CHAPTER VI
THE longing in every man to meet again after death those who were most dear to him here, to have communication with them, renewing the old relations, will be satisfied in a more perfect degree than was ever anticipated or hoped for.
For in that life those who were united here by a common spiritual bond will not only meet but will have become one through this bond; there will be for them a unified soul belonging with a common consciousness to both. For already, indeed, are the dead with the living, as are the living themselves, bound together by countless such commonties; but only when death loosens the knot and removes the body which envelops every living soul, will there be added to the union of consciousness the consciousness of union.
Every one in the moment of death will perceive that he still has a place and belongs in the company with those gone before, from whom through common interests he has received help, and so will not enter into the third world as a strange guest, but like one long expected, to whom all with whom he was here united through a common faith, knowledge, and love, will stretch out their hands to draw him to themselves as a partaker of their existence.
Into similar deep fellowship shall we also enter with those great dead who long before our time wandered throughthe second stage of life, and upon whose example and teaching our own spirit was moulded. So, whoever here lived wholly in Christ will there be also wholly in Him. Yet his individuality will not be extinguished in the higher one, but only gain in power from it, and at the same time reinforce the strength of the higher. For those souls which have grown together as one through their moments of sympathy, gain force each from the other for itself, and at the same time confirmation as individuals through the union of their diversities.
So, many souls will mutually strengthen each other in the greater part of their nature; others are connected only by a few corresponding qualities.
Not all these ties based upon certainspiritual experiences in common will be permanent, but they will be so when they are within the realm of truth, beauty, and virtue.
All that does not bear within itself eternal harmony, even if it survives this life, will yet at last come to naught and will cause a separation of those souls which for a time had been united in an unworthy alliance.
Most spiritual perceptions which are developed in the present life, and which we take over into the next, bear, it is true, a germ of truth, goodness, and virtue within themselves, but enveloped in a large addition of unessential falseness, error, and corruption. Those spirits which remain united through such impulses may so continue or they may separate, according as they both agreeto hold fast to the good and the best, and to abandon the evil by their separation from evil spirits, or according as one seizes on the good and the other on the evil.
Those souls, however, which have seized together upon a form or an idea of truth, beauty, or goodness in their eternal purity, remain thereby united to all eternity and in like manner possess these ideals as a part of themselves in everlasting unity.
The comprehension of the higher thought by advanced souls means therefore their growth through this thought into greater spiritual organisms, and as all individual ideas have their root in the universal, so at last will all souls, in fellowship with the highest, be absorbed into the divine.
The spiritual world in its consummation will therefore be, not an assembly, but a tree of souls, the root of which is planted on earth and whose summit reaches to the heavens.
Only the highest and noblest spirits, Christ, the geniuses, the saints, are able to reach, out of their full knowledge, the centre of divinity face to face; the smaller and lesser ones have their roots in these, as boughs in branches and twigs in boughs, and are thus connected midway indirectly through them with the highest of the high.
And so dead geniuses and saints are the true mediators between God and man; partaking of the thought of God they are able to convey it to man, and at the same time feeling and understanding human sorrows, joys, anddesires, they are able to lead him to God.
Yet the worship of the dead stands in relation to the deified worship of nature, at the very beginning of religion, half related and half separated; the most savage nations have retained it in its cruder, the most civilized in its higher form. And where to-day is there one which does not preserve a large fragment of it as its corner-stone?
And so there should be in every town a shrine for its greatest dead, built near or in the temple of God, and let Christ as heretofore dwell in the same temple as God himself.