Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/72

 seek for such joys as are absolutely sure to leave, a sting behind, and Repentance, Agony and Remorse are the terrible triplet they are obliged to nurse, for how long! This is moral and spiritual suicide—so far as super-mundane joys are concerned—suicide, slow but sure; and such souls, on entering the Middle State, are poor, and thin, and lean, and powerless, for deeds or thoughts either good or great; and memory reflects back but few, if any pleasant images, but, in lieu thereof, presents for inspection and as food for contemplation, an array of barren mountains, fierce whirlpools, crags toppling over into dreadful darkness, beetling cliffs, from whose bald summits the vulture and the night-owl shriek and scream, No pleasant pasture lands begem the picture—no sweetly-singing rivers of delight—but only things of wierdness, rage and fury, set as centers into pictures representing boisterous and tempestuous seas, cold and dreary ice-islands, or desert-sands which swallow up the sunshine, the moisture and the rain, but never smile with a single green or lovely thing. These are symbols and similes of the Soul's states, and are the legitimate and inevitable out-creations of itself; but, thank God! not of its inner deeps, else the universe might well run mad, and every living thing curse its God and—die. True it is that none of these frightful things are the results of the natural and unbiassed choice of any human creature, yet they are none the less real in the. second stage of existence, for the reason that Destiny forever compels a man to be himself. Sooner or later he will bring himself voluntarily to acknowledge, bow, and bend before it; and the instant that he does so, the grand Vastatory law