid quietly away in the grave ?

IMMORTALITY.

Chapter I. The Mysteries Of Life

" I do not doubt bat tbe majesty and beauty of tbe world are latent in any iota of the

world ; I do not doubt that exteriors have their interiors — and that the eyesight has another

eyesight, and the hearing another hearing, and the voice another voice ; . . . Did you think Life was so well provided for — and Death, the purport of all Life, is*

not well provided for ? " Whitman.

Life in some of its manifestations is everywhere. In polar glaciers, in tropic sands, and in the profoundest ocean depths, the life-principle is expressed in organic forms. The vitality of seeds belonging to the pre-glacial period has been clearly demonstrated.

The raspberry seed is very tenacious of life. Three raspberry plants were raised from seeds found in the stomach of a man whose skeleton form had been discovered thirty feet below the surface of the earth, at the bottom of a burial-mound, opened near Dorchester, England. With this body had been buried some coins of the Emperor Hadrian, from which, according to the testimony of Dr. Lindley and Professor Winchell, of the Michigan University, we are justified in assuming that these seeds had retained their vitality some 1,700 years ; and if so, why not, under similar conditions, 17,000 years, or even a much longer period ?

12 IMMOBTALITY.

It is stated by Lord Lindsay that in the course of his wanderings amid the pyramids of Egypt, he was permitted to assist in unrolling a mummy, the embalmers of which evidently understood the uses of ozone. The hieroglyphical writings upon the sarcophagus containing this embalmed form showed it to be about 3,000 years old. Examining the mummied body after it was unwrapped, there was found in one of the closed hands a bulb, which, when planted in a suitable situation, grew and bloomed out into a beautiful dahlia-like flower.

None can reasonably doubt that there is growing in England at this present time wheat, the grains of which were obtained from the foldings in the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy, there deposited more than 4,000 years since. Professor Agassiz fully credited this account ; while Dr. Carpenter, the distinguished English physiologist, gives it full indorsement by saying, " there is really no limit to the latent vitality of seeds."

Each individual, by virtue of cerebral organization, conceives and studies the universe from his own moral plane of thought. To Hans Christian Andersen the world was so aflame with love, and the moral universe so aglow with the symbols of Divine life and wisdom, that he saw good in, and immortality for, everything. Aware that seeds hidden from the sunshine for long periods break away from their cell-life, and put forth the tender blade, — aware that the insect and the house-fly outside of sheltering walls, becoming first dull, then seemingly dead, revive when warmed by the summer's sun, — aware that the dormouse lives with sealed mouth several months of the year ; that the live toad found in the center of a block of stone, and exhibited in the London Crystal Palace, must have existed there for centuries, and that the corn which had quietly slept in the tombs of Egypt for 4,000 years could be made to grow, — aware, as was the poet Andersen of all these marvelous phenomena in nature, he thus breathed his thoughts under the heading — " The Miracle."

"THE MIEACLE.

" From a pyramid in the desert's sand A mummy was brought to Denmark's land — The hieroglyphic inscription told That the body embalmed was three thousand years old. It was the corpse of a mighty queen ; — Examining it, they found between Her closed fingers a corn of wheat ; So well preserved was this little seed, That, being sown, it put forth its blade, Its delicate stem of a light-green shade, The ear got filled with ripening corn, Full-grown through sunshine and light of the morn.

" That wonderful power in a corn so small — It is a lesson to each and all.

Three thousand years did not quench its germ — It teaches our faith to be strong and firm, When out of that husk a new plant could be born To ripen in sunshine and clew from the sky, Then, human soul, thou spark from on high, Thou art immortal as thy great Sire Whose praise is sung by the angel-choir ! The husk, the body is buried deep, And friends will go to the tomb and weep ; But thou shalt move on, on wings so free — For thine is the life of eternity.

That wonderful power of so small a seed — The miracle seen in that corn of wheat, It puzzles the mind ; but still it is done By the Author of Life, the Eternal One."

It is an open question whether atheism be possible. When Proclus pronounced that great word, Causation ; when Plato wrote of the Divine Logos ; when Tyndall dilates on the Potency in nature, Spencer upon the Unknowable, Zimmermann upon Intelligent Force, and Emerson upon the Absolute Over-Soul, they mean God — that Divine Presence upon whose pulsing, loving bosom is the soul's rest for ever. Why then so much useless, and often bitter, disputation when words at most are but the shadowy symbols of ideas ?

It would seem to me like a paltry idling away of time to prove that, as a mortal being, I had an earthly father. Quite possibly I could not prove it. The evidence would be utterly beyond my reach. Still, I conscientiously believe it. And so, by parity of reasoning, do I just as conscientiously believe that my spiritual nature had a Heavenly Father.

The existence of space is no more a matter of necessity to my understanding than the existence of God. Thinking from the conscious Ego — the I am of Myself — I require no subtile trains of logic to demonstrate, to know that God is, and that God governs this orderly universe by immutable law.

Primal truths are axiomatic. It is a want of intuition and moral perception that necessitates so many processes of reasoning.

Full of trust, I consciously see God, the Divine Energy , everywhere, — pulsating in the growing corn, purpling in the vineyard, blushing in the peach, smiling in the sunshine, and awing us as we gaze into infinite depths filled with stars, circling suns, and systems of universes.

There is no conflict between science and religion, since they present two aspects of the same cosmos : one treating of the quality of being, the other treating of its quantitative distribution. The real conflict is between science and sectarian theology ; and the chasm deepens. The mere scientist, ever cold and semi-blind, sees but half the universe — the material side — the shell. With this he experiments. And the little knowledge he thus obtains rests, after all, upon faith, — faith in his five senses, and faith in the precision of his investigations.

Can the telescope penetrate infinity? Can the physicist explain the mechanism by which the heliotrope turns to the sun, or the marvelous chemistry by which the turbot assumes the color of the ground over which it swims ? Can the microscope detect grief in the brain, or the stethoscope sound the depths of human aspirations ? Did the scalpel ever discover a thought in the convolutions of the cranial cavity? Can love be measured with a rod, or hope weighed in a pair of scales ? The soul and all its mental operations — the soul and all the spiritual forces connected therewith — are utterly beyond the scope of the physical sciences.

All organic life begins in a simple cell. Every organized structure is but an aggregation of these cells ; and not only the specific form which the aggregate assumes, but the distinctive character of each component cell depends upon a soul-germ or pre-existing type which embodies the genius or idea of which the material structure is, plus the influences of the environment, the expression.

" A single elementary atom," says that prince of modern philosophers, Professor Balfour Stewart, " is a truly immortal being, and enjoys the privilege of remaining unaltered by the powerful blows that can be dealt against it."

No solid thinker believes in the destructibility of either matter or spirit. The conservation of spiritual energies is as true as the demonstrated conservation of forces.

The soul being a living force, is necessarily immortal. It is the visible and phenomenal forms and qualities only that change. The celestial angels ever see these elementary atoms, — these conscious monads that exist in the golden splendor of their underived immortality. Infilled with pure spirit, — aflame with the divine life, — these monads, these " firsts " of things, vibrate, rotate, repel, unite, form organic relations, and, in obedience to the laws of universal order, take on an ultimate expression by becoming incarnated in a material form.

Consciousness is coeval and coordinate with life. What we commonly consider our soul is not, logically speaking, ours ; but we are its. The soul — a potentialized and individualized portion of the Over-Soul, God — is the man. Life is the aromal garment of the spirit, and its most immediate vehicle of expression. The spiritual is the real, the permanent, and each mortal is in the spirit world now, though veiled from its surpassing glories by the material organism. The Divine Order prescribes the descent of the soul into a mortal body, and by that descent the spiritual perceptions become temporarily dimmed ; they are folded away, as it were, in a casket, and lie in a state of partial inaction during the night-season of earthly unfoldment, preparatory to the splendors of a new cycle of wakefulness and unobscured lucidity.

Absence of consciousness is no proof of non-existence, inasmuch as sleep and wakefulness are alternating states of the thinking man ; and these states should not be confounded with the subject to which they relate. The individual who becomes blind from a cataract upon the eye is still in the same world. Traveling, even into foreign countries, does not help him to the light; but remove the film, and he readily perceives that the light is all around him. The spiritual senses are so eclipsed, so bleared with the material, that we do not see the spiritual world that bathes and enfolds us like a crystal ocean.

Electricity, light, magnetism, interstellar ether, — these are only the etherealized envelopes and elastic vehicles of spiritual forces. Certain conditions develop or bring into outward expression their potentialities. And laws, so called, are the deific methods, the defined order in which the Divine Presence operates. Essential Spirit alone interpermeates and constitutes the qualities of all things. There are no abstract qualities, — that is to say, qualities abstracted from their substances. They inhere in them. Strength is not outside of the being that exercises it. Acid properties do not exist apart from the substances containing them. So love, goodness, truth, are* not abstract powers, but necessary attributes that inhere in the very constitution of every sentient being, whether man or angel. Accordingly, men and women are spirits now. They live and walk in the spirit world, though encased in mortal clothing ; their sensations, qualities, and all their higher emotions, are also spiritual, yet veiled for the present under the vestured disguise of matter.

It will be admitted that extension, divisibility, and inertia are among the principal attributes of matter. But be this as it may, matter at most is only the unreal, shadowy shell of things — the passive or statical condition for the action of force. It serves as the limiting wall for the utilization of spiritual energies. It is the background upon which the panorama of creation is projected. It is the agent of. reaction, as the counterpoise to action, without which equilibrium and the perpetuity of movement would be impossible.

The theory that force is an attribute of matter is disproved by the fact of inertia. It cannot change its state. It will ultimately be shown, I believe, that inertia is the sole attribute of matter, while the other properties usually ascribed to it are simply secondary qualities which inertia involves. Force, therefore, is the antithesis of matter, not simply one of its attributes. Will is the single attribute of force, and will is self-determining, — not motion, but the antecedent of motion, and the antithesis of inertia.

" All that we can affirm of matter," says the learned Clerk Maxwell, " is that it is the recipient of impulse and of energy." And yet materialists, and doubtless the majority of ordinary men, have come to think from their long familiarity with matter that physical forms constitute the only real, that matter is more permanent and substantial than spirit. This is a fatal mistake. Few will dispute that the concrete forms of matter, when reduced to the last analysis, are little more than a filmy appearance, an illusion that dazzles to blind.

Take a bit of the hardest granite rock. " How solid, how firm and substantial," jovl say. Let us see. I pass it into the hands of the chemist. He applies to it a most intense heat, and it becomes a fiery liquid ; increasing the heat, it becomes a fleecy, limpid fluid ; augmenting it still, it is transformed into a gaseous mist lighter than air ; continue to intensify the heat, and it utterly vanishes from sight. .There, O mistaken materialist, is your matter, your hard granite rock, composed of mica, feldspar, and quartz, driven to a liquid — to a fluid — to gaseous mist — driven from sight — vanished — gone ! And so with everything that the hand can touch, the physical eye see, the senses cognize.

Analysis resolves the seen into the unseen, and the dulled senses pale away before our deeper spiritual nature which recognizes the invisible and enduring reality.

" What do you know of angels and spirits, or even of spirit, 2

• per se?" said a very self-contained Secularist to me in England.

As much, sir, in all probability, as you know about matter, was my reply ; and especially when matter, through analysis, is transformed into a state of invisibility.

" But matter and material things may be seen, handled, felt, and actually tested by the senses."

And so may spirits, when, by the law of materialization, they desire to demonstrate a future existence.

" I've never seen anything of the kind."

That is quite probable. And then, possibly, you have not seen the Brahmans in their burning-ghauts ; the Parsees in their temples ; the Pope in St. Peter's ; nor me, with whom you converse. It is only the body you see.

" But I fancy (taking hold of my arm) that I feel and see you."

Nothing — nothing of the kind, sir. You only feel and see the shell, the vesture, the traveling-dress, in which I, the man. am at present attired. " Never do I tire," said Socrates, " of telling the wise man that the body is not the man."

" Very well ; you must know that our knowledge depends upon our senses. And, as a man professing some knowledge of science, I accept the reality of nothing that I cannot demonstrate, — I believe nothing that I cannot see, hear, taste, weigh, or is in some manner made to appeal to my physical senses. And further, sir, I think, or, rather, I have an idea."

Stop — stop right there ! You say you have an idea. Denying it for the moment, I propose to test you by your own method. You say you think — say that you have an idea. But I deny it in toto, and call upon you to prove it, — ■ to demonstrate it by an appeal to any one, or all of my five natural senses. Bring out that " idea " of yours, and let me see it — let me hear it — taste it — feel it — or let me weigh it in a pair of scales ! What is the color ? what the shape ? and what the density of that idea of yours ? . . .

This system of reasoning, on the part of materialists, fails to convince the intellect or meet the noblest aspirations of the n

THE MYSTERIES OP LIFE. 19

human soul. Thinkers ought to understand, so it seems to me, that all laws, principles, aspirations, thoughts, ideas, and unseen forces are, while imponderable and invisible, allied to the spiritual realm of existence, the realm of the real, the perpetual, the permanent, and the immortal !

Mortal life is only an incident — a tremulous eddy in the cycling stream of time. We are the dead ; human bodies are little more than graves. The departed, the invisible, are the truly living. The apostle of old denominated the body the " temple of God ; " while an ancient prophet, writing under the divine afflatus, termed the soul " the candle of the Lord.'' , - This candle, this luminous spark of divinity, incarnated in the templed organism, manifests itself through the cranial organs, and shines out through the features. It takes cognizance of earthly things, gathers rich experiences, builds up and perfects the spiritual body, and, awaiting deliverance, is finally translated in the resurrection chariot to the world of spirits, the homes of the angels, the many-mansioned house of the Father.

" Among them cherub shapes of childhood glide ; Maidens are there with waving locks of gold ; And manhood in its glory and its pride, And age no longer old !

And he, the last that left us, whose young life —

By laughing, promise-laden breezes driven — ■ Disdained to meet the rude world's noisy strife,

And sought the calm of Heaven, —

I'm sure I see him in his radiant rest,

Among his angel kindred up on high, And honored as befits the latest guest

They welcome to the sky.

Ours is the darkness ; theirs the boundless day ; — They drink true life ; we draw the labored breath ; •

They have eternal sunshine on their way ; We have the gloom of death.

Yet, nearing the cold river, I rejoice

That when I pass its darkness and its roar,

All these will welcome me with heart and voice Upon the further shore."

Chapter II. Doubts And Hopes

" And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us the stone away from the door of the sepulchre ? " Mark xvi. 3.

"Yes, -who? There it lies- — hard, cold, inexorable; the stone of silence — the stone of utter, hopeless separation. Since the beginning of the world there it has been ; no tears have melted it ; no prayers pierced it. The children of men, surging and complaining in their anguish of bereavement, have dashed against it, only to melt hopelessly backward as a wave falls and goes back into the ocean. Nothing about the doom of death is so dreadful as this dead inflexible silence. Could there be, after the passage of the river, one backward signal — one last word, the heart would be appeased." Mrs. H. B. Stowe.

" I GO clown to the grave with my son mourning," were the sorrowing words of a weeping patriarch, when bowed down with grief and broken in spirit. Dim and flickering in that distant period was the light of Judaism, and almost hopeless the despair of the Old Testament ! " The Jewish religion," says Dean Stanley, "was characterized to a considerable extent by the dimness of its conceptions relating to a future life." Bishop Warburton admits that the ancient Israelites " had no well-defined faith in the immortality of the soul." Other distinguished scholars have been candid enough to confess that the Hebrew Scriptures give but little encouragement to the hope of a future state of existence. Their rewards and their threatened punishments were temporal. The tenor of the Israelitish promises was, "If ye are obedient, if ye keep my statutes, ye shall eat of the good of the land."

The following testimonies conclusively prove that the Jews had very little knowledge of a future life :

DOUBTS AKD HOPES. 21

1. Dr. Campbell observes :

"It is plain that, in the Old Testament, the most profound silence is ohserved in regard to the state of the deceased, their joys or sorrows, happiness or misery."

2. Dr. J aim says :

" We have not authority decidedly to say, that any other motives were held out to the ancient Hebrews to pursue the good and to avoid the evil, than those which were derived from the reioards and punishments of THIS LITE."

3. Professor JMayer writes :

" But it is evident to the careful reader, that, both in the Book of Job and in the Pentateuch, the divine judgment which is spoken off, is alioays a judgment Which takes place in this life ; and the rewards which are promised to the righteous, and the punishments that are threatened to the wicked, are such only as are rewarded in the present state of being. . . . The idea that God is the Judge of the world pervades them [the writings of Moses] everywhere ; but it has always relation to this earthly existence."

It is very evident that while the great body of the Hebrews doubted, trembled, wept over the prospects of a future immortality, the Saclducees boldly declared that there was " neither angel nor spirit." Hear the wail, the sad refrain of those early biblical writers !

" The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence."

Psalms cxv. 17.

" Man being in honor abideth not ; he is like the beasts that perish."

Psalms xlix. 12.

" For the living know that they shall die ; hut the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten." — Eccl. ix. 5, 10.

" For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground ; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away : yea, man givcth up the ghost, and where is he ? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up : so man lieth down and riseth not : till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep." Job xiv. 7-12.

"His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that veiy day his thoughts perish." Psalms cxlvi. 4.

"They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise."

Isaiah.

" They shall be as though they had not been." — Obadiah.

" Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own works, for that is his portion; for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him ? " Ecclesiastes.