Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/36

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DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD.

the latter, and yet the spheres of their several existences be as far apart as is North from South. The one sees and knows only from appearances, the other from positive rapport. This fact at once explains many of the differences in the accounts which mortals receive, and unmistakably so, from the lands beyond the swelling flood, the kingdoms o'er the sea. My knowledge flowed in upon me through the channels of intuition, and through them I learned that the hyper-sensational joys to which allusion has been made, are ever experienced in exact ratio to the purity of the past record of the life. Those which I felt were only of the fourth degree, there being three beyond, though how mine should have been so intensified and deepened, was, and, for reasons plainly to be seen, must ever remain, a mystery. The amount, degree, and even kind, of joy felt by any soul upon its passage over the Myst, depends upon three things, and these are: First, the nature of the motives which, previous to the mortuary divorce, prompted to all. or any action, either toward the self, the neighbor, or society; Second, the amount of good a person has done on earth; and Third, the amount of use, in the higher sense, they may have subserved previous to physical dissolution.

Nellie and I, and the old gray-haired man who accompanied her, soon reached the road in front of the house wherein I had lived, and wherein I was born into a newer phase of life. While looking at my companions to find out whither they were going, the child, by the exercise of a power not then fully understood by myself, rose into the air a foot or more, laid her hand gently on my forehead, patted it tenderly, and said: "Come! We are going to show you your home, and then mine,