Page:God Manifest.djvu/143

Rh, it must, as before said, be of the nature of spiritual existence. Here, then, the vegetative souls of all trees and flowers and of the whole vegetable kingdom, form a third portion of a present spiritual world.

In this view, we may perceive, that the spiritual world is not to be thought of as far distant from us in space, whether above or beneath, but rather as here present, acting upon and animating the whole material world whether human, bestial, or vegetable: nay, its presence and influence may be said to extend still lower, and affect also the mineral creation, giving to it those forces which may be termed mineral life; as chemical affinity, magnetic power, and attraction of cohesion and of gravitation. Thus the spiritual world may be thought of as a vast soul, of which the material world is the body: and that soul is within that body, as the spirit is within the body of man.

Man's soul, then, we perceive, is a part of the present spiritual world: and may be said with truth, to be already in that spiritual world, even while animating the body and looking out upon this material world. When man dies, then,—that is, when the spirit separates itself from the material part, and so "shuffles off this mortal coil,"—it has not to travel any distance to reach the spiritual world—it is at once in that world. Indeed it was in it before—because it was of it; yet unconsciously, because it exerted its consciousness through material organs. But after death the spirit is wholly and consciously in the spiritual world, thus in its own proper state of existence. It is now under the light of another sun,—a spiritual sun. It sees around it the objects of another world, the veritable spiritual world, of which it had heard and thought so much,