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Page 40
Does one fear the change from gross to fine, from force of freezing to
the winged energy of steam, from solid zinc to lightning? Our whole
desire for education is a desire for refining influences. We know
there is a higher love for country than that begotten by the fanfare of
the Fourth of July. There is a smile of joy at our country's education
and purity finer than the guffaws provoked by hearing the howls of a
dog and the explosions of firecrackers when the two are inextricably
mixed. There is a flame of religious love when the heart sacrifices
itself in humble realization of the joy of its adorable love purer than
the fierce fire of the hating heart that applies the torch to the
martyr's pyre. We give our lives to seeking these higher refinements
because they are stronger and more like God.
Does one fear to leave bodily appetites and passions for spiritual
aptitudes fitted to finer surroundings? He should not. Man has had
two modes of life already--one, slightly conscious, closely confined,
peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any
one of the five senses. That is prenatal. He comes into the next
life. At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes
of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new
surroundings, his immensely wider life, and finds his superior
companions and surroundings fitted to him, even to his finest need for
love. Why hesitate for a third mode of life? He loses modes of
nourishment; so he has before. He loses relations to former life; so
he has before. He comes into new companionships and surroundings; so
he has before. But each time and in every respect his powers,
possibilities, and field have been immensely enlarged.
O the hour when this material
Shall have vanished like a cloud,
When amid the wide ethereal
All the invisible shall crowd.
In that sudden, strange transition,
By what new and finer sense
Shall we grasp the mighty vision,
And receive the influence?
Knowledge of the third state of man is not so difficult to attain in
the second as knowledge of the second was in the first. If a fit
intelligence should study a specimen of man about to emerge from its
first stage of existence, it could judge much of the conditions of the
second. Feet suggest solid land; lungs suggest liquid air; eyes,
light; hands, acquisitiveness, and hence dominion; tongue, talk, and
hence companions, etc. What fore-gleams have we of the future life?
They are from two sources--revelation and present aptitudes not yet
realized. What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings
for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light? Everything
tells us that such aptitudes have fit field for development. The water
fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost,
straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest
among the rushes. It is not disappointed.
Man has an instinct for dominion which cannot be gratified here. He
weeps for more worlds to conquer. He is only a boy yet, getting a grip
on the hilt of the sword of conquest, feeling for some Prospero's wand
that is able to command the tempest. When he gets the proper pitch of
power, take away his body, and he is, as Richter says, no more afraid,
and he is also free from the binding effect of gravitation. Then there
are worlds enough, and every one a lighthouse to guide him to its
harbor. They all seek a Columbus with more allurements than America
did hers. Dominion over ten cities is the reward for faithfulness in
the use of a single talent.
Man has an instinct for travel and speed. To travel a couple of months
is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days. He earnestly
desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpass them,
yachts, and engines. Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning
that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a
twinkling. But he is stopped there. How he yearns to go to the moon,
the sun, and stars! But he could not take his present body through the
temperatures of space three or four hundred degrees below zero. So he
must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift
as lightning, of which there are plenty in the spaces when the world
has ceased to be a world. It is all provided for by death.
Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the
present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone. A
thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to
others and to the world about him, beset him here. There he shall know
even as he is known by perfect intelligence.
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