The mind accustomed to survey and be delighted with the beauties of nature and the works of ingenuity and taste, will find itself involuntarily asking, where are the flowing rivers,the towering mountains and the wide extended plains, with their fields of fruits and flowers? Where are the stately temples, towering up in finely moulded architectural forms? Are these all wanting in that spiritual world? Is that a world of affections and thoughts, but nothing more!
Before we give an affirmative answer to these questions, let us ask ourselves again, whence comes all the beauty, loveliness and grandeur that we behold on this earth? It can hardly be said to be the earth itself that produces these things. It only responds to the action of the sun's heat and light, beneath whose potent influence there spring forth and are revealed those useful forms, which, again remoulded by the hand of man, make this earth appear so much like home. And may it not be possible that the sun of the spiritual world has power to produce corresponding spiritual forms? May it not be that beneath its genial warmth and bright effulgence, the affections and thoughts of each spirit spring forth and are manifested in living forms precisely corresponding to his state?
There appears to be a deep and very general impression that there are external forms and appearances in the spiritual world. A cold and lifeless philosophy, that knows nothing of spiritual things, may ridicule such a sentiment, and the teachers of religious doctrines may join in the ridicule. But we would ask such men, whence it is that poetical descriptions of spiritual scenery are so universally admired? Take as an example the following familiar lines:—
"Oh the transporting rapturous scene,
That rises to my sight,
Sweet fields arrayed in living green,
And rivers of delight."
Is this sentiment merely a wild flight of the imagination? and has the mind no anticipation of the existence of any such spiritual scenery? To the mere sensualist it may seem
