Page:The Other Life.djvu/83

 woods and fields. The souls of the rose, the violet, the mignonette, and the myriads of their charming sisters, float for ever as haloes of sweetness about the persons of the good, the pure and the beautiful.

The sense of taste is very obscure in the spiritual world; indeed almost null, almost dropped and left behind with those who enjoy the pleasures of the table on earth. There is no cooking in heaven; no gastronomic enjoyments. Eating there seems to be rare and little, a mere ceremonial, symbolical of spiritual appropriations as the Lord's Supper is upon earth. The reason of this is, that the spiritual body is not kept in form and life like the natural body by a regular supply and waste of inert material, but by a continual condensation or concretion of the inmost substances of the spiritual atmospheres, which concretion is effected by an emotional and intellectual appropriation of the divine love and truth which pervade those atmospheres. The spiritual bodies of infants grow in heaven by this process.

If any one objects to this idea of the condensation or concretion of invisible atmospheric substances into solid forms, we will remind him that it is the very process by which our own world has