Page:The Other Life.djvu/53

 atoms to masses, from chaos to order, by definite steps, series and degrees.

Angels were not created before men, as is commonly supposed. The story of the fall of angels from heaven is purely symbolical. All angels have been men or women on some earth of our material universe. There is no form higher or purer or holier than the human form; no destiny loftier than the human destiny. The final end of creation is a heaven of angels. If that could have been attained in the beginning by a spiritual creation alone, what were the use of a physical life with all its imperfections?—of a race of men with all their sufferings?

The inference from this is, that the physical universe is the necessary, first-created and utterly indestructible basis of the spiritual; an inference pregnant with philosophical and theological truth.

The old dispensation teaches that the natural body, after having been resolved into its original gaseous elements, will be suddenly re-composed and then changed in the twinkling of an eye into a spiritual body. A natural thing transformed into a spiritual thing! This dogma, so revolting to reason, science, common sense and a true conception of divine laws, is blindly accepted in the