Page:The Other Life.djvu/97

 the spiritual wisdom of the middle degree. This, flowing down into the world of spirits, shorn in a great measure of its beauty and power, becomes the thought of that sphere. Passing lastly into the spiritual-natural form of man, it is human thought, reason, speech.—Thus all things are bound together in a golden chain.

When God would speak to man, his idea first takes on the forms of the celestial sphere, and is a communication understood only by the celestial angels. The same idea passing through the spiritual degree takes on a covering or mode of expression peculiar to that sphere, and is a revelation to a lower form of spiritual life. The same divine idea reaches man upon earth and is dimly shadowed forth in some homely phrase of human speech.

This fact, that forms of expression are changed according to the descent of ideas from the higher to the lower degrees, explains our doctrine that the Word of God has meaning within meaning, sense within sense, adapted to the different degrees of life, and that its last and lowest sense, our literal Scripture, necessarily takes on the forms and imperfections of human thought and the limitations and feebleness of human speech.