Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/73

 comes into play, and he slowly emerges from Hell, and takes the road to Heaven!

So far in human history on the earth, the Devil has proved a failure—utter total, and complete. Not so Evil. This latter works out its mission well, even if it does no more than to convince man that his only, best and truest friends are himself and the Infinite God whose child be is. In the higher realms, to which mankind is destined, his actions are never the result of an applied force from outside himself; but when voluntarily submitting to the pressure from within, he is irresistibly led from bad to better, and from better to. Reaching this point, he no longer rebels—not against God, but against himself—his higher, nobler, better nature—but, giving up all of mere self, begins to desire nothing so much as to love and be loved, to serve God and minister unto others' good—and at last finds himself standing in the Door of the Dawn, having emerged from the Hades of his own and others' making, and stepped into his house not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens—house-spheres such as I have partially described, prepared for, and in, and of him, from the foundations of the Ages—houses which are indeed builded upon very pleasant spots, oh sunny glades and love-tinted hillocks on God's Eternal Domain—houses, too, which men often refuse to enter and occupy till after the lapse of years of misery spent in the horrid caves and unsightly huts dug and builded by themselves. All these things flashed in upon my soul, as I stood gazing into the mirror on the floor, and upon the vivographs of Memory gliding by upon the walls, in which