CHAPTER XXI.

The range of subjects coming within the scope of my title is so great that I cannot undertake an exhaustive treatment of any within reasonable limits, but I hope to supply a few keys by the use of which reverent minds of any and every school of thought may be able to enter upon successful explorations.

The amount of evidence necessary to convince a sincere inquirer that this earth-life, important as it is, is but the threshold of existence, is not very great, but it must needs be adapted to the individual mind.

To obtain this evidence is worth more to any man or woman than any other purely mental acquirement can be.

For it is a mental acquisition, the possession of which is related to, and has a natural influence over, every other we can call our own. Yet it has not, in itself, any transforming effect upon the life and character.

When such a result follows, other influences share in the work. He who has lost friends that were a part of his life, the mother whose children have fainted away into the world of mystery, the philosopher who has given the strength of his years to the search for truth, are all profoundly affected by the discovery; while those in whom the affections are less strongly developed, or whose mental powers give them no adequate perception of the profound and far-reaching relations of this great truth, may hold it as lightly as they do their dreams, and receive from it no more benefit than they do from them.

Whoever is capable of analyzing a thought or the expression of a thought, can find evidence of the world beyond strewn along his path on every hand.

All figurative expressions are merely unconscious devices to give to thought somewhat of the objective reality it possesses to dwellers in the Beyond. For instance:

"There are names which carry with them something of a charm. We have but to say 'Athens,' and all the great deeds of antiquity break upon our hearts like a sudden gleam of sunshine; 'Florence,' and the magnificence and passionate agitation of Italy's prime send forth their fragrance towards us like blossom-laden boughs, from whose dusky shadows we catch whispers of the beautiful tongue."

Is it doubted that the Athens of which the author speaks will be found embodied in forms real and tangible in that other world which takes to itself all that attains to immortality in this one?

Why do authors speak of a cold greeting, of walls of reserve, rivers of kindness, or the sunshine of love?

They may not be able fully to explain, but expressions like these point to features of the landscape in that world where the inner becomes the outer and takes on those garments of reality which belong to it by right.

The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are unseen are eternal, and when we have broken connection with our temporal bodies, or attained a true and perfect control over them, we may enter into this knowledge, to find it truly a heavenly inheritance.

But it is not alone through figurative and poetic language that we may discover evidence of the existence of an immaterial world.

The broad fields of philosophy and literary criticism receive their light, their water, and their air, outside the world of sense almost entirely. Scarce anything in these domains has any causative relation with the world of matter.

For instance, take this passage from one of the magazines:

"But what does the work of higher criticism really mean? It means, briefly, as applied to the Old Testament, the revision of certain traditions concerning the structure, the date, the authorship of the books--traditions which had their origin in the fanciful and uncritical circles of Judaism just before, or soon after, the Christian era."

A careful analysis of the meaning of this will show that it begins and ends in the domain of abstract thought. To use a figurative expression, it does not touch the ground anywhere. If our bodies and their needs, if the earth and its products which minister to those needs, if, in brief, the material universe really comprised the all that is, such a thought as is contained in the passage quoted could never have come into being. For it has no practical relation to things as such.

Yet there is nothing especially obscure about it. It was written for men and women of ordinary intelligence, who are supposed to take an interest not merely in sacred truths, which, indeed, are not dealt with in the article from which I quote, but the structural forms containing those truths.

All of which, rightly interpreted, points to another phase of existence, which is either near to or far from us according to the stage of our development, a phase which may become measurably real to us even before we enter fully upon it, and which has the strongest possible claims upon our attention.