Page:The Other Life.djvu/206

 the power of turning our spiritual bodies as we please—to or from God; the power of determining our affections and thoughts, which are the spiritual substances of the soul, so that they shall present one form or another to the inflowing life of God; this is free-agency, never violated by God, because it is the fundamental distinction between man and God. If man were not a free agent he would be a material part of God, moved like a machine; and pantheism would be true.

The divine influx is always the same. The form determines how it shall be outwardly manifested. This is the atomic arrangement of the spiritual world corresponding to what we see daily in the natural world. The same influx of the sun produces the beautiful and the hideous in nature, the nutritious and the poisonous; the golden flower, emblem of sweetest thought, and the repulsive weed, fit only to be trodden under foot. The atomic arrangement of the vegetable and animal cells, all at first inspection undistinguishable from each other, determines what forms shall appear, whether it shall be a silver lily or a livid fungus; a scaly serpent or a burnished dove. The same law prevails in heaven and in hell and upon earth.

Hell, therefore, is created just as heaven is cre-