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then see yourselves revealed in all your sinful wretchedness and deformity!

"See blazoned in him the way of Life and Good, and behold him beckoning you on to walk therein!

"See in him your examplar, and fashion yourselves like unto HIM.

"He inspireth you to emulation, and strengtheneth you to attainment.

"Let your souls yearn, and hunger, and feel their destitution, and then go to his life and be filled.

"God created you for Himself. Go! fulfill your sublime destiny!

"God wills not the death of any soul, but that all should have life more abundantly.

"What your fullness and grandeur of life may be, ought to be, behold it sublimated in Christ! Become it!

"If in spite of all the pure, spiritual truth magnified in Christ; if in spite of his blessed beatitudes freely offered you for your acceptance and emulation, inviting your transfiguration into them by conforming your life unto them; if, in spite of all these, you cling to the body of sin and of this living death, then I pity you, I commiserate you! You become, while you so remain, a foul, revolting blot on God's beauteous creation!

"It is your duty and blessed possibility and privilege to become sealed unto God.

"When you have reached this beatified state-if you ever will be free forever from the power and dominion sin and evil.

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of any "In the progress of the development and growth of the higher spiritual nature, that is even now latent within you all, there is a point reached, a blessed state attained, whereat the good and Godlike in us becomes all-powerful, wherein we become of God's spiritual image as He intended for us, whereby the soul becomes sealed unto God!

"This is the sublime state of our perfection in Holiness. Here every tendency and power and principle and emotion and thought is for good. And the dominion of evil is forever vanquished!

"Be ye thus sealed unto God!

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I see before me some from Earth's sphere, who have hardly seen the first glimmer of light-who were born, and who lived, while on earth, in the very alleys and dismal, darkened dens of ignorance, sin and vice. Legions of you are from the darkened lands of Earth. And you are here, your sickly souls creeping and crouching, as it were, in this befouled realm. You have not been able to rise above this state, because you have never been taught on Earth to know of a purer, higher life. Some of you were there society's offcasts! They of earth, among whom your sad lot was cast, were always much concerned about themselves, and their vanities and luxuries; they thought it a grand thing to rear many grand structures as temples dedicated to God, in which they held their stated and stately worship in luxurious convocation-but you they let alone to be dedicated to sin and evil!

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"God looketh upon you with much pity! In yonder world much was not given unto you, and here much is not required. The consequences of your darkened life on earth can here lay on you but few stripes. Ye scarcely knew what ye did. "You most tenderly would I lift up into the light. Be ye patient and endure a little while!

"And thou, tempted, suffering Magdalene! So often sorely tried, so much oppressed in thy young days, so driven and burdened by hard task-masters, who devoured widow's homes! Ye, who thus wert crushed into sin, are near to God's tender love! Yea, the Father hath already forgiven you, but ye must be cleansed in your desires.

"To all of you I wish to say this much more.

"The evil delights in which some of you debauch your lives will after a short while become stale, flat and unprofitable. Yea, with the most of you it is even so now.

"These viands of evil will turn to ashes and gall.

"Your lives will become a perpetual wasting away until all light, joy and hope grow dim, futile and despairing. it is thus even now.

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“With many "With others, now so gay and so debauched in the revels and wicked abominations of this corruption; so hilarious in the enjoyment of all these forms of evil-the same dull, insipid, monotonous wasting away and decay will come.

"Such are your pleasures here for which you desecrate your souls.

"And now to you all I say in parting from you, as your lives revert from this evil current and, purified by tribulation, turn lovingly to God, His purer realm of the blessed Good awaits you!

"It will be no perilous journey from this to that. For when your life here reconcileth itself to God, and becometh imaged unto His life which is exampled before you, it cannot remain here except to do good and to lift up these other fallen ones. Like seeketh like!

"The glorified soul findeth God everywhere, and like the twinkling holy thought it giveth forth, it flasheth at once into His glorious presence! Farewell!"

CHAPTER XXVI.

AFTER SCENES-DEATH? OR THE PROCESS OF BECOMING LIFE?

THUS ended a discourse which opened up to me the responsibility of man, the connection of cause and effect in man's moral actions; the sequence of suffering and punish

ment, joy and blessedness, as the outcome and results of man's own free doings; such as had never been presented to me on earth. And here in this psychic sphere I saw its truth in demonstration, in practical application.

I saw the natural, rational truth spoken by Benedictus exemplified everywhere about me.

I saw poor, suffering creatures reaping the harvests which they had sown. I saw them still sowing the seed of evil to produce other harvests which they would have to garner in misery and degradation.

So like what I had seen on earth a thousand times.

Men sowing to the wind and reaping the whirlwind; sowing tares and reaping tares.

I saw that men's evil inclinations; their propensities for sinful and degrading acts and deeds; their all-consuming lust and licentiousness and all manner of uncleanliness; their hate, revengeful emotions and animosities; their avarice, and mean, snarling selfishness; all remained a part of themselves as they had been in their former states of existence. Their change of locality or sphere had not changed their identity or their individual characters. The same forces of personality remained dominant within them.

This discourse of Benedictus, as well as what I saw and learned from other sources, taught me another truth, that God never shut up a soul to eternal despair and hopeless torment. If any being ever arrived at such an awful state it became his portion of his own volition.

In Plutone I saw still offered to them the incentive and hope of holy life and higher spiritual attainment.

In the case of vast numbers of these poor beings, I learned that here they received their first glimmer of spiritual light; and learned for the first time their true and possible relations to their Father. Their whole former existence had been in darkness, ignorance and degradation.

The latent principles and powers of good implanted within

them by God had never had on Earth one chance or incentive for exercise and development. "All their lifetime they had been in bondage" to physical poverty, want, ignorance and deprivation. How could they ever become spiritual, and grow into righteousness in their lives when all their days on earth they were driven by the temporal wants and necessities of the body, and goaded always into sinful desperation ?

Poor creatures, there was this consolation here in Plutone, that they received but few stripes, and also that they had opened up to them here, by the "Celestial Truth-Bearers," the sublime vistas of a higher and purer life!

Of these good Benedictus told me that many of them, when they received for the first time the knowledge and inspiration of holiness and purity and beauty and joy, and when they learned of a Father in the pure spiritual realms who loved them, leaped for joy; they spent their every moment struggling against their evil natures, desires and habits; they bore with heroic resignation the fearful cross of that terrible battle against the dominion of evil within them, which every soul must bear for itself; they seized upon every hope; they kissed the penal rod which their former sins laid upon them, rejoicing in that fearful expiation which was necessary for their purification and exaltation; and when their souls were able to receive God and the Light, they rose triumphant into blessed Life!

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The nature and characteristics of this realm inhabited by these evil minds were not in themselves hideous and repulsive. To one of pure heart and sanctified mind this realm itself was celestial and beautiful. God created it as He did all others, and He never created anything of itself hideous.

However, this sphere by reason of its inhabitants had not the beauty of holiness, such as that which enshrined the celestial spheres where God dwells in the souls and lives of His creatures. For in the spheres of the Holy Minds there

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