Page:The Other Life.djvu/148

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forms of thought and feeling and a flowering forth of a higher and better state. Every morning is a further revelation of the Lord, and a fresh coronation of love, fragrant with dews and flowers, as the guiding divinity of the soul.

The love of the Lord newly awakened into higher power stimulates the love of the neighbor, and the soul yearns to go forth, vigorous and joyful, into all the uses of life, social, civil and domestic. Then it passes on to its noon state, when the blended heat and light are greatest, and the spiritual activities are at their height. It pours out its life in genial labors.

But in the attempt to utilize the love and wisdom given it of God for the benefit of others, something of the selfhood creeps in, and the light begins to pale and the heat to decline, and the shadows of evening steal gradually over the soul. The morning and noon are long and brilliant according as the spirit can sustain its total surrender to God and the neighbor. As the soul turns partially away from the Lord to self, and approaches, though still remotely, those earthly states or modes of feeling and thought which we so well understand, a spiritual obscurity overshadows it, represented outwardly by all the phenomena of evening.