ting off of all business affairs a great annoyance. If we have lived so selfishly that we cannot use our leisure and enjoy our liberty when it comes, we may find the astral life very dull and irksome.
Life on the astral plane is not punitive, but purgative. All of nature's processes are really kind and beneficient, although it is not always apparent on the surface. Pain is a friend. It is always the lesser of two evils. It is nature's danger signal. We unconsciously get a hand too close to the fire and are startled with a burn. This is the warning. But for it the hand would have been consumed. We overwork, and a warning pain springs up in our brain or heart. The network of nerves that makes us suffer is but nature's telegraph system prepared to send an instantaneous message of warning from every point of the body to the brain. Now, for precisely the same reason that we suffer here we may suffer there—not because we are being punished, but because the moral nature is being purged; because we are getting rid of certain traits and tendencies that to retain would mean greater suffering in the future. If a man has an abscess it may be painful to submit to the surgeon's knife; but that suffering is the way back to good health, plus the consequence of having violated some of nature's laws. There is no such thing as dodging natural law. It operates as unerringly and as exactly in the unseen world as in the visible, and therefore a study of this subject is important. By having a knowledge of the astral life and the after-death conditions, both terror and suffering may be avoided. Such suffering as may be experienced is not, of course, physical, for the physical body, with all its aches and pains, has been left behind. But we all know from experience that physical pain causes less suffering than mental and emotional distress. No physical pain is comparable to the pangs
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