God is love, and love is the law of life and the creative force of the universe. The love of God in the soul is the substance and life of all religion. The love of fellow-man in the heart is the foundation of all human kindness and social ethics. As Dante followed his beloved Beatrice from world to world until he found her at the gates of Paradise, so we must follow our loves and ideals through all the tragic incidents of existence until we find them as guardian angels at the gates of celestial glory and creative perfection.
A noble character, a worthy and useful life of service to others is the chief purpose and crowning glory of all earthly existence. Wealth and fame are mere incidents in the fleeting drama of human experience.
All true greatness is in the beauty and grandeur of the soul. It must come from within; external manifestations may shadow it forth, but cannot produce it.
All true gentleness and kindness are a reflex of the inner life of love and willing service. We live in the atmosphere that our thoughts and spirits breathe around us, and by opening the windows and doors of our soul to love we inhale the perfume from other souls, and the breath of life from Deity Himself.
Thoughts are forces, and through them we have creative power; but they must be winged with love to manifest divine energy. Every act is preceded and given birth to by a thought, the act repeated forms the habit, the habit determines the character, and character determines the life and destiny.
Everything in the material universe has its origin first in the spiritual concept or thought, and from this it takes its form. The spoken word and the mighty deed spring from the potency of living thought, and life is a tireless swimmer in an ocean of thought. Thought is the conscious energy of the soul, the subtle, invisible force of the reasoning, resistless mind, and, to be potent with life, must be winged with love. Thought is everywhere and surrounds us like the atmosphere we breathe. When we want a thought we should reach up into the air for it with the caressing hand of love, and it will come like an invisible messenger from spirit land. We should seek thought and wisdom in the intellectual zenith of our own minds, and not from mediums or clairvoyants, for they have never revealed any great truths.
Thus our great poets, sages and prophets have reached up into the spiritual altitudes and gathered wisdom and truth as the stars are gathered and sparkle in the glittering mirror of night's far off and measureless spaces. They come with the speed of light from all suns and spheres in the jewelled crown of God's eternal expanse of love and life, they whisper wonderful things to the listening spirit in the silent chambers of the dreaming soul, and they come like angel faces in the visions of night and paint with the flaming finger of anticipated joy the glorious beatitudes of immortality and love. There is the science of thought which brings wisdom and success, and the science of love that brings peace and joy. It is a beautiful thing to live. Life is the fine art of the soul, the literature of the spirit, where it writes its hopes and achievements.
It is the theatre of all possibilities here and hereafter, but its atmosphere must be magnetic with love and faith where the spiritual forces may battle and exert their powers. We must first love all the world if we would have the world love us. Only what comes from the heart can reach the heart of the world, for mankind will care little for us unless we show we care for mankind. But what man earnestly desires and persistently wills and strives to accomplish through love will finally be attained. Love and goodness are all-powerful and will eventually conquer.
The first cause of all discontent, weariness, bitterness and vanity of life is selfishness. It is the corrosive element that rusts away all the pure gold of energy and aspiration. It is as amazing as sad that we burden ourselves with selfish strivings that are of no consequence, and miss the gladness and exhilaration of living. For no life is successful unless it is radiant with love and usefulness. Emerson says: "Life is an ecstasy and nothing else is really worth living. Happiness is not determined by a bank account or the flattering incense of praise, but is a mental and spiritual condition."
Ye who seek liberty know this; it can only be found in the liberty of your fellow men. Ye who seek happiness know this; ye can only find it in the happiness of others, and if you desire to be happy you must make others happy. This is God's eternal law of compensation—of altruism—love to others; what you do unto others you do unto yourself. Look upon thy fellow man with wisdom and thou shalt have love. Feel for thy fellow man with love and thou shalt have wisdom, and, having wisdom and love, thou hast God and heaven in thy heart. These are the golden rules of the New Testament, written in the reason, conscience and experience of men, as God's living book of wisdom and truth.
Every action has its rebound or echo. Others will return your love or hate as the mountains return an echo, and by the same law. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." The hate you send forth will return to you, the love you gave will come back to you, for it is an immortal part of you and a part of Omnipotent Deity.
If you are sick, love! If you are envied, hated and slandered, love! If age and death steal upon you, love! For God is love, and heaven is love, and love is life eternal. This is God's law, this is the law of man's nature, the law of the New Testament, the law of love and life, the law of the universe.
Whatever may be man's misfortune, if he has a love of humanity, a love of literature, art or nature, he has resources of happiness that nothing can remove. With these the poor man is rich, and the rich man can never be poor. For each by love has overcome the world. Therefore believe and love, and hold fast to the conviction that the forces of life are divine and eternal, and their laws written in the reason and consciences of men, and that death is only a transition from our world to another of greater beauty and perfection. The inadequacy of earth-life to satisfy the soul's capabilities is evidence that its career must continue hereafter in brighter worlds of celestial love and destiny.
It is said the common epitaph of humanity is, "They mean well, try a little and fail much." But if love is their guiding star and they obey the dictates of their reason and conscious duty, their lives cannot be failures. Most of our troubles and cares, like echoes, do not exist until we call them forth. But sweet, subdued sorrow, and the tears of love and sympathy that spring from the generous heart to the soulful eyes, are like heavenly dews, and promote the growth of the soul. They should not be classed among the depressing trials. Neither should friendly rivalry, or laudable ambition to excel, be deemed trying aggressions, for they are beneficial phases of growth. Humanity should emancipate itself by hitching its chariot to the star of love, and switching the current of human energy from the circuit of worry and anger, and connecting it with the motors of good thoughts and noble deeds.
All men should realize the fact that anger turns the natural juices of the body into poison as the vibrations of thunder sour the sweetest milk. And every fit of anger is an electric trip-hammer that drives a nail into the coffin of life and shortens human existence. All nature reveals the law of "natural selection and survival of the fittest," and demands in man the highest perfection of love, beauty and self-development.
The culture of the divine essence of the soul, love and ideality will eventually emancipate, exalt and ennoble human life.
Love is the beginning of life. Love is the creative agency of all human and animal existence. Even the vegetable world, trees, shrubs and flowers have their dual, sexual amities, and their male and female blending in the love of unity and the unity of love, and thereby propagate and continue their species in the ever changing cycles of life.
All that live must come from loving. The positive and negative circles of electric and spiritual forces in man and woman must be broken and reunited in a combined circle of dual vitalizing growth and power before God's first command, "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth," can be consummated.
God has so organized the universe that love brings life and continues it, while hatred checks all the sweet gushing juices and joys of hope and life, and, brings death and darkness. Love commands the electric creative forces of human life as God commands them in the boundless heavens. Love is the elemental part of God, and the godly part of man. And he whose soul is diffused with love is enwrapt in the effulgent drapery of Divine goodness and joy.
Woman by Divine right and the Supreme decrees of destiny is the ministering angel of love and life, and is next to God the Creator and Preserver of the human race.
Some very strong writers believe man's body is the product of the thought and mental force of his progenitors. If so, the mental impulse of love, and even its lower form of animal passion, is the begetter of the human race. Mrs. Josephine Barton, in "Mothers of the Living," declares, "The history of flesh has its beginning in the male atom, and exists as an unembodied idea in mental solution. Thinking results in ideas and ideas crystallize into form. Thoughts are the blocks out of which children are made. The physical gets its breath of life from the mental or spiritual. The first avenue of development after its appearance in form in the male parent is the daily and hourly thinking, exercised in the mentality of the parent. These atoms, though microscopic, are the brain and spinal cord of the atom man. The product of the male element is judgment and will, of the female love and intuition; so the atom man crystallizes only the seat, brain and nerve faculties. This structure—temple of the soul—like the acorn, has inherent within it growth and fruit possibilities."
She arouses useful thought and adds with force and eloquence, "All men are, by their daily thinking, moulding the brain and spinal cords of future men.
"O men of earth! what qualities are you weaving in your thread of thought? Of what substance are you moulding the grand army of the future race? Are you endowing them with the intellect of true manhood, or crystallizing into atoms all manner of distorted brains?
"Our bodies are bulletins of our thoughts, and the male atom is the microscopic beginning of childlife, and when expelled from the loins of their progenitors, become the 'living souls' that people the cities and the plains. The human atom thus formed, when imparted into the custody of the mother, is ready for the breath of life which the mother mind, by love and intuition will breathe into it. The temple for a human soul is thus constructed. The nourishment then given is as pliant to thought as the ocean to a raindrop, and prenatal education is most important. O splendid fact! Be lifted up, thou expectant mother of the living! You are at liberty to take the helm of possibility and steer for the sunlit isles where all sons are gods. The mother should be herself what she would have her child be. She should affirm and reiterate. 'I am the heir of all wisdom, the expression of all beauty, the revelation of love and truth, the life proclamation of the Eternal. I am serene, radiant, valiant, loving, aspiring, knowing.' Then will all conceptions be immaculate and all human life glorious and divine."
I maintain that woman is the prototype of the godmother of the universe, who is the third person of the Trinity, known as the Holy Ghost or Comforter. The Trinity of the theologians—three persons in one—is contrary to all human reason and logic. It contradicts every type of being in universal creation, and would be a monstrosity in natural law and creative experience. It defies all analysis and subverts all law of animate and inanimate nature. God never thus contradicts himself, his own laws, and his created universe, or the book of nature and man's reason; and no such doctrine is taught in the New Testament, when analyzed by a true construction of language.
To deny the Trinity was a crime punished by death a century or two ago in England; and ecclesiastical authority there and elsewhere prescribed what man should believe for centuries, or receive the punishment prescribed by law or the Inquisition. Until recent times men were not allowed to think for themselves.
But reason and truth, written in the soul of man by the finger of Deity, will assert its divine right to correct the blunders of ignorance and superstition.
And as it was many ages before the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man was discovered and recognized, so it required modern intelligence and reason to place woman in her true and God-given position; and recognize in God the Father, God the Son and God the Mother, the same natural trinity in heaven as exists on earth in father, mother and child. The book of nature, and the book of man's reason asserts there can be no father or son without a mother. They would be an anomaly in nature, unthinkable and impossible, and if there is a Father and Son in heaven, there is a Divine Mother, who has always been there as the companion and counselor of Deity, and is also the Divine Comforter of all human souls. And if there is sex in all nature, it is reasonable to believe there is sex in the family of Deity. When Christ said, "I and my Father are one," he meant one in purpose and spirit.
Up to the recent centuries, woman was the chattel slave of man, kept in ignorance and degradation, and deemed inferior to man, and the past ages would not recognize her divinity, or her equality with man. But now she stands on a level with man, heart to heart, and brain to brain, and every true man offers her the tribute of love and reverence, and recognizes that in all the realms of earth and stars there is no being so worthy of love and worship, next to Deity, as the mothers of men.
They are the saviors of mankind, whose vicarious suffering has brought forth and redeemed the generations of men. They are the trees of life in God's earthly garden, whose branches, ladened with the fruits of love, have called forth the mysterious blossoms of being to bloom in the fields of time and people the land of immortal spirits.
The beginning of civilization was when the mother bid the rude men of the forest and hill to build the needed shelter in grove or cave to protect her and her helpless offspring. And from that simple shelter or thatched-roofed hut has sprung the vine-clad cottage, and the marble palace, and the family roof-tree of every house in every land. It was the mothers of men who filled up the broken ranks of war, and brought peace, and wove garments, and refined and civilized man and taught him the arts and commerce of civilized life. And could the mothers control the destinies of nations, their loving hearts would banish war, and peace would be universal.
And the most precious heritage of every nation on the green earth is the nobility of its mothers, for without noble mothers, it can have no worthy and manly men.
All nations should recognize this fact, and instead of giving pensions to those who destroy life, they should give them to those who multiply and replenish it, and make a nation worthy of existence and fame. And God will surely bestow on the mothers of men a crown of eternal glory for every life added to his empire and domain of deathless eternities.
The momentous question arises in this busy age of travel and pleasure, when so many seek the luxurious ease of opulence and avoid as far as possible all cares and responsibility, Will the emancipated womanhood of our land deny the law of love and life, written in the heart and conscience of all sentient beings, and decline the angelic ministrations of maternity? Will they refuse to join in the economy of God and nature, or leave this high and holy vocation to the ignorant and superstitious of our foreign element? If so, the citizenship of our beloved nation will degenerate with each succeeding generation.
Will the modern woman seek social pleasures and the flattery of passing admiration in lieu of home life and maternity, and be satisfied to flutter as a gaudy butterfly of fashion? Will her womanly heart find the prattle of a baby voice and the pressure of its chubby hands upon her smiling face, as it crows in her loving arms, a truer, sweeter pleasure than the social triumphs of a few fleeting seasons? A joyous child brings more pleasure to a household than a marble palace with mahogany furniture and an automobile.
This is the all-important woman question of the future—the question of race suicide. For the entrance of woman into all the vocations of business life, the tendency to avoid domestic cares, the laxity of the marriage vows, together with the elimination of homes for boarding houses, and the prevalence of divorces, makes it a serious question for the future. Already this pressing vital question causes the wisest men of France to tremble for the future of their race and nation, for its shrinking population is forcing it from the rank of a first-class power to the humiliation of weakness and decay. Will they listen to France's Macedonian call and the law of love and life written in their womanly natures?
Humanity of the past and present is not final. It shall not cease at the present development. Human society was never static. We are at the beginning of the greatest changes in human history. There will be no shock, but the transforming, silent touch of universal evolution, whose voice speaks thus: "We are the creatures of twilight, but out of our minds and the lineage of our minds will spring minds that will reach forward fearlessly. A day will come—one day in the unending succession of days—when the beings now latent in our thoughts, hidden in our loins, shall stand on this earth as on a footstool, and they shall laugh and reach out their hands among the stars."
It is said that the flower which opens and smiles upon the brink of an abyss is like love, which lives also between two eternities. It is the most human of the passions and at the same time the most divine. It is the most intimate and the most ethereal; it guides the poet when he scales the skies and lifts the soul to celestial raptures.
The gifted and the common mind are alike troubled, agitated and exalted by this divinity who evokes their silent passions and stirs their slumbering fancy.
Many animals change their form and color in the season of love, and man is similarly affected in his psychic nature. Every human and divine element responds to the witchery of the god of love. And new colors in thought and character appear, and the glowing eye glistens with changing smile or tear, like dewdrops on the jewelled face of morn. The first touch of poetry lights up the prosy brain, the first ambitions, brilliant hopes, struggles, flashes of genius, and heroic resolves spring forth like living phantoms at the magic power of this matchless magician of the soul.
Woman, far more than man, is reared in the regions of love, and has more leisure to reflect on the secret movements of her heart, and to gather the wisdom and beauty of love and distill it as the rarest perfume of life. Love is woman's crown of divinity. Love lifts man to his highest capabilities, noblest enterprises and loftiest ideals, and makes him monarch of a larger and more beautiful world.
The history of man shows how gross and abject natures are transformed by love. How dull and stolid minds have been guided by it to paths of honor and glory. It is said that fame and science should guard themselves from love as from a dangerous enemy, and that to be a great man one must love their art alone and be wed only to their great ambitions.
Ah! but for one genius killed by love, a hundred owe to it all their greatness and inspiration and the moving force of life, and bless it as superior to fame and sweeter than all the laurels of victory or the plaudits of success.
All the glory of art and science, of thrones and crowns, is inspired by the love of woman. This was openly proclaimed in the heroic and chivalrous ages and should still be held in grateful remembrance.
If love does not always elevate and refine and work the miracles of its magic, it is because men lower their ideals of women and love. Woman has a stronger thirst after the ideal, a more refined sensibility, exquisite fancy and poetic nature and aids man to mount to loftier actions and ideals. In a beautiful picture, Dante is below, Beatrice above; he looks at her and is thus inspired, while her eyes, fixed upon him, seem to say: "Upward, upward; it is thither we must go together!" It is said nothing is so irresistible as the enthusiasm of woman. Without reason for believing, without strength for hope, sustained solely by love, she is always full of faith for the great and beautiful things, and with sublime imprudence cries, "Forward, forward!" and drags man to the most difficult summits of success.
A wise man says: "In the great and little things, after having consulted science and art, experience and imagination, after having read history and human hearts, also always consult the woman you love, whether it be a question of a book or a law, or a work of art, or of business, industry or poetry. She will certainly have something new to tell you." Ambition often fails to elevate men, they die without having attained their full measure of power. Only the love of woman could have given them the energy which ambition and self-love were powerless to bestow.
In the past ages the world prated much about aristocracy. There have been four kinds of aristocracy in the world's history. There has been the aristocracy of muscle—the supremacy of brute force. This was followed by the aristocracy of blood or family pedigree, by which one claimed by inheritance superiority over others. Then came the aristocracy of wealth, which prevails in our day, whereby those who obtain fortunes by birth, accident, parsimony, force or fraud, claim superiority over others less sordid or less fortunate. But the true and only aristocracy that ever has or ever will exist in the human race is the aristocracy of love and goodness. There is nothing so kingly as kindness, nothing so royal as truth, and nothing so godlike as love.
The aristocracy of muscle has brought misery and distress and cursed the world with cruelty and oppression; the aristocracies of blood and wealth have often brought sorrow to their possessors, and proved a rope of sand, a broken reed, a Jonas' gourd that faded in a night. But the aristocracy of love and goodness is God's aristocracy, and belongs to the society of heaven. It is a part of the family of Deity, and possesses the wealth of the universe. It is the pride of celestial hosts, and the joy and blessing of transient mortality. The humblest of earth may join this aristocracy of love and goodness and be a prince and king in his own right, by royal prerogative as eternal and enduring as the earth and stars.
Thus we find that love is the spiritual and electric law of life, and the crown-jewel of the universe; that it gives life and inspires it; that all the creations and forces of nature are dual and sexual, with love as the supreme sovereign of all life and destiny.
Magnificent are the pyramids of Cheops, but while they and the groves of gods and pillars at Karnac were being reared for a tyrannous nobility and priesthood, twenty thousand common men agonized and died in the quarries. Beautiful was Athens, "The City of the Violet Crown," when the sunlight flashed from the Parthenon; but Aristides was banished because he was just, and Socrates was murdered because he taught the oneness of God. Rome sat on her seven hills and ruled the world; but men were butchered in the arena to make a Roman holiday, and at night Christians were burned for torches to light up Nero's golden house. All this was because love had not exalted the ideals and energized the wills of men.
In the middle ages the sound of the chisels carving the marble dreams of Michael Angelo was drowned by the shrieks of victims of the Inquisition; and later in England, villains and serfs, even after Magna Charta, were hanged for stealing five shillings. In our own land Cotton Mather tells us men were crushed by heavy stones upon their breast, as punishment for petty offenses, and witches swung in the breezes of Salem; and less than fifty years ago human slavery was sanctioned by law. All these horrors and the cruelty of the world have been because men have not let love illumine the soul and energize the heart of humanity. To-day all this is changed. The ægis of the law protects the humblest citizen, and the fate of nations is decided not by a Hannibal or a Charlemagne, but in legislative halls and courts of justice. And all men may work and hope, for fame is waiting with willing laurels for souls aglow with the fires of love and genius, who are destined to be torch bearers along the highways of heavenly harmonies.
Carlisle, that rugged old thinker, declared that man should imitate his maker and "Create, create, create." This is the chief object of life. Not alone in the propagation of his race, but to build houses and temples, erect monuments, write books, fertilize deserts, and cause the earth to blossom with new flowers of fragrance, and new thoughts of beauty.
In order to thus glorify life and make it a divine ecstacy, and a stepping-stone to celestial worlds, love must be the guiding star, and will the creative-impulse. These two are the sovereign forces of the universe in man and Deity; and uphold and control all others.
Therefore man should make love and truth his ideals, and will his sceptre of power, and with each rising sun proclaim:
I contend in my previous books that electricity and not gravity is the one fundamental form of energy from which all other forms, such as light, heat, vital force, physical life and so-called gravitation are derived by transformation. That electric energy is the one evolving creative force in the physical universe, back of which is the directing, intelligent, spiritual power of Deity, who has made all visible things of one matter—the invisible atom, controlled by one invisible power, electricity, after one unchanging pattern—the electro-magnet.
This necessarily teaches that the sun is not hot, that all heat, light and vital force is produced by the contact of positive and negative electricity in the dense atmospheric cushion of suns and planets, where alone it is needed for vegetable and animal life. All of which is produced by the positive electric currents of the sun coming in contact with the negative electricity of the planets, just as two wires oppositely electrified and brought together produce the arc and incandescent electric light.
I contend that the suns are the self-luminous, perfected worlds of the universe; worlds like our world, only larger and more prolific in life and power than the planetary worlds. That they are the headquarters of Deity, and the future abode of man. This leads to the reasonable scientific hypothesis that our all-life-giving sun is where Christ ascended to, when the Disciples saw "a cloud receive him out of their sight;" where Elias was translated; where Paul was "snatched up to the seventh heaven"; where Saint John in the Apochalyptic journey saw "the new Jerusalem—the City of God." This wonderful city, from scientific facts and analogy, exists in the sun and could be no where else, and seems to be so represented in Revelations, and its description is grander than all the romances of earth. This gives the most reasonable scientific explanation of Revelations and the eternal beatitudes of the Christian's life everlasting, while at the same time it recognizes the law of evolution, and proclaims there is nothing supernatural in the universe.
I contend that the sun's photosphere is a brilliant, globe-encircling aurora; that the planets are the hatcheries of human souls, and the suns the place of their maturity and perfection; that all things are composed of atoms and electricity, which are as invisible as the soul. That the soul is an invisible atom of Deity, and, like invisible atoms and electricity, may pass to and from the sun.
In showing the terraced mountain on which the city in Revelations was built accorded with the proportions of the sun as compared with the earth and moon, a simpler illustration would be this: The sun's diameter is 110 times that of the earth, and as the earth has mountains six miles high, the sun should have them 110 times higher, which would be about 700 miles in perpendicular height, making about 1,200 miles measuring the slope from the base to the apex. Or, if the mountains in the sun are as high in proportion to diameter as those on the moon, the mountains of the moon being three miles high, and the sun's diameter being 400 times greater than the moon; the mountains of the sun should be 1200 miles in perpendicular height.
Up to the last few centuries all standards of measurement were indefinite. The cubit, fathom, and foot all depended on the size of the man. A furlong was originally a furrow in an English field, and might be 300 or 800 feet in length. All these measures have been made definite by law or custom since the Bible was written. But the word translated furlong was the Greek word stadium, which was the length of a Greek foot race which was 520 feet (except in two instances); while a present furlong, the eighth of a mile, is 660 feet, making in 12,000 furlongs a difference of about 320 miles, making John's wonderful city 1,180 miles square. The ancient furlong was about what I put it—the tenth of a mile. Critics should inform themselves before displaying their colossal lack of information.
I contend that over ninety per cent. of the universe is invisible matter. This invisible matter floats in all space and permeates all visible matter as water permeates a sponge.
All matter in its primary and elementary form is invisible, and, being invisible, it partakes of the characteristics in this respect of invisible force and invisible spirit. These three invisible entities constitute the universe, its center and circumference, its invisible realities, its eternal foundation and limitless boundaries. Only one of these—matter—by a vast aggregation of atoms, is converted from the invisible to the visible. This universe was made from nothing—nothing visible, nothing tangible, nothing the human eye could see or the human finger could touch. There was a time when the stars and planets, suns and worlds were transparent ether, as impalpable as the viewless air, and scattered as star dust in the measureless void of space along the forgotten highways of the past eternities. Silence reigned profound in the pulseless regions of the air, where, motionless and dumb, the atoms hung in dark and lifeless space. There was nothing in all this universe—nothing but cold, darkness and silence. But these are the home of atoms, the star-dust which Deity had scattered by the breath of his power through the highways of space in the beginning of primeval creation. While these were nothing to man, they were the foundation stones of all created things. This nothingness of space was the fallow ground of the universe and the formless shadow of suns and worlds. It was a universe in solution as viewless as ether, and as intangible as mind. The electric energy of space was yet unstirred by the divine fiat or shook into vibrating force by the word of Creative Power. Other suns and worlds and a universe of universes shone forth in the realms of space when the Creative Word was spoken that lit this newer universe into being.
"Let there be light," and from His lips that spoke no word but love and truth and power, the lightning of electric life and glory thrilled every atom with vibrating cosmic energy, and life-evolving force. Then the electric clothing of light and life leaped into power and enwrapt as in swaddling clothes a new born universe. And wherever the breath of Deity was blown there was the glowing nucleus of a sun, or the revolving center of a world. Then atoms and electricity met in fond and unending embrace, substance and energy clasped hands, and matter and persistent force were woven into each other's arms and saturated with electric, life-giving energy.
The first starting point of the universe was the intellectual volition of Deity. The second was the law of nature impressed upon matter by electricity, the right hand of Deity and the tongue and word of His power. Spirit cannot act directly upon matter; it must have a medium controlled by spirit at one end and working on matter at the other. This medium is electricity. Matter is held together by the electric attraction of the molecules of which it is composed.
The molecules are composed of invisible magnets called atoms. This electric attraction acts continuously. Were it to stop its action for a second, solid bodies would instantly crumble to invisible atoms, our material forms would vanish into thin air, and the universe disappear in viewless ether.
The electro-magnetic force holds firmly the molecules of solid bodies and gives them their strength and solidity. It is more feeble in its cohesive grasp on liquid bodies and is very feeble in gaseous bodies. Molecules are in a ceaseless state of activity and motion, forever vibrating to the touch of electric energy.
The ever-restless and varying motions of the invisible molecules constituting all matter is like a cluster of bees at their hive, or of ants at their nests, hurrying and scrambling over and around each other in constant and curious motions. And if our eyes were powerful enough to see the molecules of which a block of wood or a human body is composed, they would witness such a scene of activity as the crowded bees and ants exhibit, only still more curious and constant. When water is changed into steam it goes into the air as widely separated and invisible particles which disappear entirely, but every particle is still in existence and may be converted again into water. When wood is burned, it changes into ashes, smoke and vapor. Not a single particle is ever destroyed. It is so with our bodies, they dissolve into their natural elements, which pass into tree and shrub and air and water and other bodies; they never return to their organic form. There is no resurrection of the physical body. What goes down into the grave never comes forth again. The spirit-body never enters the grave, but soars to the celestial cities of the sun in a new and endless life. Nature and Deity would not do so nugatory a thing as to resurrect three or four bucketsful of water and a handful of bonedust. Fresher and better material is at hand in abundance all the time.
There are bodies all around us so small that we cannot see them. They are in the air we breathe and in the water we drink. Some of them are alive and some are not. Many of them are so small we need the most powerful microscope to detect their presence. Yet every one is made up of parts much smaller than itself. The fine dust which clings to our fingers when we hold a butterfly or a moth, scarce visible to the naked eye, is found under the microscope to be made up of a thousand or more still smaller particles.
There are living creatures so small it would take a million of them to equal the size of a mustard seed. Millions of them float unseen in the air around us, and swim in the drops of water we drink. Millions more float through the blood in our veins, which to them are vast, surging seas of life. They are so very small, a thousand of them might fly side by side through the eye of a needle. Yet each little creature must be made of still smaller parts, else they could not move or devour their food; they are too infinitesimal for the grasp of our imagination.
If we keep on dividing a body into smaller and smaller pieces, we at last get a piece so very small it cannot be divided again without changing into some other kind of matter. These smaller pieces are called molecules, which are particles of matter which cannot be divided without changing their nature. All bodies are porous and have spaces between their molecules. This was proven of gold a long time ago at Florence, where a hollow globe of gold was filled with water and shut up tight, then put under immense pressure. The water was forced by the pressure through the pores of the gold as a fine dewy moisture or perspiration. The same result would have occurred had it been iron, copper or any other metal, as there is a space between all molecules in all bodies.
All molecules in all bodies revolve around each other without touching. You can stand a man before the Crookes tube or Roentgen rays and look through him and take pictures of his bones, and look through his bones and take pictures of objects on the other side of them, and also look through four-foot walls. And photographs are now taken through six-inch brick walls.
All spaces between the molecules of all visible substances, all pores and cavities in all organic bodies and inorganic matter, including the earth, and all animal and vegetable life is, I contend, permeated and occupied by invisible electro-magnetic ether. This ether is the life-giving and life-preservative force and essence of the universe and that from which all things have been evolved. All suns and worlds and all their complex creations and everything that exists floats in this boundless, vibrating sea of magnetic ether. And there are vast and mighty currents of electric force and power reaching from every sun and planet to every other sun and planet in the universe. These are enduring bands of strength, invisible ligaments of magnetic power that bind the universe together as one complete, harmonious electric organism. They constitute the unity and strength of all creation and promulgate and enforce the laws of nature.
They are vast highways of space, the boulevards of the universe. We cannot see them, neither can we see elemental matter, or electricity, or life, but we know they exist, and are the foundations of the universe.
Human spirits, at death, when they drop their visible vesture of atoms, can step onto this electric tide, this current of swift-speeding light and power, and in eight minutes or less time enter the heaven of their dreams in the celestial cities of the sun.
They have but to step on this flowing tide of electric power, as they step on a moving stairway or platform in our cities here on earth, to be borne with scarcely a sense of motion to their bright and heavenly abode. It is a swift and continuous band, an endless chain, a mighty ligament of light and life and power constantly passing between heaven and earth, and earth and heaven, between sun and planet and planet and sun. These are the countless pathways between suns and stars, the mighty and everlasting highways of eternity which God hath built to span the silent ether of space between suns and worlds, and bind the universe in one harmonious whole.
On these mighty currents, as on a moving bridge of golden light, angels and men and ministering spirits may pass and repass to the gateway of eternal life.
Moses and Elias, Christ and John, and all the departed saints of earth have trod this Jacob's ladder on which the angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth, and all the departed denizens of earth have trod its golden stairs to their celestial, sun-bright home.
Dr. Minot J. Savage, the eminent New York divine, says he objects to my putting eight minutes of time between the earth and the spiritual world. He thinks Christ taught that they were in immediate connection with each other. And so they are, by the coming and going tides of spirits between the two worlds. But now that the speed of light seems to be discovered to be instantaneous, it may be the communication between them is instantaneous.
When the deathless spirit has dropped its "mortal coil," and visited with electric wing the luminous, life-giving sun and the mighty cities on its spacious bosom, and graduated in the universities of heaven, it will discover that eternity is scarcely long enough to study and enjoy the marvelous creations of the universe. It will find our world is but a floating island in the great solar sea of electro-magnetism, and the solar sea or empire of our sun is but a small province in the boundless ocean of space, hid in the infinite abyss of starry depths; that measureless immensity and countless variety reigns in the universe. Human souls will then be free as air and untrammeled as ether, and may explore the vast highways of eternity with wonder-seeking minds, and visit Jupiter with his enormous moons, Saturn with his gigantic rings, and traverse the out-lying orbs of distant Uranus and Neptune. They may then pass to other solar realms, and wander over the varied bosom of Andromeda's triple suns of blue and green and sapphire tints that whirl like globes of rainbow beauty in the azure sky, and see the double stars and multiple suns, and fiery comets with their glowing spooms, and blood-red meteors, all following harmonious orbits through the pulsing voids of space, vibrating to the rythmic cadence of electric law. All moving with tranquil majesty in the trackless seas of immensity obedient to the Omnipotent Will.
Here blooms infinite, varied life and ever-changing beauty to thrill and bless the wonder-loving soul and make melodious harmony with every pulsing vibration of their imperishable life. The universe of myriads of suns is separated by trillions of miles and scattered like lighthouses along the realms of space, as dynamos of heat and light and life, shooting with measureless speed and bound together by mutual ties as delicate and invisible as the ties of love that bind two souls together at the hymeneal altar. Such is God's universe. She is as a bride to her lover in every floating atom of space, in every circling world and glowing sphere, in every human soul and angel spirit.
As light is the great painter of the skies, and photographs all things that occur in the atmosphere of suns and planets, the aspect of the earth and the sun and the events that occurred on their surface thousands of years ago are now winging their flight through space millions of millions of miles distant. To the eye of Deity or an observer on some distant orb these events of centuries past would seem to be actually occurring or in progress. With powers commensurate with the photographic powers of light, a human soul could stand upon a distant star and follow this wonderful vision and gaze on a succession of events from the beginning of time to the present moment, and read the history of every sun and planet in the rays of light from its own atmosphere. And with poised wing in limitless space or on some far-off sun, read the mighty events transpiring on this little earth in the distant rays of light from its own atmosphere. And in the cities of the sun, the denizens of heaven may, by some marvelous appliance, so magnify the picture in each ray of light from earth and sun and planet that they may view with microscopic eye and telescopic vision all the historic scenes of every sphere, and learn the life and history of every rolling orb.
They need not visit them to see and know the panoramic history of their glowing life. And thus they may view the varied scenes of earth. Could we transport ourselves to Alpha Lyra, Sirius or some more distant sun and could see, like them, the photographic pictures in the rays of light from earth we could view scenes that transpired on the earth thousands of years ago. Thus human souls may see and thus Deity sees the end from the beginning at all times in all spheres. And a ray of light, a drop of dew, a grain of sand or a blade of grass conveys to him a history of the world of which it is a part.
Thus God preserves in every ray of light a constant picture of the changing panorama of the universe; and in man's mind, through man's imperishable memory, He keeps a perfect record of man's thoughts and deeds, which He can unravel as a written scroll at any moment.
The future is ever present in its germs, precisely as the past is present in its fruits. And God's knowledge of the past and future is as much the subject of His consciousness as the present action of His creatures, or the primary laws He has established. He has assigned to the universe certain material and spiritual laws, and the whole scheme of the universe is so perfect it needs no direct intervention. His perfect control of matter under electric law produces the evolutions of nature that accord with His divine purpose, and His spiritual impulse directs the spiritual development of the human soul to the ultimate goal of truth and perfection to be attained in His self-luminous, perfected worlds. Thus we perceive that to the Omnipotent Ruler of the universe the infinite past and the infinite future would at all times be present, that each atom and event would exhibit to Him at each instant the limitless past and future, giving him perfect and omnipotent consciousness and control of his spiritual and electric universe.
And even on this earth, the time may come when we can so magnify the picture in a ray of light that we may see the cities in the sun, and read the inscriptions on their walls and temples, and view the gates of pearl and the sapphire dome and diamond coronet above the Acropolis of the terraced city of the sun described in Revelations.
The soul is an invisible atom of Deity and, like invisible atoms and electricity, may pass to and from the sun in eight minutes and perhaps only a few seconds.
I reason scientifically that if invisible matter and electricity go everywhere and pass to and from the sun continually and exert their power and do not lose their natural properties or identity, it is clear and overwhelming proof that man's soul, when it steps out of the body, maintains its power and identity, and can fly with the speed of light to the throne of light and life in the luminous bosom of the all-life-giving sun.
Is it not right, by the eternal law of cause and sequence and unanswerable logic, that life should return to the fountain of life? That life, soul life and material life, which the sun nurtures, builds and vitalizes here, when its usefulness here is ended that it should return to the luminous bosom of its great mother—the source of all life, light and power; and that there it should find the great Spiritual Father, who planned and constructed this mighty machinery of worlds, or his immaculate Son and representative.
Then, by all the laws of reason, intelligence, and "the eternal fitness of things," God, the eternal, creative Spirit, should have his abode and center of life and light and power at the central abode of all life and light and power in the physical universe,—the all-sustaining, creative sun. Such accords with the eternal laws of nature and the one unchanging mode and pattern of the universe. For by the universal law of all created things, the center of physical and electric power and life is also the center of spiritual and intellectual power, and there should be the home of Deity and the promised heaven of the human soul.
The question may often arise, Does God perfect humanity and then destroy it? Does He make men of us with all the trouble and care that comes inside of seventy years, and then throw us away? I do not believe he does anything so wasteful and unjust. He has prepared a pathway to the skies and takes us to Himself. This is more rational.
Jacob saw the heavenly ladder and angels ascending and descending between heaven and earth, and Stephen saw the heavens open and Christ sitting on the right hand of God. These were not miracles in the supernatural sense; they were simply a larger vision, an expansion of electric and spiritual power under the rapid evolution of natural law. All great seers and prophets have had the same clairvoyant power.
At the birth of our planet, the stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy. At the birth of Christ the angels sang for the shepherds on the plains of Bethlehem, and they visited Abraham and Lot, and Joseph and Mary, and ministered to Christ when he was weary and famished in the wilderness. They carried John in the spirit to the great and high mountain in the sun which was to him a new heaven and a new earth and showed him the great city of God, and they have borne millions of bright human spirits along the electric highways of the skies to the celestial mansions of the blest. So will they wait and guide us through the dusky borders of mortality, along the shining pathway to the sun, and welcome us to the delights of its celestial cities. And we shall see in the hour of dissolution the ladder Jacob saw reaching from earth to heaven on which the angels ascend and descend, and we shall see the vision martyred Stephen saw when the heavens opened, and the vision St. John saw when he gazed on the New Jerusalem.
And this electric stairway between heaven and earth is so real, sure and strong, that the weakest spirit cannot lose its way or stumble or fall. It has the lightness of air and the strength of adamant and is as eternal as the stars. Millions of millions have trod its pathway of viewless power that no steel or adamant could brake, and none have failed to reach the heaven that it links to earth.
The creature whose intelligence measures the pulsations of molecules and unravels the secret of the whirling nebulæ is no creature of a day, but the child of the universe, the heir of all the ages, in whose making and perfection is found the consummation of God's creative work.
God is a spirit and man is a spirit, and spirit power is the supreme sovereignty of the universe. And the soul of man can command electric energy to bear it with swift wings and tireless feet along the electric pathway to the luminous bosom of the sun, to the celestial cities of his future heaven.
And the angels will be our guides and direct our faltering spirits along the electric pathways to the stars, and light the shining boulevards of eternity, and lead us to the golden streets and crystal palaces of heaven. And they will escort us into the diamond banqueting hall of the King of Kings, and we shall feast on angels' food, and sip nectar and ambrosia from the table of the God of Gods.
And the angel choir shall take down their celestial harps from their panels of amethyst, and with deft fingers and entrancing voices sing us the old, loved melodies of heaven, and put a new song in our mouths, and we shall join the heavenly jubilee of eternal life and glory.