"But no such angel have we seen,--no such sublime, unquestionable,
glorious manifestation. And when we look at what is offered to us, ah!
who that had a friend in heaven could wish them to return in such wise
as this? The very instinct of a sacred sorrow seems to forbid that our
beautiful, our glorified ones should stoop lower than even to the
medium of their cast-off bodies, to juggle, and rap, and squeak, and
perform mountebank tricks with tables and chairs; to recite over in
weary sameness harmless truisms, which we were wise enough to say for
ourselves; to trifle, and banter, and jest, or to lead us through
endless moonshiny mazes. Sadly and soberly we say that, if this be
communion with the dead, we had rather be without it. We want
something a little in advance of our present life, and not below it.
We have read with some attention weary pages of spiritual
communication purporting to come from Bacon, Swedenborg, and others,
and long accounts from divers spirits of things seen in the spirit
land, and we can conceive of no more appalling prospect than to have
them true.
"If the future life is so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable as we
might infer from these readings, one would have reason to deplore an
immortality from which no suicide could give an outlet. To be
condemned to such eternal prosing would be worse than annihilation.
"Is there, then, no satisfaction for this craving of the soul? There
is One who says: "I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am
alive for evermore, and I have the keys of hell and of death;" and
this same being said once before: "He that loveth me shall be loved of
my Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself unto him.
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