Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/129

 artificial and conditional acquisitions. A man may lose an eye, leg, arm, be disfigured by accident or disease to an extent that will render him hideous to all embodied beholders; but let him die, or, while living, be gazed at by spiritual beings, and his legs, arms, eyes—the whole man stands revealed in all his true proportions. This discovery gave me joy, indeed; for I had known some whose disfigurements had pained me exceedingly. No maimed forms ascend from gory fields of battle; no crippled people inhabit the Soul-worlds. Thank God for that! True, in the regions midway, there are many who, being insane, or immersed in phantasies, insist on appearing as they were on earth, or even in worse plight; but this is not necessarily so, any more than the grimaces of a clown or mountebank are the natural expressions of his features. By this time I had also learned that, with the exception stated previously in reference to the essences of things, the two worlds—earthly and spiritual—were in scarce any one thing alike, as had been taught by those whose books upon the subject I had lost so much valuable time in reading—finely written and eloquent books, truly—yet, after all, I found them now to be filled with:

My experience demonstrated that the two worlds are not equal, continuous, or even resemblant. In fact, they, being disparates, many failures must necessarily be made in attempting, in the present state of the languages at least, to convey adequate verbal representations