the hidden allusion contained in the beautiful passage already quoted, "They that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever?"—"There are more things in heaven and earth," says the far-seeing poet, "than are dreamt of in our philosophy-"
Those heavens, moreover—that spiritual firmament, which thus becomes visible to man after death, when he enters on the spiritual state,—will be real heavens, the true heavens: whereas this material firmament over our heads and which we call "the heavens," is, as science well knows, not really such. Those planets and worlds plainly cannot be the abode of angels or spiritual beings at all, but, by the deductions of all just analogy, they are earths like our own, inhabited by men like ourselves; being material and not spiritual, they must of necessity be the habitation of material beings, that is to say, of beings clothed with material bodies. In fact, our sun and planets must appear as heavens to them, precisely as they appear heavens to us. Why, then, it might be asked, do we call that firmament and those worlds "heavens" at all? and why have they been always so called by the ancients, as by the Greeks and Romans for instance, as well as by the moderns? This custom springs, doubtless, from an interior and spiritual idea, an idea derived from the spiritual world;—the some cause that makes us speak of truth as light, and of love as warmth, and also that causes us to speak, of God as above, or on high. According to the views just presented,—to the eye of the spirit the real heaven would appear as on high, stretched far and wide, in glittering beauty, just
