460 THE SPIRITUAL BODY; ITS NATURE, LIFE, AND APPELLATIONS. (Concluded from page 426.) We live in the spiritual world, all of us, as persons blind from birth live in the present material one, i. e., in it, but not seeing it; and the death of the material body, (which involves the permanent opening of the spiritual sight,) is like the couching of the eyes of such persons by an oculist, and enabling them to see what surrounds them. The cessation after death, of our consciousness of the material, is imaged, in manner not unlike, in the suspension of our external senses during sleep. There is far more than superficially appears in that ancient saying, Sleep is the Brother of Death. You may lift up the latch of my eyes, and unroll the loveliest landscape before them; the sense remains obstinately dull. You may play the sweetest music; the ear is deaf to the strain. You may present the most odorous bouquet to my nostrils; its fragrance is wasted on the desert air.' But to subordinate the Material, is universally to give scope to the Spiritual. Hence it is that in sleep, sensibility to the material world being suspended, there comes in place of it, that mysterious foreshadowing of our trans-sepulchral sensibility to the spiritual, which occurs in certain modes of dreaming. We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleep,' says Sir Thomas Brown, and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps.' Strange state of being! For 'tis still to be; Senseless to feel, and with seal'd eyes to see. Doubtless the majority of dreams are what Macnish asserts all to be, namely, the resuscitation of thoughts which in some shape or other have previously occupied the mind.* Experience and revelation attest, however, that at times, the struggles of the chained spirit to employ, and thus to enjoy itself amid the glories of its proper clime, are not in vain. Such are the occasions when strange, beautiful pictures open out before our sleeping sight, rich in all the colours and reality of life. It will be said that these are creations of the imagination. Probably so. But then what is this imagination'? Barely to assign a phenomenon to the imagination' is to get no nearer to its cause. It is to evade the question, rather than to resolve it. The 'imagination,' as usually * Philosophy of Sleep. Ed. 2. referred to, is just one of those useful entrenchments behind which perplexity is apt to shelter itself, and nothing more. The imagination belongs less to the material than to the spiritual world; or at least, it is like the Janus bifrons of the Roman mythology,-provided with a twofold face and senses. But leaving aside such dreams as those alluded to, even the ordinary kind claim to originate in a spiritual activity, similarly concurrent with the ligation of external sense. For the resuscitation of thoughts which in some shape or other have previously occupied the mind,' is nothing more or less than a prelude to what will unquestionably form a chief part of our intellectual experience of futurity; namely, the inalienable and irrepressible recollection of the deeds and feelings played forth while in the flesh, providing a beatitude or a misery for ever. Ordinarily, this resuscitation is of such a medley and jumbled character, that not only is the general product unintelligible, but the particular incidents are themselves too fragmentary and dislocated to be recognized. But it is not always so. There must be few who have not experienced in their sleep, with what peculiar vividness, unknown to their waking hours, and with what minute exactitude of portraiture, events long past and long lost sight of, will not infrequently come back, shewing that there is a something within which never forgets, and which only waits the negation of the external world, to leap up and certify its powers. In the whole compass of poetry, perhaps there is nothing more touching than the allusion in the Exile of Erin : Erin! my country, though sad and forsaken, In dreams I re-visit thy sea-beaten shore; But alas! in a far foreign land I awaken, And sigh for the friends I shall never see more! That which so vividly remembers is the Soul; and if in the sleep which refreshes our organic nature, it utters its recollections but brokenly and indistinctly, it will abundantly compensate itself when the material vesture which clogs it shall be cast away. Much of the indistinctness of dreams probably arises from physical unhealthiness. If a sound body be one of the first requirements to a sound mind, in relation to its waking employments, no less must it be needful to the sanity and precision of its sleeping ones. Brilliant as are the powers and functions of the spiritual body, the performance of them, whether sleeping or waking, so long as it is investured with flesh and blood, is immensely, perhaps wholly, contingent on the health of the material body. If the material body be improperly fed, or the blood be insufficiently oxygenated, the brain and nerves are imperfectly nourished, and the spiritual N. S. NO. 168.-VOL. XIV. 3 N body can but imperfectly enact its wills. However little it may be suspected, the great practical question of our day, the health of towns, thus involves, to a less or greater extent, the moral and intellectual interests of the community. For a soul that is debarred from acting freely and vigorously, through a defective or vitiated condition of its instrument, cannot be expected to act nobly and religiously. Common as is the theory that the soul sinks into lethargy after death, existing nohow and nowhere till the day of judgment;' practically no one thinks so, shewing again how the heart corrects the head. Who ever speaks of the departed except as having gone to heaven,' that is, of living there as an angel? Here, indeed, is the mourner's consolation. When the loved and lost are thought of by the calm light of the great and sacred truth that there is a spiritual body,' they cease to be dead; their resurrection has already taken place. The mind that is in a right state recoils from the chill ideas of the coffin, and putrefaction, and inanimateness, and fastens on the sweet conviction that the vanished one is alive, and in the enjoyment of serenest happiness and rest. It thinks of the corpse in the grave merely as an old garment, consecrated indeed by the loved being who had used it, but of no value in itself, and soon to be the dust from which it was moulded. To believe that the departed is in heaven' is necessarily to believe in the spiritual body; also to believe in its immediate resurrection, and what is of no less importance, in its immediate 'judgment.' Never was there a more lovely illustration of this faith than the epitaph on the mother and her infant in the Greenwood Cemetery at New York:-'Is it well with thee? Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well.' (2 Kings, iv. 26.) Not the least pleasing element of the great mystery of the spiritual body is that which concerns the souls of little children who die, and their development in the future life. Whether do they remain little children, or expand to the full, beautiful, noble human stature? Either way, those who have lost such a one, are never without a little child to love and nestle in their hearts. The others grow up and become men and women, but this one stays with them for ever. The conviction of our departed friends being alive in heaven, fashions our own secret expectations. No one ever imagines from his heart, that he is to lie indefinitely in the earth, but rather that all pleasant things and states will immediately supervene, the same, yet inexpressibly more bright, all the dreams found, and only the sleep lost. To die is to greet and be greeted by faces shining in the sweetest lineaments of love. It is enough that we have a spontaneous hope of it, for the hopes of the heart are rarely deceptions. Holding such views in their hearts, and daily reading the book wherein they are confirmed, is it not strange that Christians should use for the symbol of death, the unconsoling, not to say disgusting and disheartening, skull and cross-bones! What a Sadducean usage compared with the beautiful custom of the ancient Greeks, who, though pagans,' saw death imaged rather in the living, glossy, Evergreen tree, and planted accordingly, beside their tombs, the cypress and the yew. In ancient funeral ceremonies were used, for the same reason, branches of myrtle and arbutus, as shewn by the beautiful allusions in the Electra of Euripides, and the 11th book of the Æneid. Certainly the former custom is still extant, but not so its intrinsic significance, or whence the dull surmises that have been set forth to explain its retention? That which is perennially fair and cheerful is the true emblem of death; not that which is dolorous;—the tree green throughout the winter, and the Amaranth, rather than the decaying old bone. How elegantly and appropriately the Amaranth is associated with life and death by the poets; and practically, under the name of Immortelle, in the cemetery of Père la Chaise, is well known. It is not a little curious that the only personification of death which has come down to us from antiquity, represents it as a skeleton dancing to the music of the double flute. This is contained on a gem preserved in the Medicean Gallery at Florence, and figured in the Museum Florentinum. There can be little doubt that the charming old fable of the singing of the swan before its death, is but a poetic rendering of the same idea. † Beautiful again is the similitude of life and its interlude of death, presented in those mysterious rivers which, like the Guadalquiver, after flowing for some distance, lucid and majestic, suddenly hide themselves in the ground, but a little further on burst out again, as pure and bright, and grand as ever. Leopold Scheffer, in that exquisite German tale, The Artist's Married Life,' when little Agnes is lying n her coffin, expresses in one word what it is to die : 6 If sorrow to the child thou thought'st to bring, O Death! thou art deceived; For yesterday it living laughed; to-day, though dead, it smiles! To enter the spiritual world, or rather, to become conscious of it, requires no long journey. Man, as already observed, is from his birth an inhabitant of it. Wherever there are material substances and material worlds, there likewise is the spiritual universe. Could we be trans * Gemmæ Antiquæ ex Thesauro Mediceo, &c. Plate 94, fig. 3. + For an exhaustive account of all that is contained in ancient literature on the singing of the swan, see Jodrell's Commentaries on Euripides, under Ion. ported to the most distant star that the telescope can descry, we should not be a hair's breadth nearer to it than we are at this moment, nor should we be a hair's breadth more distant from it. So far from being infinitely remote and unconnected, as vulgarly supposed, the invisible or spiritual world is immediately contiguous. It circumferences us like the air we breathe. It is only to unintelligence that it is distant, and thus like the Beautiful,-at once quite close, and far away. It is near to our souls, which alone have concern with it, as the sweet kiss of true love; far from our bodies as such love is from the vicious. This is the very letter of Scripture. When the shepherds were watching their flocks on the eve of the nativity, the angels had no long distance to traverse in order to come into view. They were not seen first as a bright speck in the sky, gradually, as they drew nearer, taking shape. They were beheld 'suddenly,' indicating that they were close by all the while, and that for them to be seen it was merely needful that the spiritual eyes of the shepherds should be opened. At death, accordingly, there is no migration to some distant region of space; the avenue to our eternal abode is simply the casting off the flesh and blood' which 'cannot inherit' it, and heaven and hell are near and distant according to each man's moral state. Death is another life. We bow our heads 6 What are the landscape features of that 'golden chamber,' of course we cannot know till we enter it, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.' But the inspiration which promises it says also that 'the invisible things of God are clearly seen by the things which are made,' signifying that the splendours of futurity, though in their ful ness unimaginable, are nevertheless pictured in those of earth. Heaven is the permanent εἴδος of creation; earth is its dim εἴδωλον.* The spiritual world is the universe of the essences of things; the material one is the theatre of their finited presentation; to such extent, and in such variety, that is, as it is necessary or desirable that man should know them during his time-life. Doubtless there are millions of spiritual things which are never ultimated into material effigies, but reserved as the privilege of the angels. Yet whatever we do see, that is excellent and lovely, we may be sure is a counterpart of something What if Earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein, Each to the other like, more than on earth is thought? Milton. |