Page:The Other Life.djvu/63

 of the natural body? Because the spiritual body is the ultimate and basis of the soul, and the soul is immortal. Our natural bodies are of temporal use, because birth, growth, and discipline in the lowest sphere are necessary to the soul in its first evolutions. In due time the soul must expand and achieve the higher possibilities of its nature. It therefore rises from its worn-out and useless natural form, as the butterfly rises from the body of the grub-worm. Does the butterfly ever return into the body of the worm? There are no backward steps in nature or in the soul.

The spirits and angels who conversed with Swedenborg were touched with a certain sorrowful indignation, that men upon earth, and especially Christians believing the Word of God, entertained such vague and absurd ideas about the nature of the soul and the life after death, amounting to no idea at all, and closing the mind by sensuous fallacies against the light of truth. They rejoiced that Swedenborg had been intromitted into the spiritual sphere, so that he could teach mankind from actual observation, that a spirit is only a more perfect and beautiful man, living in an immortal human form and enjoying all the senses which we here attribute to the human body.