Recognition in Heaven

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PKEFACE. ' The heart has its own history. In its loneliness often spontaneously arise emotions of indefinable endearment, that seem to be prophetic of a blissful consummation, as if breathed by invisible and familiar friends from the Spirit-land. Insensible, at such times, of connection with rude matter about us, we seem to be soaring aloft to a bright and happy world afar, ?a Paradise, an Eden of Love, the home of the soul, ?where the Father of our spirits abides, surrounded by his ransomed and angelic family, ?and among them are many of our own household. Anon, we seem to have approached so near as almost to hear the softened notes of the distant cherubim, and to inhale the fragrance of the Rose of Sharon and the odor of the golden vials, and to see the curtain of immortality gently rising, and revealing familiar forms and faces beckoning us to a welcome place among them. At such times, like Paul, we hear and see what it is unlawful to repeat?so sacred are our communings with them we love, and so rude and cold the world in which we live. Or, like Peter on Tabor, we never would think of earth again, did not other friends and unfinished work recall us to the place of graves. Or, as to John in Patmos, a door to us seems opened in heaven, and we seem to hear a voice saying, Come up hither, and I will show you things which must be hereafter; ? and suddenly the sterile rocks around us become a mount of glorious vision?from which, like Elijah, in a chariot of fire we would ascend into the open .heavens, if the time had come to transmit our mantle to another. And so, like David, we cheer ourselves the while with the belief, that, though our sainted friends cannot come back to us, we shall in due time go to them. We cannot renounce the belief that an invisible spiritual wo