Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/128

by good, well-developed, unfolded, and harmonic souls. * * * * Slowly the opening through which this great practical drama was seen, and its beautiful teachings conveyed to me, closed up, and once more I stood solitary in the midst of my aural sphere. Looking now toward the point wherefrom I had turned a little while before, my eyes observed that the apparent attack upon its integrity was still going on; but this was mechanical only, for my mind was dwelling upon things of far more interest and importance. Amongst other lessons gained during the brief time that I had been dead to earth, alive to a higher existence, was this: The terrestrial world itself is really spiritual, could mankind but perceive it. For instance, every tree, shrub, flower, plant and animal is not only possessed of an ideal and thought-representative value, but they are themselves essentially spiritual; for the bark, and leaves, and woody fiber, the flower-petals, and all that physical eyes behold, are not the things they seem, but are merely the outer-coats and coverings, the cloaks and garments which the things themselves put on; the nature of the external form being determined by a law integral to the very thing itself, just as a picture is merely the physical embodiment of an idea in the artist's mind. Unfavorable conditions cramp some trees physically; but burn the wood, and the spirit of the tree is as perfect as the Infinite One could fashion it. So also with human trees. Interiorly, many men and women are better than they seem, and many are worse. Still, be it remembered, that beauty and symmetry is natural to trees, even though storms, and snow, and fierce winds dismember and render them hideous; so also virtue and goodness is natural to the human soul, while vice and deformity are