Chapter XX: Friends in Heaven

Heaven is above the world of spirits, as the latter is above the earth. The way to heaven is through the world of spirits; but it is not reached by a process of death, but by a process of preparation. We are prepared for heaven by putting off the evils and falsities and imperfections that we carry with us from the natural world. We are then taught to feel, think and act in unison and love with thousands and millions of other beings. It takes a long time and a great deal of instruction in the world of spirits to bring some people to this degree of social development.

The harmony of souls in heaven is like that of an immense choir of music. Each has a distinct part, and each must be perfect in his part. Imagine thousands of good and pure spirits living in choirs of thought, choirs of feeling, choirs of acting; and you will begin to have a faint idea of the order, peace, beauty and felicity of the social life in heaven.

New-comers into the world of spirits are always anxious to be admitted into heaven. There is a process by which they can be elevated into heavenly societies, and shown the wonders and glories of the celestial life. This favor is extended to all, and their legitimate curiosity is gratified. They then return into the world of spirits for judgment and preparation, and to undergo those organic changes which are necessary to a permanent residence in the higher spheres.

I was delighted to hear my father say that I had been unconsciously prepared for this wonderful journey. Walking along with a glad heart, engaged in pleasant conversation about the difference between the world of spirits and heaven, I suddenly perceived a beautiful road ascending a mountain deeply shaded with overhanging trees and bordered with brilliant flowers.

“This is our way,” said my father. “The roads which lead out of the world of spirits, either up into heaven or down into hell, are invisible to all but those who have been prepared to follow them. There is no danger of any one going astray. No mistakes are made here; no revelations but to the proper parties. All the art and cunning of Simon Magus or his master demons could not enable them to discover this little road leading up into the heaven where our loved ones reside.”

How easy, how buoyant, how charming was that ascent! No fatigue, no hurry, no impatience, no terrestrial sensations. Our bodies seemed to grow lighter and stronger, and our minds clearer and happier as we ascended. The air grew fresher and sweeter; the trees and flowers more beautiful; the sky softer and more brilliant. As we neared the summit we saw the most exquisite green lawns and terraces, which seemed to have been dipped in a golden ether. Here and there was a flock of sheep. Now a swarm of pearl and crimson butterflies would sport around us; and then a flock of birds like little flying rainbows would illumine the air.

“These things,” said my father, “are typical of the thoughts and affections of the blessed people whose homes we are approaching.”

The vista from the summit exceeded in magnificence and beauty everything I had ever imagined. There were two interminable series of green knolls, one on the right hand and the other on the left, separated by a charming little valley with the softest, brightest verdure I had ever seen. On every knoll was a resplendent palace built of precious stones. The grand rainbow-like illumination produced by these mineral splendors flashing in the sun, is altogether indescribable. Away in the east where the palaces seemed to approach each other, the view was terminated by a great temple resembling the temple at Jerusalem, and shining like a gem in the distance.

The valley between these palaces was laid out in lawns, parks and gardens, adorned with flowers, statues, fountains, lakes, and picturesque walks and arbors. These things are common enough on earth; but here each of them exceeded the corresponding earthly form in all the elements of artistic beauty, as much as the most precious diamond in the world exceeds the commonest pebble on the sea-shore.

This was the heaven of a society of angels, all belonging to the tribe of Benjamin, and all interiorly united by similar thoughts and affections. Now for the first time I learned that all angels were once men upon our earth or some other; that the physical universe is the indestructible basis of the spiritual; and that all things first receive root and form and substance in the former, to rise and expand indefinitely, in the latter. The earth is the footstool of the Lord, and is established for ever.

I now noticed that I had on different garments from those I had worn in the world of spirits, and much more beautiful.

“These garments are given you,” said my father, “to adapt you to the sphere which you have entered. We are clothed here imperceptibly to ourselves, as the trees and flowers in the natural world are clothed with forms and colors by a generous nature. All our external things arise spontaneously around us, without our thought or care or labor, being perfect correspondences and mirrors of the things within us.”

“Here is the home of your brother,” said he; and we stood before a palace of marvelous splendor. Twelve steps of lustrous pearl led up to a grand piazza covered with a dazzling arch and supported by twelve columns of gold. We entered the spacious hall, and before I had time to observe its beauties, a youthful spirit advanced, strongly resembling my father; and with a face full of light and love, and a voice overflowing with kindness, welcomed me to that little spot, as he called it, of the Lord’s spiritual kingdom.

“You shall see me as I used to be,” he said “and then you will know me better.”

Thereupon he underwent the same series of spiritual changes by which my father revealed himself to me as the poor old leper of the wilderness. He returned into the states and forms of his boyhood, as a full-blown rose might shut, leaf after leaf, contracting itself slowly into a beautiful bud again. He was the same little Samuel who sported with my sisters and myself in our garden in Bethany, and whose withdrawal from us had left so dark a cloud on the sunny places of our childhood.

Reassuming his angelic form while I gazed at him with admiration and joy, he pointed to a chamber, the half-open door of which was one superb crystal. From it there issued a beautiful female form, clad in a silk robe of lustrous white. Her face was radiant with smiles and beauty, and a single rose was in her hair. The extreme gentleness and gracefulness of her movements, her manners, her tones, revealed the pure soul of this bright angel.

“Behold my wife!” said my brother.

Bewildered and delighted, I pressed timidly a brotherly kiss upon her cheek, and said:

“This is to me the greatest wonder of all in this realm of wonders. Married in heaven! Husbands and wives living together in wedded bliss! Enlighten my darkness; tell me something of this great and beautiful mystery.”

“I perceive,” said my brother, seriously, “by the glance of your eye and the tone of your voice, that you cannot yet be initiated into the sublime and heavenly secrets of the spiritual marriage. You have not been sufficiently divested of your earthly and sensuous state of thought to penetrate those truths which are only visible in the light of heaven. Be satisfied for the present to know that sex and marriage are universal and eternal; that love is inextinguishable, and becomes purer and holier the higher it rises; and that conjugal pairs live together in heaven in eternal youth and eternal bliss.”

“A most delightful and ennobling thought,” said I; “and I am willing to believe what you say, and to wait my own spiritual development before being able to comprehend its meaning.”

I was then seized with an intense desire to see my mother. And lo! before I could give it utterance in words, she appeared before us, an angel as young and beautiful as my sister-in-law, but grown the female counterpart of my father by long and loving contemplation of his virtues.

“I was attracted hither,” she exclaimed, in charming trepidation, “by strange gushes of maternal feeling. Who is it that calls me?”

Mother and child passed simultaneously into the old forms of the earth-life, and into the long dormant states of the natural memory. She was a Jewish matron in Bethany, and I a little boy of five years old. How frantically she kissed my face and hands! How madly she pressed me to her heart! How we wept together!

When we came back to our last form and state, she exclaimed, still weeping for joy:

“Oh that I could see you continually in that charming little shape! I shall make you resume it over and over again, until I satisfy my hungry heart with the graces of your boyish form. Ah! nothing is lost. All is given back to us.”

We discoursed on a thousand topics, and floods of spiritual light were poured upon my benighted, undeveloped mind. Walking with these angelic friends on the grand piazza of the palace, and gazing at the architectural grandeur which surrounded us, I was filled with an exhilaration of spirits too great for earthly utterance, never to be comprehended by any one until he meets his friends, whom he calls dead, in the divine light of the heavenly world.

When I new recall these things, poor, old, desolate, heartbroken man that I am, bearing my earthly burdens again and doomed to another death, they all seem to me like a delightful dream! That I walked and talked with friends in heaven! surveyed their houses! discussed their laws, their government, their worship, their occupations, face to face as man with man! Impossible! Incredible!

What did I say?

It was no dream. It was no hallucination. It is possible. It is credible. It was a fact. My memory does not betray me. My imagination does not mislead me. It was all true; and I shall see them, hear them, live with them again, never to return to earth, so soon as I once more give up this mortal breath and render this feeble body back to the dust whence it came.

How long, O Lord! how long?

I learned from my brother that the societies in heaven, which are innumerable, are arranged according to the uses they perform, which depend upon the bent of the inclinations and the expansion of the intellectual faculties of those who compose them. Men on earth receive their vitalizing impulses, their attractions to all that is good and true, from these societies through the medium of good spirits in the intermediate world.

Some of these societies inspire the love of nature and art; some the genius and power for civil government; some the taste for science and practical life. Some animate especially the devotional nature; some the social; some the poetic; and others, again, act as intermediate powers, balancing and harmonizing the different activities of the soul.

The society to which my brother belonged was one which presided over and secretly vivified the architectural tastes and genius of man. Near by, upon mountains whose purple summits I saw in the distance, was a large society which presided over music. Great societies which were the secret life and soul of poetry, history, oratory, statuary, painting and other fine arts, were grouped around, more or less remote, all holding the most delightful communications and interchanges with each other.

I was astonished to learn that the peace and joy and highest happiness of the angels spring from the exercise of their faculties in the performance of useful service to each other. They are never idle, but continually engaged in doing something useful from the love of use. I learned that in this the angels find their chief delight; and that, although they occasionally meet for formal and social worship, and unite in prayer and songs of praise as people do on earth, they nevertheless regard the loving and faithful performance of the duties of their respective vocations as the highest kind of worship. This they call _real_ worship; and the _formal_ kind in which they sometimes engage, is merely to fit them for the higher and more real kind.

“Do you ever see your earthly friends,” I asked, “struggling and toiling in the dark abyss of nature, before they cast off their earthly covering and rise into the light and beauty of these higher worlds?”

“Not directly!” replied my brother, “for there is no continuity between spirit and matter. To speak philosophically, there is continuity and correspondence; but spirit and matter are not degrees of the same substance, differing only in tenuity, as is commonly supposed. It is impossible for us to see or hear anything in the natural world, except through the medium of some living man whose interiors have also been opened.

“Wonderful as it may seem to you, the spirits of men still living in the flesh are really in the spiritual world, all the time connected secretly with spiritual societies. They are invisible to us, however, because their thoughts, affections and senses all open downward and outward into nature. They become dimly visible, but do not communicate, when they are in states of profound abstraction or great spiritual elevation.

“We see them occasionally also by correspondences, which would appear to you like visions or dreams. In every society these manifestations are different, depending on the nature and functions of the society. In ours, for instance, the mental states of our earthly friends are sometimes revealed to us architecturally. That is, we see them as in a dream building houses: and without knowing their names or earthly whereabouts, we judge of their characters by the materials, the progress, the execution, even to the minutest details of the work they seem to be doing.”

“Wonderful and beautiful!” I exclaimed.

“I can show you this wonderful thing more easily than I can explain it. We have here the power, incomprehensible to you at present, of recalling these symbolic images and making them appear before us again, as if they were external and real things.

“Look,” he said, and the horizon toward the north seemed overcast. A thin veil of mist arose before us, and through it we discovered a dim range of hills, upon each of which a house was in process of erection.

“Every man in the flesh,” said my brother, “is always engaged, unconsciously to himself, in building his future house in the spiritual world; for the entire spiritual life of a man is represented symbolically by his residence here and its appointments. All the activities of your hands, heart and brain in the good and true things of the earthly state, are so many contributions to the materials, style, form, color and finish of your eternal home.

“Observe,” he continued, “that some of those houses are nearly finished, others are barely begun. Some of them are in styles of great grandeur, others are very plain. The materials, too, and the execution differ immensely. Observe also that a man alone is at work on some; a man and a woman on others.”

“Why is that?”

“When a man and woman are truly married, they assist each other in building the same house; for they will live together as husband and wife for ever in heaven. Sometimes persons not married in the world, are seen working together here. Such persons have strong interior affinities, unknown it may be to each other on earth, and will be united in heaven.”

“Strange and beautiful!” said I.

“And true!” he exclaimed, earnestly. “The true is always strange and beautiful.

“If you will look closely,” he continued, “you will see many faint and shadowy forms that are earnestly assisting these men and women in carrying the heavy materials and putting everything into its proper place. These are attendant good spirits invisible to the workers themselves. When a house is finished, we know that the architect has been released from the bondage of the earth-life, and will soon occupy the same house vastly beautified and glorified in some heavenly society.”

Thus are spiritual houses—houses not made with hands, eternal in the heavens—builded by our prayers, our faith, our hopes, our loving thoughts, our useful and unselfish deeds.

“I see some houses,” I remarked, “upon which no one is working. They seem to be falling to decay.”

“The builders have been led away into temptation by evil spirits. The work of regeneration appears to be arrested or retroceding. The Lord will lead them by ways they know not, and they will renew their labors.”

While gazing at this strange scene and scrutinizing these shadowy architects of future homes, I suddenly recognized my own figure toiling along under a great beam which was to constitute one of the door-posts on the ground-floor. My house was scarcely begun.

“See, brother,” said I, “I have passed into the spiritual world and my house is not finished.”

“I never saw it so before,” he said. “I would say confidently from this, that your earthly mission is not ended.”

While he was speaking, my attention was arrested by a woman in a black robe on the side of the hill opposite to where my own figure was. This woman was bent almost to the earth under a great block of stone, which she was bearing to put into the walls. Several shadowy forms were busy around her assisting in the difficult task.

“And that woman?” said I.

“Is probably your future wife.”

An insatiable desire immediately seized me to behold her face. Forgetting my painful experience in the imaginary heaven of the Greeks, I thought only of Helena.

“It is she,” said I, to myself. “She is a pagan. She is surrounded by evil spheres. She is unregenerate. Her regeneration will be painful and difficult. The good angels are assisting her. The foundations of our house are laid; the structure will rise; the joint work of our secretly united souls. I always knew it and felt it. It cannot be otherwise!”

In this ecstasy of thought I watched the bowed figure in the black robe.

“Oh that Helena could see and know that I am with her and she with me, laying the invisible foundations of our eternal home! What felicity that would be! Let me speak to her! Let me see her face!”

The intense desire of a strong will is at once granted in the spiritual world. The woman in the black robe slowly raised her eyes to heaven and turned her face toward me.

It was the pale, sorrowing face of Mary Magdalen!

Mary Magdalen!

The blood all seemed to rush back upon my heart, and I stood with a chilling, suffocating sense of disappointment hard to describe. But the loss of Helena, grievous as it was, was not the only ingredient in my cup. There was vexation as well as disappointment. A deep sense of mortification overpowered me at the substitution of Mary Magdalen, a woman without character or friends, recently possessed of seven devils—a creature miserable, outcast, forlorn.

Secret feelings of social superiority, self-righteousness, and offended dignity, embodied themselves in my exclamation of contempt:

“Mary Magdalen!”

I brought upon myself immediately the operation of one of those spiritual laws which excite so much astonishment in the new-comer. My angelic friends were total strangers to earthly passions, to the frenzy of love, the rage of disappointment, the sentiment of superiority, the feeling of contempt. Loving all alike with infinite tenderness and pity, the angels of God do not see any difference between the self-righteous saint and the audacious sinner.

My outburst of unregenerate passion separated me at once from my heavenly companions. It appeared to them that the ground opened and swallowed me up. They no doubt exclaimed to each other:

“Poor fellow! He is not yet prepared to enter upon the heavenly life. We will wait on the Lord, who bringeth all things to pass.”

My sensations were different. The architectural heavens of the tribe of Benjamin vanished from my sight; all was dark for a moment; and, remitted into my former state, I found myself in the world of spirits just where I had been raised from the dead.

My faithful friend John the Baptist was near me, and extended his generous hand.

“Have I visited heaven,” said I, “or have I been dreaming?”