Page:The Other Life.djvu/184

 righteousness for sin. It is this which signalizes the Christian from the Mohammedan paradise. Not that sense and substance and splendid imagery, and the glories of a visible creation seen with bodily eyes are excluded from it, but that all which is vile in principle and voluptuous in impurity will be utterly excluded from it. There will be a firm earth as we have at present, and a heaven stretched over it, as we have at present; and it is not by the absence of these things, but by the absence of sin, that the abodes of immortality will be characterized."

The speculations of this great evangelical thinker, though far below the standard of New Church truth, and showing rather a brave search and struggle for light than the light itself, are cordially commended to those persons, who are afraid to think independently on those sublime themes, or even to think of them at all. They may infer from these views that it is unscriptural, unphilosophical and absurd, to speak or even think of heaven as a vague and felicitous state of the soul floating away in immaterial ethers. And that, on the contrary, it is highly rational and biblical to describe it as a genuine and beautiful world, full of glorious and saintly people, living in the constant exercise of