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 n