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 Oh, what a rebuke does this heavenly doctrine of progress, administer to that contracted, conceited and unprogressive spirit so often exhibited even among professing Christians!—that spirit which turns proudly and sometimes scornfully away from all new disclosures on the sublimest themes; and which—asking for no more and no higher truth—plumes itself on present attainments, as if the farthest boundaries of spiritual knowledge and heavenly wisdom had been already compassed!

O, God of boundless truth and love, be pleased to look with pitying eye on the foolish pride and self-conceit of the multitudes who treat with scorn and derision thy sublime revealings, and shed down on all thy children here below more of that humble, truth-seeking, wisdom-loving, progressive spirit of thy children in the realms above!

E have shown in previous chapters that heaven consists of innumerable societies of wise and happy beings, all of whom were once dwellers in the natural world; and spirits of a very different character, also of human origin, constituting a realm quite the opposite to that of heaven, have often been referred to. Thus we have, in these two realms, the clearly announced Bible doctrine of a heaven of angels and a hell of devils. These in the aggregate constitute the spiritual world—a world not remote from the natural, but inti-