Page:The Other Life.djvu/113

 name and his works will grow brighter and brighter in the eyes of successive generations, when all the false prophets and false Christs, both in the Church and out of it, have passed into oblivion.

The mind of man, unillumined by light from heaven, never could have invented the sublime philosophy by which the Swedish seer has penetrated so far into the mysterious abysses of the universe. The unaided imagination of the natural mind, struggling to frame for itself some idea or visible image of heaven, rushes to the two extremes, materialism and sheer immateriality. Heaven is, from one standpoint, a purely mental state of existence, a negation of everything real; God is a Being without body, parts, or passions; the soul is a formless and intangible ether; its life hereafter is one of perpetual psalm-singing and oral prayer.

The mind which entertains this idea of heaven is like the earth before the creation, "without form and void;" a chaos, a dark, bewildering abyss. It needs the voice of God to speak light into existence, so that it may think wisely and rationally.

On the other extreme the natural mind falls into utter materialism. Heaven is located in some distant star or sun, or it occupies