They had heard but once from our old friend, the Son of the Desert. A strange servant, no doubt a disguised robber, brought back the ring with a note from the wanderer, saying that he was unworthy to wear it; that it afflicted him with sorrowful dreams and burned into his soul like iron. Martha herself fortunately met him at the gate, and would not permit him to depart without an answer, as he was instructed to do. She sent back the ring with her love and Mary’s to the savior of their brother, with the solemn assurance that the ring had a great blessing for him concealed within its curse.

I soon discovered that my sisters had but one idea, one study, one passion. Their individuality was lost in their perpetual concentration of soul upon one object. That object was Jesus Christ. They no longer spoke of him as the prophet of Nazareth. Martha had at last discovered with her eyes what Mary had seen with her heart. He was the Son of God: He was the Messiah. With subdued voices and reverent gestures they called him the Lord.

I was ready to concede that this man must be the greatest philosopher of the age.

This was the opinion of our good uncle, who, however, took no trouble to see or hear the worker of such great miracles. He said there was nothing new under the sun; that all things repeated themselves over and over again; that all wisdom had been spoken and every miracle performed ages and ages ago. The Son of God was in his mind synonymous with a disciple of the Sun.

Beltrezzor was sorry that I did not remain a year at Rome, for he said the practical atmosphere of that city would have moderated and utilized the ideality I had drawn from Athens. He was greatly pleased, however, with my conduct at the supper of Hortensius.

“The man who sees any reason,” he would say, “why Hortensius should be more wealthy, more powerful, more respected, more glorious than Anthony, has not incorporated into his soul the first ray of the divine principle of fire, and is altogether ignorant of the power and beauty of the sun.”

A few weeks after my return, Beltrezzor transferred the whole of my father’s estate, improved and augmented, into my hands. No reasonings, no entreaties could induce him to abandon or even to defer his long-contemplated journey to the extreme East. A strange, sad home-sickness had apparently seized him; and he waited with a childish impatience for the arrival of the caravan from Egypt which was to escort him to Assyria.

It came at length; and our adieus were long and bitter. We were bound to him not only by a pious gratitude for his rich gifts and his unvarying kindness, but by a genuine love of his sweet, sincere and noble nature. We wept at the thought of the dear old man going away into that far-off, marvelous Orient, without a wife or child to comfort his declining years. My sisters also seemed overwhelmed with grief, that one so good and so beloved had rejected to the last, with a quiet, polite incredulity, all the evidences of the divine mission of Jesus.

The old man’s parting words to me, as he leaned from his camel, whispering in my ear, were these:

“Beware, my son, of the spirit of fanaticism which has fallen upon your good sisters. I bequeath you this verse from one of the sacred books in Persia. It is my last and best gift to you. Do not forget it:—

“ ‘It is more truly pious to sow the ground with diligence, than to say ten thousand prayers in idleness.’

“Adieu!”

A few days after my uncle’s departure, we were invited to dine at the house of a worthy Pharisee, Simon by name, who was touched at heart with a secret admiration of Jesus. Preoccupied as I was with thoughts of Helena, and caring nothing about spiritual things, I would not have accompanied my sisters but at their earnest solicitation. They had been assured that Jesus would be present, and they were anxious for me to behold the object of their love and worship.

Reflecting, by the light of later and grander experiences, upon the first impressions made on me by this mysterious man, I am convinced that not only his face, his expressions, his words, but his whole life was comparatively a sealed book to the people who saw him in the flesh. They saw only the outside, the husk, the fleshly, not the heavenly part of him. They were ignorant of the sublimities, the infinities concealed within. Whoever sees only the physical and not at the same time the spiritual side of anything, sees little. The flowers, the gems, the clouds, all beautiful objects, on the spiritual side are full of sacred mysteries. Ignorant of these little things, how could the men of that day comprehend the Christ?

What a different banquet from that of Hortensius! A plain room, opening directly on the street; a plain table; a plain company. At Rome we had a wild ambition, aspiring to universal empire, and imitating even in its luxuries all the splendors of heaven and earth. Here were simple tastes, frugal habits, civic industry, neighborly love. There the presiding genius was the demon of pride; here it was the Divine Man.

She bent low over the feet of Jesus as he reclined on his couch, and I observed that she was weeping. She seemed deeply agitated. Suddenly she let down the great mass of dark brown hair from her head, and began wiping the feet of the Lord. Washing his feet with her tears and wiping them with the hair of her head! What touching humility! What contrition!

Then she anointed his feet with a precious ointment which she drew from her bosom.

My thoughts were concentrated on that kneeling figure. I entered so deeply into what I imagined to be her feelings and sorrows, I was so attracted by what must have been a secret spiritual affinity with her own soul, that I heard almost nothing of the conversation which ensued between Jesus and Simon, and which is recorded by the apostle Luke who was himself present.

When the divine voice pronounced the verdict, “Thy sins are forgiven;” a strange and bewildering sense of delight came over me, as if I myself had been the sinner who sought and found the pardon of sin. I was contemplating in amazement this reverberation, as it were, of the woman’s sentiments in my own spirit, when Jesus said, “Thy faith hath saved thee: go in peace;” and the woman turned slowly around and walked sobbing out of the door.

Scarcely knowing what I did, I quietly withdrew from my place at the table and followed her. Suddenly, in some ecstasy of religious feeling, she threw her arms wildly toward the sky, the veil was lifted for a moment, and I recognized the beautiful, sorrowing and purified features of Mary Magdalen!

The spell which overpowered me was instantly withdrawn, and I returned to my seat. No psychology I had ever been taught, threw any light on this singular phenomenon; and it remained a mystery until solved by that special light of the spiritual world which I alone of all men have enjoyed.

After that the mysterious preacher and miracle-worker was a frequent visitor at our house in Bethany. I came no nearer to him than at first: I understood him no better. He was a good, wise, wonderful man; beyond that I could not penetrate. I became intimate with all his disciples; and I loved to dispute with them on theological subjects, and to puzzle their uncultivated brains with my philosophical doubts and quibbles. But in the presence of their master I had nothing to say. I stood abashed and silenced by some secret power which I could not explain. I never thought, however, of acknowledging him as the Messiah, or the Son of God.

The reason was, that my heart and mind were too closely riveted to nature and the things of sense, to rise to the conception and love of spiritual things.

Absence extinguishes a feeble love; but intensifies a great one. I brooded in solitude. I took interest in nothing. Conversation was irksome. Religion and philosophy were alike neglected. I experienced that apathy which a great desolation of heart produces, and which men attribute to moroseness or stupidity. I was feeding with the intense hunger of love upon my treasured memories of Helena; devouring every word she had spoken, every look, every tone, every changing form, every shifting light of her miraculous beauty.

My love for Helena, for reasons which I did not then comprehend, was not of a soothing, ennobling, purifying type. It was a disquieting, paralyzing, corroding passion. The sphere of this woman, wholly incapable of the heavenly duties of wife and mother, did not lead me, encouraged and strengthened, into the sweet and useful activities of life. Like an evil spirit rather, it drove me into the wilderness; tempted me with stones which were not bread; and haunted me with wild dreams and insane ambitions.

Thus many weeks passed away, and the fever of my soul had so worn and wasted me that my sisters became seriously alarmed at my condition, not knowing the cause; for I had never divulged my pagan goddess to these pious little ones.

One day I was suddenly lifted out of the cavern of despair into the serenest sunlight of hope. I received a message from Helena that she was traveling with her father to the most noted places in Asia, and would spend a few days in Jerusalem; that she was the guest of Alastor, a wealthy Greek merchant of the city, and that her visit would be devoid of genuine pleasure unless she could see once more her esteemed friend, who had saved the life of her brother.

Now occurred a most curious mental phenomenon. The sudden reaction of joy in the feeble and excited state of my nervous system, overpowered my brain. I became the victim of an absurd, grotesque illusion. I leaped at once from the abyss of self-abasement to the maddest height of presumption. I transferred my entire experiences of heart and mind to Helena. She, I imagined, was pining with unconquerable passion for me. She was wasted and worn by unrevealed, unrequited love. She had suffered and faded in silence until longer concealment was death. Her father had brought her under cover of travel really to meet me again, to draw me once more to her feet, to obtain my confessions, and to receive new hope and life from my words. I was filled with an unspeakable tenderness, with a generous compassion. I would fly to her; I would console her; I would make her life and happiness secure by giving her my own.

Disappointed, chilled, bewildered, heartsick, miserable, I maintained a broken conversation for a little while, until Helena, perceiving with her woman’s wit, something, and perhaps all of my secret, broke off the interview.

“You are sick,” said she tenderly, “you are feverish, you are in pain. You should not have come until to-morrow.”

“Go home now,” she continued, taking my hand kindly in hers, “go home and be cared for. When you get better you must come again, and we will talk of Athens and art, of poetry and love; and of all the beautiful things that ravish the hearts of men and women.”

I did not dare to look back. At the foot of the stairs I ran heedlessly against our old relative and enemy, Magistus, whom I had not seen since my return from Rome. Seizing him by the shoulders I gasped,

“Who is this man on the portico?”

“Simon Magus,” said he, with a coarse laugh,—“Simon Magus, the prince of Egyptian magic, and he has evidently cast the evil eye upon you. Woe to you!”

I fled precipitately through the streets. When I reached home I was in a burning fever. At night I was in a raging delirium. It was a brain fever of malignant type. My mad and grotesque illusion about Helena was really the beginning of my illness. Days and nights of alternate excitement and stupor passed away; days and nights of physical torture and mental suffering. My sweet sisters watched and wept and prayed by my side.

Horrible fantasies besieged my fevered imagination. I thought that Mary was under the magician’s knife, and that he would accept no substitute for her bleeding heart but that of Helena. I opened my eyes and started with horror; for Mary was seated by my side, with the heart, as I supposed, torn out of her bosom. Then again, Hortensius was cutting up the beautiful body of Helena for his fish-ponds, while the Egyptian held me fascinated by his terrible eye, so that I could not stir for her help.

Yes! I was dead: and, wonder of wonders! I live again, to describe my sensations, and to inform my fellow-men what I saw and heard behind the veil which separates the two worlds—that veil which is so thin and yet seems so impenetrable.

I next became aware of presences about me. How can I describe the new sense which informed me of their nearness! I did not see or feel or hear them. I perceived them, intuitively as it were, by a holy atmosphere of love and purity and beauty which came with them. So the flowers, without senses like our own, when the dark and chilly night is over, must feel the tremulous waves of light gladdening around them.

These invisible, inaudible attendants were engaged in some office of love about me. What it was I did not understand; but I felt as if my body was being drawn out of something, as a hand is withdrawn from a glove,—although no one seemed to touch me. I entered into a state of exalted and blissful sensations, totally new to me, and quite incomprehensible to men still lingering in the flesh. My affections seemed to be concentrated or detained upon pure, tender, lovely and holy things, so that nothing painful or doubtful or sorrowful should stain the shining mirror of the soul.

“It is good. His last thoughts were about the Lord.”

I pondered these words and asked myself whether I was dead or dreaming or in a trance.

My invisible friend then passed his hands several times gently over my face. He next drew a fine film from my eyelids and breathed upon my forehead. I instantly recovered my sight and looked around me. There were two men before me with beautiful and noble faces, and clad in robes of shining linen. I could not remove my eyes from them, there was something so inexpressibly tender and brotherly in their looks and motions.

“You are in the world of spirits, my brother,” said one of them with ineffable sweetness. “Be not afraid, but rejoice! The world of spirits is the vast realm betwixt earth and heaven into which all men come when they are first raised from the dead.”

“Raised from the dead?” said I, in extreme bewilderment.

I looked at myself and looked around me.

“I cannot understand it,” said I, sorely puzzled. “You are certainly strangers to me, and you look so unlike any of the men I have ever seen, that I can readily believe you are angels. Nor do I see my beloved sisters, Martha and Mary, who, I know, would not leave my bedside for a moment. But this body is the same body I have always had; this is the room in which I have been sick so long; and looking out of that window, I see the Mount of Olives and the familiar sky of Judea. Explain how this can be.”

They looked at each other smiling, and one of them replied:

“The last impressions made upon the mind linger a while after death; so that the transition from natural to spiritual life may not be too sudden, and the sensation of personal identity may be fully preserved. This will change to you presently. We do not see the room that you see, nor the Mount of Olives, nor the Judean sky. These will all vanish from your sight after a little, and you will find yourself differently clad and moving about among novel and beautiful scenes.”

“But,”—said I, incredulously,—“but this body of flesh and blood, in which I live, move and think, how came it here?”

“Our mission,” he continued, “is now ended, and another takes our place. We assist in the resurrection.”

They made a motion of departure, but I seized one of them by the hand.

“Oh stay!” said I, “do not go. Your words interest me beyond measure. I would learn more of the heavenly life. Pardon my incredulity, pity my ignorance.”

“One approaches,” said he, “who is much nearer and dearer to you than we. Relatives delight to render to relatives these charming offices of comfort and instruction. He comes!”

“Who?” I exclaimed, eagerly.

“Your father!”

I looked in the direction indicated by the angel’s face. Out of the darkness—which appeared to me and not to the angels, for it proceeded from my own mind and not from theirs—out of the darkness slowly loomed up a human figure. It brightened as it advanced. Then there stood before me a young man of radiant beauty, clad in a tissue of shining purple. His face was full of eager expectation, sparkling with love and joy.

While I was gazing at this form, which seemed to me a beautiful apparition, the other angels disappeared.

“My son! my son!” exclaimed the shining visitor in a voice of touching sweetness, and which seemed in some way remotely familiar. “Do you not know me?”

“I am permitted for your sake,” said he, “to return back into the mental states of my earth-life and to resume its forms. This is one of the wonders of the spiritual world, but one which you will frequently see and soon understand. Look steadfastly at the changes I shall undergo, and you will believe.”

The light about him began to fade. The purple tissue darkened; his face grew pale; the lustre passed from his hair. His features gradually changed, becoming less and less beautiful, less and less youthful. Wrinkles appeared; his cheeks became haggard; his eyes sunken and sad; his head bowed and bare; his beard gray. Unsightly scars came upon his forehead; and when he held up his withered hands, from which two or three fingers had dropped, I knew the poor old leper whom the cruel law had driven into the wilderness.

His figure then underwent exactly the reverse series of changes; and when his angelic form was restored, I fell upon his neck and wept tears of joy.

It was in accordance with this great spiritual law of changing forms corresponding with the changing states of the soul, that the disciples beheld Jesus from such different stand-points. If Thomas Didymus could have entered into the spiritual state of the three disciples on the mount, he would not have seen the Christ showing the wound in his side and the print of the nails, but he would have beheld him radiant—in his transfigured glory. It was the varying stand-points or mental states of the disciples, which give us such different manifestations of the Unchangeable.

I was not, however, thinking of these things at that moment. I was contemplating the youth and beauty of my father’s spiritual body.

“I was told,” said I, “that the spiritual body was a fac-simile of the natural body. How comes it that yours is so totally different?”

“And why do you look so young?” I inquired.

“Time,” said he, “does not belong to the spiritual world. We have no computations here by months and years; no revolution of suns and planets, which produce day and night and the changing seasons of the world. Our external surroundings, what you would call our visible nature, are the immediate outgrowth of our own spiritual states. The exterior changes continually with the interior. All in heaven are therefore young and beautiful, because their soul-life is good and pure, and is fitly represented by youth and beauty.”

My father then questioned me about the dear ones I had left behind. He manifested the deepest and tenderest sympathy in all that had happened to us since his departure from the world. He had heard of us frequently from new-comers into the world of spirits. We do not cease to love our earthly friends after death. But in the heavenly life there is such a thorough, soul-satisfying trust in the wise and merciful guidance of Divine Providence, that fears, doubts and anxieties about our absent loved ones, are utterly impossible.

“And my mother?” I inquired in turn,—“my mother and my little brother Samuel, where are they?”

“In heaven,” said he, “where you shall see them, but not now. You will undergo sundry preparations of state, inexplicable to you at present, by which you will be fitted for the ascent into their resplendent abodes.”

The angel who assisted in my resurrection was right. The objects which surrounded me at my death, and which lingered a while on my mental vision, had faded away. I found myself in a strange but beautiful world, the forms of which were similar to ours, but the laws which governed their appearance and disappearance very different.

I must confess that I was supremely astonished to find myself living, feeling, thinking, precisely as I did before my death. My mind indeed seemed more active, more penetrating than ever. My body had a buoyancy, a strength, a healthfulness pervading it, which were accompanied by a sense of intense pleasure. But it still seemed the same body in which I had previously lived; and I could scarcely comprehend my father when he told me that my sisters and friends were making preparations to bury my earthly form.

“Oh that I could look down upon them,” said I, “could speak to them, could show them my true self, and lift their souls out of the fearful shadow of the tomb! Why is it not granted us to cheer the hearts and illumine the minds of those who are sorrowing so vainly over our cold dust?”

“And that natural body,” said I, “laid in the grave, and food for worms, is not to rise again?”

“Why should it?” said my father. “Who wants it? What use could it subserve? Are we not in spiritual bodies clothed with all beauty and perfection? Are we not in a spiritual world vastly more beautiful and happy than the natural? Why should we return into nature? into a natural body? into an envelope of flesh and blood, however purified and etherealized?”

These ideas struck me as extremely rational and beautiful. Having passed the lowest round of the ladder of being, why should we reverse the laws of development and descend back to it again? Impossible! The natural body was only a vehicle of natural life with its thoughts and emotions. Spiritual thoughts and emotions demand a spiritual body, a spiritual world. Let those who choose, wed themselves to the grave and the worm and the dust and the darkness, and speak of their friends as sleeping in the cold ground, and satisfy their hungry souls with the hope of a material resurrection. But their ideas are far, very far from the truth; and the minds of men will some day be emancipated from such gross naturalism.

“Imagine,” said my father, “the consternation of the good spirits, who are happy in heaven, at the thought that they must leave it, divest themselves of their beautiful spiritual bodies, and return to the natural world with all its painful limitations of time and space, resuming their old cast-off material bodies, which had been long since resolved into dust and forgotten!”

The thought is monstrous! monstrous! And yet the poor blinded people in the natural world dwell upon it as if there were some special consolation, some glorious promise in it. Incomprehensible freaks of the human spirit! He who preaches a material resurrection, has made but one feeble step beyond the infidel who preaches none at all.

“Men still in the flesh,” said my father, “do not know that our spiritual world inhabited by spiritual bodies fulfills all the imperative demands of the soul for a perfect and final resting-place. We have here life and form, organization and objects, weight and substance, sounds and colors all more beautiful and wonderful than those in the natural world. All these things, invisible, intangible, inaudible to men, are as real and solid to our senses as the earth was to you when you were a man upon it.

“Yet this external world surrounding us is not material and fixed like yours. It is what we call substantial or spiritual. It is plastic to spiritual forces. It changes, not according to your natural laws, but according to the changes in our own spirits. This is the key to the great difference which exists between the world you have left and this glorious one in which you are to live for ever.

“All this,” said I, “is so beautiful that it seems impossible. Liberated now from the thraldom of time and space, I understand you; but I doubt whether the most gifted philosopher in Athens can conceive of a world without time or space; of a world so phantasmagoric in appearance, yet said to be so genuine and eternal in reality.”

“Our spaces are determined,” said my father, “by spiritual affinities. Similarity of thought and feeling determines presence; dissimilarity makes distance or absence. When you here direct your thought to any person on the same plane of life, as we call it, with yourself, having at the same time a desire to see him, that person becomes aware of the fact, and, responding to your desire, is face to face with you at once.

“Let us both,” he continued, “fix our thoughts intently upon our noble and lovely friend, John, called the Baptist, who was beheaded in prison, and is performing here a similar office to that which he so well executed on the banks of the Jordan.”

We did so; and in a moment there was a beautiful flash of azure light, like a great sheet of water reflecting the sun and sky.

“That,” said my father, “is the sphere or symbolic appearance which always precedes and announces the coming of the gentle herald of the Lord.”

He saluted me with brotherly warmth, and we entered into a long conversation which I shall not repeat; but from which I learned a thousand interesting and wonderful things about the spiritual world—things incredible to men in the flesh, most of whom, like birds of night, are satisfied with the darkness of nature.

Let not the reader smile at this anatomical metaphor. When he gets an interior view of the human body such as I have enjoyed, he will see that it is an epitome of the universe; that the mysteries of nature, the wonders of philosophy and the secrets of heaven are all written upon its organs and tissues.

In the present state we are strangely compounded of good and evil, both hereditary and acquired. He who thinks that all good people on earth are ready, at death, to pass at once into heaven without further preparation and instruction, has formed a mistaken idea of heaven. Our life in the world of spirits is a judgment upon ourselves, an unfolding or unrolling of our true characters, a revelation of our evils under the best possible circumstances; where by the assistance and instruction of angelic friends, our imperfections, if our ruling love be good, can be finally removed, and our souls fitted for that perfect social organization based upon supreme love to God and the neighbor, which men in the flesh cannot understand or even imagine.

“But,” says some one, “all that is done for us instantaneously at death by the miraculous power of God.”

The population of this world of spirits is immense. Not only the dead from our world are there, but angelic spirits from heaven and evil spirits from hell all meet on this grand arena of spiritual combat and instruction. In the time of Christ many generations and centuries of human life were accumulated there; for evil had become so predominant, and the spiritual element in man so nearly extinguished, that few or none could be prepared for heaven. Unless, indeed, God had descended in the human form and executed a great judgment in that world, casting the evil into hell and revealing a higher dispensation of truth, mankind would have perished and heaven itself have been threatened with chaos.

But all this is myth and mystery to those who have busied themselves only with the historical movements of the natural world, not even knowing that the world of spirits above and around them had far grander historical movements,—the key and cause of all others.

Every human being living in the natural world, is attended by two good and two evil spirits who are living in the intermediate state. I saw the spirits who had accompanied me during my life; and, what is singular, although I had never seen them before, they appeared like old acquaintances and friends whom I had known from my youth. Let no man suppose that he will rise from the dead into the world of spirits, and find himself a stranger there, friendless and alone.

“Why,” said I to my father, “are not our earthly friends permitted to see us in this better and brighter sphere, to converse with us, and establish social relations with us?”

“They are in natural bodies,” said he, “and they cannot see our spiritual forms with their natural eyes. Their own spiritual eyes would have to be opened before they could see us. The opening of their spiritual senses would bring them into conscious communication with the world of spirits.”

“Well,” said I, “so much the better. They would then see all these wonderful things for themselves, and their doubts would be wholly dissipated.”

“Ah! you know little as yet of the world of spirits. It is full of evil and wicked ones, who share the bad passions and prompt the sinful deeds of men on earth. If men came, by the opening of their spiritual senses, into visible and audible communication with their own attendant evil spirits, the power of hell on the earth would be immeasurably increased. The power of a wicked companion in the flesh is great; but the power of an evil spirit enthroned in your bosom, possessed of your entire memory, and governing from his more interior stand-point every movement of your brain, would be fearful indeed!”

“No,” he continued; “it is the mercy of the Lord which in the present evil state of the world keeps these two realms of being from a conscious intermingling. The offices and uses of the two worlds are different; one begins where the other ends. To throw them together would be to produce inextricable confusion, to destroy free-agency, to confound good and evil, to thwart regeneration, to arrest the judgment, to close heaven and to open hell.

“All this can only be made clear to you by a thorough system of religious philosophy, embracing a true psychology and the organic relations of God to the universe, and of the different parts of it to each other. All these will be the subjects of your delightful study, and may possibly be revealed to mankind in some far-off futurity, when men become capable of receiving and utilizing such sublime mysteries.

“To seek to penetrate the veil which separates the spiritual from the natural realm, to invite an open intercourse with spirits, to consult them about earthly affairs, is one of the terrible crimes denounced and forbidden in Scripture. It is the secret source of the power and mysteries of magic. To seek such intercourse is perilous to the soul’s best welfare. Therefore it is that consulting with ‘familiar spirits’ is forbidden in the Word. It is forbidden for man’s own good.”

“Yes, my son. In heaven only there is rest. There only are perfect peace and order and love. The road to heaven lies through the world of spirits, through its instructions, its purifications, its judgments. The pathway is pleasant and beautiful to the good man; for at every step he lets fall some hateful thing that clung to him in the past, and he rises into new light, new glory, new joy.”

“You spoke,” said I, “of general judgments occurring in the world of spirits, as well as the particular judgment of each individual. What do you mean by that?”

“At the end of every church, every dispensation, every old order of things, and at the beginning of a new church, a new revelation, a new era, there is a great judgment executed in the world of spirits. This judgment is effected by the light of divine truth streaming down through the open heavens, searching people to the core, revealing their true characters, separating the evil from the good, casting the former into hell, elevating the latter into heaven. It is a destruction and reconstruction of the world of spirits. This stupendous event is described in Scripture as the great and notable day of the Lord, the day of wrath, the judgment day, the end of the world.

“You astonish me,” I exclaimed. “The people on earth know nothing of these things. They are expecting a fulfillment of the prophecies in the material world. They expect the Messiah to come in splendor and power, to invest the Jewish people with supreme dominion, and to wreak his vengeance on all the disobedient and idolatrous.”

“Poor blind ones, led by the blind! They interpret literally what was written in the language of symbols and given to them for spiritual uses.”

“Why the necessity of this judgment?” I asked.

“Because the church is corrupt and dead; the priests are drunk with the wine of false doctrine; the people blind and without a shepherd. Therefore iniquity abounds. The flood-gates of hell are opened. The world of spirits is crowded with evil ones, who prevent the good from ascending to heaven, and infuse the most direful evils and falsities into men on earth. The prophets are dumb. The magician and the sorcerer are in the ascendant.

“You appall me by your prediction. But my wonder is, how such dangers can be impending, and the human race know nothing about it.”

“Because they know nothing of spiritual things—nothing of this world of spirits in which are the cause and origin of all things. Because they look downward, and not upward. Because they have eyes and see not; ears and hear not. Because they have perverted and nullified the Word of God by a sensuous interpretation of its meaning.”

“Alas! then,” said I, “how can the lost order be restored and the world saved?”

“By one arm alone; that of the Creator, the Supreme Being, the Lord.”

“Oh,” said I, “this Being of supreme power created man in his supreme wisdom, gave him angelic attendants, a written Law, an established Church—and behold the result! What new influences can He bring to bear upon his fallen and doomed creatures?”

“These are mysteries and dreams to my understanding. I cannot comprehend how the Supreme Being, infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent, can assume a human body and live like one of us.”

“It shall be made clearer to you. You shall see Him. Indeed you have seen Him, but you did not know Him. You shall see Him again—and know Him.”

“I shall see the living God?” said I, in a state of solemn trepidation.

“Yes”—said John the Baptist, who accompanied us—“you shall see Him. I have surrounded you, by divine permission, with an atmosphere which will enable you without pain to endure his coming.”

I cannot convey to mortals an adequate idea of the sense of awe which crept over me at these words. My knees smote together; my hands dropped; my heart trembled; my brain reeled at the thought of standing face to face with the living God!