an
has had two states of being already. One confined, dark, peculiarly
nourished, slightly conscious; then he was born into another--wide,
differently nourished, and intensely [Page 244] conscious. He knows
he may be born again into a life wider yet, differently nourished,
and even yet more intensely conscious. Science has no hint how a
long ascending series of developments crowned by man may advance
another step, and make man isaggelos--equal to angels. But the
simplest teaching of Scripture points out a way so clear that a
child need not miss the glorious consummation.

When Uranus hastened in one part of its orbit, and then retarded,
and swung too wide, men said there must be another attracting world
beyond; and, looking there, Neptune was found. So, when individual
men are so strong that nations or armies cannot break down their
wills; so brave, that lions have no terrors; so holy, that temptation
cannot lure nor sin defile them; so grand in thought, that men
cannot follow; so pure in walk, that God walks with them--let us
infer an attracting world, high and pure and strong as heaven. The
eleventh chapter of Hebrews is a roll-call of heroes of whom this
world was not worthy. They were tortured, not accepting deliverance,
that they might obtain a better resurrection. The world to come
influenced, as it were, the orbits of their souls, and when their
bodies fell off, earth having no hold on them, they sped on to
their celestial home. The tendency of such souls necessitates such
a world.

The worlds and the Word speak but one language, teach but one set
of truths. How was it possible that the writers of the earlier
Scriptures described physical phenomena with wonderful sublimity,
and with such penetrative truth? They gazed upon the same heaven
that those men saw who ages afterward led the world in knowledge.
These latter were near-sighted, and absorbed [Page 245] in the
pictures on the first veil of matter; the former were far-sighted,
and penetrated a hundred strata of thickest material, and saw the
immaterial power behind. The one class studied the present, and made
the gravest mistakes; the other pierced the uncounted ages of the
past, and uttered the profoundest wisdom. There is but one
explanation. He that planned and made the worlds inspired the Word.

Science and religion are not two separate departments, they are
not even two phases of the same truth. Science has a broader realm
in the unseen than in the s