Page:The Other Life.djvu/65

 side of ourselves. We touch the physical objects about us with delicate nerve-cells sheathed in soft and pliant tissues. We touch the flowers through an aromal atmosphere which circulates around them as our own great atmosphere envelops our globe. Through the medium of an undulating air, breaking in delicate waves upon our auditory nerves, we touch the mighty organ as it breathes in music and the distant clouds as they smite in thunder. Through the infinitesimal vibrations of a luminous ether, we touch the mountain-tops and the stars and the sun.

Through similar and corresponding atmospheres and media, composed of spiritual substances, our spiritual senses come into contact with the spiritual world. We touch or communicate with each other in our thoughts and affections, with spiritual objects around us, with heavenly societies near or remote, and with God himself. Wonderful and beautiful is the parallelism or correspondence between the natural and the spiritual worlds in all their forms, forces and phenomena!

In the spiritual world as in the natural, there are three discrete degrees of attenuated substances, which receive and present or make objective the influxes of divine love and wisdom into created