Regions of the Dead.

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after the death of the body, may be counted part of the universal faith.

Two forms of doctrine are found :

1. The Transmigration of souls, which, ascending from lower stages, has established itself amongst the huge communities of Asia.

2. The separate personal Existence of the Soul, found not only amongst rude and primitive men, but in the heart of Christianity-where it is at once an inducement to goodness, a sustainer of hope, and a solution to the problem presented by the mixed state of our present life.

The savage mind is generally incapable of a large and clear view of immortality; all dull and careless natures are wont to regard the world to come as far off; but conviction of its reality finds expression in every definition of faith. Sometimes continuance of life is the main fact, sometimes retribution is the chief feature.

Four great regions are assigned to the dead: hell, earth, hades, heaven, and the conception of them does not sink into dreaminess, but is characterised rather by ghostliness. The low creeds have little moral element in connection with the state and place of the departed. It was reserved for our Christian Faith to implant righteousness and holiness, to give the inspiration of duty and love, and to constitute them chief verities in the Kingdom of God.

FUTURE RETRIBUTION.

The idea of future retribution and different grades of condition is not universal: some savage races are in an intermediate condition between the continuance theory and the retribution theory. This confirms the New Testament statement that the revelation of a pure and glorious immortality is by Jesus Christ.

All races have idea of the soul outliving the body in a country of ghosts; and all carnal men, whether of low or high culture, count a corner in this world the better place. In all faiths, except the Christian Faith, whether the spirit dwells with the body in the grave, or is secluded in a subterranean void, or abides in the dark classic realm of hades, or occupies

the Roman Orcus of pallid souls, or roams the ghostly prairie of the savage hunter, the life is shadowy and dismal. The Sheol of ancient Jewish dead was, to common conception, but little better-a place where the dead met the dead. Nevertheless, we can trace amongst many barbarous nations germs of that holy comforting doctrine which lies at the very heart of Christianity; but the roads by which a happy land is attained are so strangely different that the path of life to one race seems to another a very descent into the pit. The chiet idea in low culture is-what gives prosperity or renown here will give it hereafter; present contrasts have reality in future existence; "the good are good warriors and hunters," said the Pawnee chief; but as the good, whatever it may mean, is a qualification for reward, the theory, even among lowest races, belongs to morality.

The crude primitive faith pictures a spectral abode. The higher faiths more and more spiritualise the definite regions of heaven and hell into states rather than localities of happiness and misery. In the last hours of earthly dwelling godly men say of the coming change-"It is not death, but life." Mourners, setting aside the evidence of their physical senses, exclaim-"Life is not severed by fatal shears, only the bands of earth, the consummation is in eternal glory." The Christian Faith reveals a state of perfect purity; and to aid our conception of it brings to view a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

THE POWER AND DOCTRINE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE.

The attempts which have been made to discredit the Divine Inspiration of Holy Scripture, and to disprove Prophecy, faith in a Personal God, in moral order, in spiritual existence, in judgment to come, have led to searching investigation.

A certain predictive power seems to be possessed by peculiar states of human consciousness, and prophecy of some kind has been found to exist among all nations. Apart from any sacred purpose, considered as a mere faculty in the human mind, it is something distinct from intelligent thought and consciousness, but not inconsistent with them: it is a part of the relation of the psyche to the inner and outer world. In

Predictive Power.

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Hellas, the office of the Pythia, with the rational prophet or оpýrηs to stand beside her; and amongst Jews, the school of the Prophets; are historical proofs.

The power, in its lowest form, is a morbid condition of consciousness, or a sickly brooding enthusiasm ; but, though uncertain in the degree and accuracy of prophetic enunciation, it has, through the whole course of history, obtained and kept power over stoutest minds. In high states, or the spiritual grade-we speak not of the sacred and Divine as found in Holy Scripture-the inward vision is allied with the faculty of recollection; is related to, but is not, demoniacal possession.

It is an error to assume that it belongs wholly to lower culture, and will be destroyed by higher medical knowledge. Higher medical knowledge will do well to investigate it as psychic power. In British India, moving, writhing, tearing men, are entered by a psychic power and oracles are uttered. This kind of prophecy, or prevision, or delusion, or disease, or whatever it may be, arose in times of so-called barbarism; continued in full vigour throughout the classic world, and exists now scarcely altered. Men, who naturally have neither ability nor eloquence, will, in the possessed state, pour forth earnest lofty declamation in well-knit harangue of metaphor and poetic figure.

We are not prepared with any explanation, and only use the fact as one of the many links by which human consciousness is united to a world of occult influences; and as example, whether good or bad, of the verity of that higher and holier power which is manifested in Scripture. The relation seems to be somewhat like that of the divining damsel, at Philippi, to St. Paul and the preached gospel (Acts xvi. 16–18).

These investigations, carried into fields of thought, worked, for the most part, by those who refuse Holy Scripture, show that the attempt of physicists to limit the universe to material existences is in opposition to universal consciousness and experience. Matter is but one small piece of furniture in the many-chambered House of God. There is world within world, as there are stars beyond stars; and space, where we see nothing, teems with a more manifold existence than that

exhibited in material forms. It is the high attribute of true Art and Science to suggest infinitely more than they express; suggestions that all material things are not carcases of the dead, but rather germs of life. We all, at times, have the shuddering impression, embodied by Coleridge in dark and fearful verse, that something not of earth is behind us; and he is less than man who does not weave wild contrasts of heights and depths, of solemn mysteries, of possible loss, of holy and eternal triumph,

"A spirit moves within us, and impels
The passion of a prophet to our lips."

Inner powers are ready to be quickened into the life of manifold senses: senses by which we see-not with the eye; and hear-not by the ear; faculties enabling the soul to discriminate between spirit and spirit, evoking forms now coiled as in chrysalis web, that we may stand perfect in vital organisation.

Take example, a cultivator of positive science, endowed with healthiest of human brains, Sir Humphry Davy. By inhalation of nitrous oxide, he was abstracted from all external things, losing perception of them. Trains of visible images, strangely linked with words, passed rapidly through his mind; so that he "existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas." On awaking he resolved that the universe had its chief reality in the mind. If so slight a cause, till then unknown, gave exhilaration, clasticity, vigour, refreshing and doubling the grandeur and might of intellectual man; it is certain that many occult influences run through all creation; and our present faculties, duly heightened, might establish communication wherever beings live and think. Man already obtains favours that are marvellous; yet, he does but touch the infinite; can only meditate a little on evils that perplex--not disable and disarm them; can but desire the exquisite and perfectly good-not possess it.

The consideration of these mental phenomena and potentialities enables us to make a profitable definite examination of Holy Scripture.

Unity, Variety, Grandeur of Scripture.

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The examination aims at showing that the Infinite Spirit has entered finite Nature; that the Voice which past generations believed to be the Voice of God revealing deep mysteries, is a true Voice; that Christianity consists of a definite positive body of truths admitting neither addition nor diminution except by Divine Authority; and that the Bible is not such a book as man would make, if he could; or could make, if he would.

The indications of unity in the Bible, despite being the work of many writers who were separated by wide intervals in time and space, are proof of a plan running through the whole, and render it impossible for the Book to be a work either of chance or of human contrivance.

More varied in its contents, in its writers, in its ages, than any other book; it raises unwearied testimony against the universal tendency to polytheism; and, as if to disprove the possibility of it being the product or evolution of human consciousness, it everywhere maintains a sublime doctrine of monotheism. This Book, alone of all books, resisted and overcame the tendency to worship many gods; and declared of the one God-" His the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is His; and He reigneth over all."

With the unique spiritual sublimity, is an inversion of the seeming relative importance of events. The rise and fall of empires, changes and revolutions which fill nations with terror or triumph, sure to be recorded on human page, have here little or no mention. A small people, domestic scenes, family trials, traits of personal character, are invested with peculiar greatness, some mysterious connection with moral government by the Supreme Ruler. The world rings with the fame of great captains, the earth shakes beneath the tread of innumerable legions, and the writers of this strange Book are not deaf; nevertheless, the Bible is silent and unconcerned as sun and stars: only those events are regarded as great which bear on the development and issues of that spiritual empire, or Kingdom of God, which the Book asserts is being founded and builded in the world.