must be tangible and material, — must still have a material investiture, — or these lower senses could take no cognizance of them.
Spiritualism would transfer men from the spiritual sense of existence back into its material sense. This gross materialism is Scientifically impossible, since to Spirit there can be no matter.
Jesus said of Lazarus: “He is not dead, but sleepeth.” He restored Lazarus by the understanding that Raising the dead. he had never died, not by an admission that his body had died, and then lived again. Had Jesus believed that Lazarus had lived or died in his body, he would have stood on the same plane of belief with those who buried the body, and he could not therefore have resuscitated it.
When you can waken yourself or others out of the belief that all must die, you can then exercise Jesus' spiritual power to reproduce the presence of those who thought they had died, — but not otherwise.
There is one possible moment when those called dead and the living can commune together, and that is the Dying sight. moment previous to the transition, — the moment when the link between their opposite beliefs is being sundered. In the vestibule through which we pass from one dream to another dream, or when we wake from earth's sleep to the grand verities of Life, the departing may hear the glad welcome of those gone before. The dying may whisper this vision, name the face that smiles on them, and the hand which beckons them; as one at Niagara, with eyes open only to that wonder, forgets all else, and breathes aloud his rapture.
16
