Page:Heaven Revealed.djvu/238

 yourself the loveliest rural scene imaginable—fields and forests, trees and lawns, gardens and flowers, singing-birds and gurgling brooks, fleecy clouds and azure skies and the picture would be clearly defective or incomplete without human habitations. The presence of beautiful houses as the symbols of life's sweetest joys, would be indispensable to the completeness of the scene. The æsthetic element of our nature demands this.

It is because the love of home is so deeply implanted in the human heart, that we always feel the need of a house as its symbol to complete the beauty of any landscape. Heaven, therefore, without human habitations would be lacking in one important element of beauty. It would not be our conception of the celestial realms. Besides, some of the deepest, tenderest, and best feelings of the heart—feelings which can be developed and kept alive only in the sanctuary of home—could not be visibly represented in heaven without houses. Therefore these feelings could not live—could, indeed, have no existence—in heaven; for every living thing in the hearts of the angels, is pictured there under visible and correspondential forms. This is the law which underlies and determines all the phenomena of the other world—the law of correspondence.

That there should be houses in heaven, therefore, seems altogether reasonable; and not only reasonable, but, if the inner is visibly pictured in the outer world there, there must be houses. The great law that determines the whole aspect of the phenomenal world in the Hereafter, necessitates this conclusion. And through