in their operation, have no necessary or immediate connection with our mental states. The flowers may bloom as brightly in the garden of the wicked man, as in that of the good man. The fields may look cheerful when we are sad, or the leaves may wither when we are gay and happy. The mountains, fields and rivers, were where they now are, before we looked out upon them, and they will retain their places, after we shall have seen them for the last time. It is true the industry and ingenuity of men may make very great changes in the forms and appearances of the objects around them; but it is plainly seen that those forms have no necessary connection with the spiritual states of those who dwell among them. "They are not mutable and variable, according to the state of the affections and thoughts, as in the spiritual world, but immutable and fied." Living therefore, as we do, in a world where the form of the surrounding objects has no immediate connection with our mental states; and being familiar with this order of things, and knowing nothing by open experience of any other, it must necessarily require a strong and oft repeated mental effort, before we can clearly and distinctly conceive of the real and substantial existence of external objects, which at the same time exist only as the outward expressions and correspondences of affections and thoughts. The Word of the Lord plainly teaches us that there are external objects in the spiritual world; and reason confirms the same, for we know that if that world has an existence it must have some external form; we cannot conceive of existences without forms. And is it possible to conceive of any other law, than the one referred to, by which external forms can exist in that world? There are no natural substances there, out of which such forms can be created. The only imaginable way, therefore, of accounting for their existence, is, to regard them as being of spiritual origin, or as being the outward expression of the states of spirits.
