Page:The Other Life.djvu/111

 Say that heaven is a state of perpetual prayers and praises and ineffable bliss, and you find a ready acquiescence; but endeavor to give it a "local habitation and a name," to describe it and make it credible to our rational faculty, and all ears are deaf to us, all eyes are blind.

The Bible itself is in a measure a dead letter in the eyes of a sensual and philosophizing generation. The very people who believe it and love it and preach it, cannot realize that the Bible shows us that angels and departed spirits are living already in the human form, seeing, feeling, loving and even eating as we do. They forget that the prophets and apostles who had glimpses of heaven, saw there mountains and rivers and seas and fields and temples and cities and animals, and all such visible objects as meet our senses here.

If they say that all these things are symbolical and not real, which is equivalent to saying that revelation is a kind of dream, what will they answer, when we press home to them their own professed beliefs, (in which, however, we do not concur,) that Enoch and Elijah and the Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven with their material bodies? How can physical bodies, such as they had upon earth, exist among the unsubstantial