s of
worshipping angels. The soul's home, the heaven of God, may be
suffused throughout the material universe, ignoring the existence
of physical globes and galaxies. So light and electricity pervade
some solid bodies, as if for them there were no solidity. So,
doubtless, there are millions of realities around us utterly
eluding our finest senses. "A fact," Emerson says, "is the last
issue of spirit," and not its entire extent. "The visible creation
is the terminus of the invisible world," and not the totality of
the universe. There are gradations of matter and being, from the
rock to the flower, from the vegetable to man. Is it most probable
that the scale breaks abruptly there, or that other ranks of
spiritual existence successively rise peopling the seeming abysses
unto the very confines of God?

"Can every leaf a teeming world contain,
Can every globule gird a countless race,
Yet one death slumber in its dreamless reign
Clasp all the illumed magnificence of space?
Life crowd a grain, from air's vast realms effaced?
The leaf a world, the firmament a waste?"

An honest historical criticism forces us, however reluctantly, to
loose our hold from the various supposed localities of the soul's
destination, which have pleased the fancies and won the assent of
mankind in earlier times. But it cannot touch the simple and
cardinal fact of an immortal life for man. It merely forces us to
acknowledge that while the fact stands clear and authoritative to
instinct, reason, and faith, yet the how, and the where, and all
such problems, are wrapped in unfathomable mystery. We are to obey
and hope, not dissect and dogmatize. However the fantastic dreams
of the imagination and the subtle speculations of the intellect
may shift from time to time, and be routed and vanish, the deep
yearning of the heart remains the same, the divine polarity of the
reason changes not, and men will never cease fondly to believe
that although they cannot tell where heaven is, yet surely there
is a heaven reserved for them somewhere within the sheltering
embrace of God's infinite providence. We may not say of that
kingdom, Lo, here! or Lo, there! but it is wherever God's
approving presence extends: and is that not wherever the pure in
heart are found? 40

Let every elysian clime the breezes blow over, every magic isle
the waves murmur round, every subterranean retreat fancy has
devised, every cerulean region the moon visits, every planet that
hangs a