Page:The Other Life.djvu/57

 the main cause of the prevailing darkness and skepticism about spiritual things.

During our earth-life we seem to ourselves to see, hear and feel only from physical causes. We look downward and outward entirely. We know nothing consciously of our interior, spiritual life. Nature stands before us, as a vast, crushing, inexorable reality; heaven floats afar off as a shadow or a dream. The spiritual is unheard, unseen, uncomprehended: present to us only in the pictures of hope, the whisperings of faith, and the intuitions of love!

At death the windows of our natural house are all shut; the rooms are ail empty. The tenement is deserted, silent, dark, useless; abandoned to the ravages of time and the elements. The windows of our spiritual house then open out upon the beauties and glories of the spiritual world. The rooms are radiant with eternal light; the halls are echoing with celestial music; the portals are overarched with immortal flowers. We are thenceforth dead to nature; and our friends, poor prisoners in time and space, see us no more.

How wonderful! how beautiful it is! that both kinds of senses, the spiritual and the natural, can be kept simultaneously open, and that a man can