Page:The Other Life.djvu/211

 would obliterate what little light of their own they were enjoying in their sad, painful, pitiable way. The reason is that the light of heaven and the light of hell, although coming originally from the same source, flow through different media, and do not accord or correspond. An analogous phenomenon is seen on earth. Two waves of light, not according or corresponding, but coming into collision, produce darkness. Two rays of heat can also be made to produce cold or a fall in the thermometer; and two waves of sound may result, not in a sound of double intensity, but in absolute silence.

Heaven is concealed from the spirits in hell; for they cannot feel its heat nor see its light nor breathe its atmosphere. They deny its existence, they scoff at the idea of God, rave against the name of Christ and the Word, and attribute all things to nature as stoutly as the most inveterate scientific infidels of our own day. They can be brought back, however, into their earthly states of thought, and then adjoined to the intellectual sphere of the angels, so that they can think from their standpoint, and thus see all the wonders of heaven and understand all the truths of the Lord's spiritual kingdom. But when they return into the