itant of your world as one
egg is like another. They are men themselves; communities made up
of those who have lived in your world, and who have gone out of it
with the same thoughts, passions, and emotions as they had on earth;
many of them having rejected or disregarded the true revelation, and
others never having had that revelation to reject. Of course they
are ignorant, in this intermediate state, of the tricks which these
experimenters play with them, till they are concluded; but in
rejecting the new revelations, many of them reject the very conditions
of belief which when on earth they said would have been sufficient,
while the result in those who make the experiment and in those on
whom the experiment is made is to 'vindicate the ways of God to man.'"

There is a wonderful power in getting over trifling difficulties in
our dreams, or I should certainly have demurred to some parts of this
statement. Instead of that, I let my mind, as usual in such cases,
dwell on a point which was no difficulty at all. "If," said I, "they
are dead, they are probably very different beings from what they were
when alive."

"And do you think," said he, with an unpleasant half-sneer, "that mere
change of place makes any difference in man, or that the merely physical
effects of death operate a magical change on his intellect, affections,
emotions, and volitions, or can render him a more reasonable creature
than he was before?"

"I did not mean exactly that," said I; "but surely it is not possible
that the soul without the body can be exactly like the soul with it."

"Have not your philosophers," said he, "often founded, or pretended to
found, scepticism on the argument that it is difficult to tell whether
life itself may not be a series of illusions like those in dreams?
Have they not even declared, that, as in dreams all seems to be real,
so in their waking moments all may be no more than a dream? nay, have
not some said that it is impossible to tell which is the real and
which the dreaming part of their existence?"

"There have been such," said I, "but I never knew any one convinced by
their reasoning."

"Perhaps not," he answered, "but it may be of use to show you, that
in that intermediate state men may, as in dreams, be capable of a
series of thoughts and emotions exactly similar to what they experienced
in this world; quite as vivid, and," he added with a quiet smile,
"perhaps as rational."

"But they must be more coher