ed or disregarded, so perhaps is
retrogression induced or progress achieved. But not in Hades or yet in
Elysium. These were the inventions of man for his brother. So also was
the very neighbourly heaven which the early Church devised. But
because that has gone from the sidereal chart, it does not follow that
there is no such place. Because there is nothing alarming under the
earth, it does not follow that hell has ceased to be. On the contrary.
Both are constant, though it be but in the heart.

In the light of reincarnation it is probable that neither can occur
there without anterior cause. But probably too it is the preponderance
of either that creates the mystery of life, as it may also foreshadow
the portent of death.

Death, it may be, is not merely a law but a place, perhaps a garage
which the traveller reaches on a demolished motor, but whence none can
proceed until all old scores are paid. Pending payment, there, perhaps
the soul must wait. But the bill of its past acquitted, it may be that
then it shall be free to pursue on trillions of spheres the
diversified course of endless life--free to pass from world to world,
from beatitude to bliss, from transformation to transfiguration, from
the transitory to the eternal; weaving, meanwhile, a garland of
migrations that stretch from sky to sky, marrying its memoirs with
those of the universe, and, finally, from some ultimate zenith,
reviewing, as it casts them aside, the masks of concluded
incarnations.

The prospect, overwhelming in beauty, is really divine. The divine is
always utopian. But there is the supreme Alhambra of dream. It exceeds
any other, however excessive another may be. It is the _Nec plus
ultra_. Into it all may wander and never weary of the wonders that are
there. It may be unrealizable, but for that very reason it must be
also ideal.

FINIS HISTORIAE DEORUM

End of Project Gutenberg's The Lords of the Ghostland, by Edgar Saltus

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