enjoyment survives; and when justice is not done according to such a standard, self-loving men will still ask why, and find no answer. Only those who have the heart to say, 'We can do without what we desire' find the secret. Man will have what he deserves, and find what is best for him exactly in proportion as he honestly seeks for it."

This gives a true idea of innate justice and happiness. They are like the electric currents of the sun, which go to each planet in exact proportion to their attracting power; and so man receives in his inner nature, and spiritual consciousness, however unfortunate his surroundings, the exact measure of justice and happiness his real merit draws and justifies. Thus honesty of purpose and conscious integrity of soul constitute happiness, and not earthly possessions, or temporal wealth, pleasure, and power. It is not what man has, but what he is, that brings happiness. And this generation in their haste and striving are the most ungrateful in the world's history. All the ages of the past have suffered and toiled for them. A billion human eyes. have looked for them, and a billion hands have sowed and garnered the earth for them. All the treasures of the world in all the ages of the world are poured at their feet. All human history has been written for their instruction, and the wise and great of every age speak to them with their tongueless voices from the volumes of their living thought. And the world is theirs with all the past embalmed and glorified.

There can be no real pleasure here or hereafter without doing something useful. And there, as here, the pleasures of the mind, the dreams and aspirations of the soul, will be the most exquisite and lasting.

In those perennial realms there can be no degradation of body or soul. None can fall from virtue, like Vulcan from heaven, in a day. And no evil thought or purpose can spring from the passionwrought brain, like Minerva full-armed from the head of Jupiter.

There we will not be, as Newton said of himself, as children picking up pebbles on the shore of knowledge, but the great ocean of truth will lie discovered before us, and we can venture at will upon its placid but boundless waters. And the joy of life will be to meander in the fields of truth, and pick up "wisdom more precious than rubies." All nature, radiant with smiles, will tender her welcome mysteries, and the highways of beauty will blossom in the sunshine of supernal bliss. There will abide our loved and lost; and while they cannot come to us here, we can go to them there in the supernal realms of the self-luminous sun.

Then the mysteries of time and the riddles of existence will be solved, and all will know that God made all nature beauty to the eye and music to the ear and rapture to the soul. That every lesson we learned here will be useful in the hereafter, and every tie of earthly love and affection will be reunited in the realms of perennial life.

"My own dim life should teach me this,

That life should be forever more;

Else earth is darkness at the core,
And dust and ashes all that is."

But even dust and ashes shall be reanimated into living forms; and the very earth dust under our feet is clothed with the enduring properties of eternal life, and shall live again and again in the rosy tints

of fruit and flower; in the ruddy glow of cheek and sparkling beauty of the human eye; and shall bathe in heaven's perennial light; and come and go from the luminous bosom of the all-life-giving sun to the earth-dust life of circling planets while the ages roll.

And no speck of dust, or dream of longing soul, or hope of heaven, shall ever be blotted out or quenched in the dark ocean of oblivion. No noble thought, or kindly deed, or lofty aim, or high and holy purpose, but shall receive the recompense of just reward. And every life, however humble, or oppressed with care, or steeped in sorrow, or bathed in burning tears, shall find at last the haven of its long-sought rest, the heaven of its cherished dreams.

And nothing that exists shall be destroyed on earth, or sun, or planet. All things, from atoms to the great white jewelled throne of Deity, shall stand in their own sovereign right of life and destiny forever and forever. The God that made the little viewless atom that makes all visible created things hath thus decreed, and bound its viewless form by chains of living light unto his central throne, and bid it come and go from heaven to earth, and earth to heaven. And living souls upon those angel wings of living light and joy shall sweep upward to that central throne and to the peerless Cities of the Sun, and enter the pearly gates of heaven, where "God shall dwell with men."

The universal dreams of mankind, the aspirations of all thinking souls, the hallowed memories of the dead, and the sacred hopes of the living, all demand a life beyond the tomb.

All nature teaches the lessons of another life in the unfolding verdure of spring and the blossoms and fruitage of summer.

The vast material universe moves with wonderful precision and regularity, bringing in their appointed time the seasons and years. The earth, like a swift racer, speeds upon her circling orbit and completes her annual journey to a second. And infinity looks down upon us from the eternal stars in their unapproachable glory, and all tell us we have an undying soul. The disparity between the vicissitudes of man's destiny here, and the beneficent regularity and perfection of the physical universe, proclaims that man shall have another and more perfect life hereafter.

The numerous and constant changes going on in our body and brain without affecting our reason, memory, or consciousness prove unmistakably that our souls will survive our bodily existence, and enter the elysian fields of immortality. And the sacred oracles of divine truth confirm the visible oracles of the living universe, and teach us that there is in the vast realms of God's own home and Paradise a peerless heaven where the blissful soul shall taste the nectared sweets of peace and gladness, and dwell in perennial joy; where it shall bathe in the crystal fountain of life, and be robed in the divine drapery of eternal love, and sit down at the feast of immortal goodness and truth, and walk the golden streets of the celestial city, and fly on the wings of heavenly joy to the reunited loves of the terrestrial long ago.

CHAPTER XII

THE NEW JERUSALEM, THE CITIES BEAUTIFUL, AND THE CITIES OF PERFECTION

The supernal cities of the sun are thousands and millions in number, and are peopled with the departed denizens of the earth and planets; and bask in tranquil beauty in the circling radiance of the luminous corona. These cities, with their sapphire domes, diamond spires, and glittering turrets scintillating in the far crystal ether of its glowing skies, sit like jewelled crowns on the broad bosom of the father of worlds. Their mansions, spacious and beautiful, are built of gold like unto glass and inlaid with precious gems; their streets are paved with gold as it were transparent glass. For there the vast electric energy of the sun has made gold, and diamonds, rubies and all precious stones, prolific and abundant as rocks and pebbles and the heaps of sand upon the shore of earthly seas and rivers. And there these baubles of earthly desire have no commercial value, for nothing there is bought or sold. There is an endless supply for all "without money and without price."

And there on the broad bosom of the all-glorious sun is the city of the New Jerusalem, described so minutely in the wonderful visions of Saint John, basking in the white light of celestial glory, with the Israel of Jehovah, from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and Solomon, to the latest arrival from the earth planet.