ine sense a condition to be attained and enjoyed by reason of the phenomenal occurring of corporeal dissolution. Such an immortality would fall short of the eternal life, and is little better than a mirage of the imagination. The spiritual essence, the inward man that delights in the law of God, is the fountain of our life, and confers upon the corporeal structure all its significance. We are, therefore, immortal, imperishable and eternal, without becoming so. The supersensuous world is not a future state, in any essential sense of the term, but is now present and about every one of us. Our life in that sphere of being is by no means incompatible with living here on the earth. It is not necessary to lay the body aside in order to become free from the contamination of this material existence. The soul may turn again toward its celestial source, contemplate it, and be at one with it, and so become spiritual and divine as partaking of Deity. Thus will it be delivered from the illusions of sense and the disturbances of passion which obscure its vision, and be exalted into the region of eternal truth, goodness and beauty. Here all things are perennial; the love of good, the enthusiasm of the right and unselfish motive exceed all the limitations of time and space. Whoever attains these and lives in the exercise of them, possesses life beyond the veil which separates the visible world from the greater universe, and is in very fact a son of God living in eternity.

We may now understand intelligently these sayings recorded of Jesus in the fourth Gospel: "He that heareth my word and believeth in him that sent me hath life eternal; and he cometh not into judg ment, but hath passed out of death into the life." 'He that believeth in me, even though he die, he shall live; and he that is alive and believeth in me shall not die." The living here denoted is. that of angels and the various genera of celestial beings in the eternal world. Of that region this universe is but the effigy and shadow; and of the life of that world, this sublunary life is but the apparition and dream.

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"The sense by which we lay hold on eternal life," says Fichtê, we acquire only by the renouncing and offering up of sense, and the aims of sense, to the law which claims our will alone and our acts;-by renouncing it with the conviction that to do so is reason

able and alone reasonable. belief in the eternal first enters our soul, and stands isolated there, as the only stay by which we can still sustain ourselves when we have relinquished everything else, as the only animating principle that still heaves our bosom and still inspires our life. Well was it said in the metaphors of a Sacred Doctrine that a man must first die to the world and be born again in order to enter into the Kingdom of God."

With this renunciation of the earthly the

This sacred experience is prefigured by the meeting of the soul with its diviner self at the Bridge of Judgment. The resurrection from the dead to the life eternal, the life of the eternal world, is denoted. It is the converse of the apostasy or abandoning of the celestial home. The Ionic philosophers, after the custom of the sages of the farther East, designated it as the metempsychosis, which, though usually interpreted as meaning the transplanting of the soul from one body to another, denotes rather the transformation and transition from the sensuous and corporeal to the spiritual life. The Hebrew Psalmist gives the graphic description: "He brought me out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay; he set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings." The soul, having become. immersed in the mire of sense, and lost sight of the celestial world, is brought again to the perception of the truth, and stands erect in its native divinity, ransomed and redeemed. It is now transfigured and changed into the image of the heavenly.

The resurrection is not to be understood as a restoration from physical accident. We can afford to disencumber this subject from the gross fancies and interpretations which originate in a sensuous conception. To the dead who hear and obey the divine voice there are not promised any renewed pulsation of arteries and stimulating of the nervous system, but a birth into spiritual life. The fatal sting of death is taken away and the king of terrors is dethroned when we cease to wander from the right. The victory thus achieved relates to moral and not physical dissolution. "The body is dead through sin," says the great Apostle, "but the spirit lives through righteousness." "Ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit," he says again. "You hath he quickened; ye are risen with him through the operation of faith." "God hath quickened us and hath raised us up and

made us sit in the heavenly places." These declarations shut us up to the direction: "Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God."

We have no occasion for apprehension or perplexity in regard to a judgment of the last day. The form of speech is Asiatic and highly metaphoric. By those whose mental purview is bounded by Time, that event may be regarded as relating to some physical crisis, like the consummation of terrestrial existence, or perhaps the end of life; but in the world of Mind there are no such limitations. The day of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting, always at high noon, without sunrise or sunset; it has always been, it now is, and it will never cease to be. It is a "last day" to those alone whose life and thought are still involved in corporeal nature; it is a day of judgment to those only who love darkness rather than light, and are wrongdoers. But they who have attained the pure life and the true resurrection are living all the while in the divine, eternal day. They are in the heavenly places, in beatific communion with spirits and angels, and are endowed with the perceptions, faculties and energies which pertain to the life of the eternal world. We have the assurance that as we live in family, neighborhood and society in the earth, we may likewise sustain analogous relations with those who dwell in the celestial region. The basis of this assurance exists in our own being, and we confirm it by living in charity and doing the right. "In all moral feeling," says Jacobi, "there is a presentiment of eternity."

The life which we live as inhabitants of the eternal world is in no sense a continuance of the life which we live upon the earth. It is not a form or mode of existence, but a quality of being. It has no part in any action which is inspired by the consideration of a result. It consists solely of the moral essentials, love, virtue and goodness. It knows no going and coming as in a region of space; there are no words for divisible conditions in the language of the gods. We have no occasion to search for any one in the heavenly world. We are in and with those whom we love, and are permeated by them through all our being. We cognize rather than recognize them. There is no space or limit to the human mind, and hence our personality possesses a power of indefinite extension over the world of spirit. The glad

ness of thought, the communion of love, the beatitude of service, the ecstasy of worship, the contemplation of the divine, make up the life there; as they are also felt and known here to be the highest of our employments.

The whole matter, however, transcends the sphere of common reasoning. It belongs to the universal faith which has been cherished alike by seers and sages. It pertains to the world of ideas, the prior realities which came with the spirit from the eternal home.

Let no

one, then, seek to intermeddle and exercise dominion over the faith and conduct of another in matters of the spiritual life. It may be our province to serve as guides and heralds of the eternal verities, but beyond that point each one must minister to himself. The truth, and not its exponent, will make us free. This liberty of the spirit, however, is no mere breaking of yokes and fetters, but an initiation and induction into the fullness of the divine life. We are not even made subject to the will of the Most High, but render to it a free obedience.

Thus we are at one with the Divine Order which inspires and regulates the interior universe, and is supreme in all worlds. In this is the life eternal, the life of the eternal region-being without change, participation of the Absolute Good. The celestial warder, our pure law and inmost spirit, conducts us onward, not only into Paradise, but to the very foot of the Celestial Throne.

ALEXANDER WILDER, M.D.

He who made the past, that imprisons his present, can work within the prison house and create a future of Liberty.-Annie Besant.

The wise man in God has the wisdom of God, and he will teach it in a way that nobody can contradict or resist him, and his teaching will harm no one, but bring joy and gladness and glory to all who will receive it.-Paracelsus.

Beliefs which are sound and manifestly true are of necessity used even by those who deny them. And perhaps a man might adduce this as the greatest possible proof of the manifest truth of anything, that those who deny it are compelled to make use of it.—Epictetus.

GENIUS.

The study of genius is certainly fascinating. The mere classification from works or from lives is intensely interesting though in the end generally unsatisfactory. The examination of genius itself is attracting thoughtful consideration. As psychic phenomena, its works and its nature are being cut to pieces and subjected to all known tests. The time will come when its philosophy is known and the present physical and physiological experiments will help in the attainment of that knowledge. But pure psychology, metaphysical and not anatomical, will give the final solution.

In the realms of literature, art and music, we can best study genius in the present state of our knowledge. We must look into the material now. It is necessary for the human reason to work up to the supernatural from that which is understood; and we find the supernatural is either nothing or is natural. We but expand the rule of nature. Christ said, "If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" Our basis for argument changes as our knowledge grows. Several centuries ago a French scientist argued that it would be as absurd to say that the sun revolved around the earth as to think that the fire revolved around a fowl to roast it. To-day we do not ask for proof that the earth revolves; we do not need to argue about it. Our time to understand genius has not yet come.

There are three ways in which we may study it to-day: its effects in the man, in his works, and in the audience. Genius is not imagi nation, but it needs its help. The artist, composer and author must draw from their own experience-and if the conscious world-experi ence were all, how narrow it would be. Talent by itself lacks origi nality. The immediate audience may not be able to differentiate. It may be carried away by emotion, by a borrowed humor or pathos, by a stolen melody, a copied picture. But the thoughtful find more than a single strain in each work of genius. The master musician composes his harmony out of his own experience; besides its leading melody