visits to their former homes, always appear to men clad as they used to be when incarnated. They are compelled to this course by an integral law of soul, so long as there are any on earth capable of recognizing them, or so long as a good descriptive portrait may exist. If the likelihood of identification does not exist, then the spirits may assume such instructive or beautiful forms as are either the spontaneous expression of their interior state, or as their goodness may suggest, and unfolded wisdom prompt.
Some of my readers may feel disposed to inquire, "Where was my soul when it made these interesting discoveries?" The response is: not in space, not in time; for I was in a condition above and beyond these, just as tune is above tone, or as meaning is above and beyond the mere sound of the words conveying it. I sustained the precise relation to time, and space, and matter, that heat does to cold, light to shadow, shape to essence, phantasmata to reality, bulk to number, number to mass, or any two antithetical things whereof men may have ideas. I had become a resident of a new universe, differing as greatly from that upon which man's vision rests, as that itself is different from dreamland. My glad soul had crossed the shores of time and distance, and the barque of its existence was fairly launched upon the vast ocean of a new eternity.
O, ye babblers of vain, philosophy, who nurse folly for aye, and call it wisdom, ye who. are so deeply engrossed in nursing your pet theories—theories planted on nothing, and reaching nowhere, what know ye really of the other stages of human existence? Nothing! Aye, truly, nothing! and echo, hollow echo, gives back—
