Page:The Philosophy of Creation.djvu/191

 merely a theory, but sound, wise, and righteous, daily thinking, loving, and living.

At death the Limbus is not cast off from the spiritual body along with the material body. It quiesces, and becomes as the outer cuticle of the spiritual body. Nor is it carried into the spiritual world. It still remains in the natural world, for though it is formed from the purest substances in nature, it can not be carried into the spiritual world. It rests upon the atmospheres, which in turn rest upon the earth, whereby its form is preserved from without as the natural body is by the pressure of the air; and its form is preserved by the spirit from within as the material basis of the eternal permanency of the soul. The Limbus performs the physical use of holding the purer substances of the spirit in form after the rejection of the material body at death, just as the skin of the body holds in form the volatile substances within it.

The angelic heavens rest upon the plane of the Limbus in nature, and by that and successive atmospheres lastly upon the solid parts of the earth. In a most real way the earth is the "footstool" of angelic life and of God's creation. Without the Limbus the spiritual bodies of the inhabitants of the other world would dissolve, like decaying bodies, and life there would perish.