Page:The Other Life.djvu/48

 by the assertion that the soul cannot be divested by death of the human form—ask him if Christ did not ascend to heaven with the human body which he exhibited to the doubting apostle? if Enoch and Elijah, did not pass bodily into the spiritual world? if all the spirits and angels seen of the prophets and apostles did not appear in the human shape? if his own idea of the final heaven of the saints is not based upon the resurrection and purification of his own gross natural body?

He will be obliged from his own standpoint (which is not ours) to answer these questions affirmatively; but he will not abide the logical issue. With strange inconsistency he charges us with entertaining a sensuous idea of heaven, when we affirm, from the biblical standpoint, that the soul has a bodily human form and enjoys all the senses and faculties which we here possess.

Swedenborg alone has taught us the deep philosophical and moral significance of the Human Form. It is the only form capable of expressing the spiritual life by freedom of will, rationality of thought and the subordination of the sensuous to a higher sphere. It is the form of forms, the central, pivotal, archetypal form to which all other forms in the universe refer themselves. All the