Page:The Other Life.djvu/256

 Every society, every individual in that world is a centre of influx and a focus of attraction to men in this. Our very life flows to us through them, and it is colored and changed and ennobled or perverted according to the media through which it has passed. We are insensibly following our good and evil spirits in their movements, and repeating their experiences every day of our lives. We are nearing the heaven or the hell to which they are going, and putting off the evil or the good as they do. We cannot serve two masters; we must choose between them.

People who think there is to be an end of the world and a general judgment day for all who have ever lived on earth, and who locate the theatre of that judgment in the clouds or within the realm of nature, and, see no absurdity in such a belief, are unwilling to entertain the more rational doctrine, that the judgment is a spiritual process, entirely out of and above nature, which occurs in an intermediate state or world of spirits.

Such persons have derived their ideas from a sensuous interpretation of the symbolical language of prophecy. In that language the end of one Dispensation or Church is always described as the end of the world or the consummation of the age,