ast the whole universe of matter
and spirit composes an unbroken heaven?

According to the nebular hypothesis, the entire creation was once
a measureless chaos confusion, conflict, collisions, explosions,
making a universal hell of matter. But the discords and
perturbations grew ever less and less, regularity and order more
and more, as suns and planets and moons took form and wheeled in
their gleaming circles, till now the mazy web of worlds is weaving
throughout space the perfect harmony of the creative design. The
evolution of incarnate spiritual destinies began later, and is
more complex than the material, each mind being as complicated as
the whole galaxy. May we not trust that at last it shall be as
complete as the evolution of the astronomic motions already is,
and a divine empire of holy and happy men be the goal of history?
This hope carries the cross through hell, and leaves nothing
unredeemed.

CHAPTER IV.

THE GATES OF HEAVEN; OR, THE LAW OF SALVATION IN ALL WORLDS.

HEAVEN, in the crude fancy of mankind, has generally been
conceived as a definite, exclusive, material abode; either some
elysian clime on the surface of the earth; or some happy isle
beyond the setting sun; or this whole globe, renovated by fire and
peopled with a risen and ransomed race; or else some halcyon spot
in the sky, curtained with inaccessible splendor and crowded with
eternal blessings. It was natural that men should think thus of
heaven as a place whence all the evils which they knew were
excluded and where all the goods which they knew were carried to
the highest pitch, God himself visibly enthroned there in
entrancing glory amidst throngs of worshippers.

This was unavoidable, because, in an early age, before knowledge
and reflection had trained men to the critical examination and
correction of their instinctive conclusions, all the data which
they possessed would naturally lead them to imagine the unknown
God in the glorified form and circumstances of the most enviable
being their experience had yet revealed to them; and to paint the
unknown future state of perfected souls under the purest aspects
of the most desirable boons they had known in the present state.
It being a necessity of their uncritical minds to personify God by
a definite picture of imagination, and to portray heaven to
themselves as an external place, they could not do otherwise than
work out the results by means of the most intense experiences and
the