The soul when uncontaminated informs the whole outward body. It has its pains and illnesses, more or less affecting the outer form, yet all unrecognized in materia medica, and when its mortal brother is struck with death, bends all its energies to make escape, lest it, too, take on mortality. Failing in its effort to make a doorway for its exit, it suffers for awhile through sympathy, till the final moment sets it free from pain within its small dark house, no longer small, because made clear, transparent, by the touch of death, when the dying has been brave. No trace of foreign matter may remain to start a dissolution, in which case the soul preserves the body from decay without more trouble than a little watchful care. Sight, hearing, touch, through vibratory currents reach round the world and even touch the clouds; the body has become, in fact, a mansion perfectly adapted to the needs of its proprietor, who finds a new world open to his delighted consciousness, and thanks God fervently for his perfect victory over death, as well as for his comfort and protection within the white, still walls which form, in fact, the first abiding-place of the spirit. With this still form as passive aid, the soul, with little pain, is able to make the mental transition which its change of circumstance requires. No longer concerned directly with any thought based on material needs or material changes, it finds itself in touch with the moral causes which underlie these changes; and because moral force is most familiarly manifest in and through people, these, and their relations to itself, fill all the mental horizon. In this new field of perception, nothing impresses more than the enormous differences in spiritual rank and attainment existing among mortals who, judged by tape-line and scale, stood fairly equal, and whom human law necessarily places on a plane of perfect equality, or perhaps, through its deference to wealth, makes unequal in the wrong way. The thoroughness with which past illusions are stripped away from the mind tends to leave the spirit fairly aghast at its previous blindness. Frequently forgetting that the motor nerves of the physical form are no longer responsive to its touch, it starts to rise, that it may go and tell the world of these wonders just discovered, but finds itself in the firm and quiet grasp of death, a touch that seems to speak and say: "Never mind; that is all right. You forget you are not free. Lie still and learn your lesson." "But shall I not return?" "Possibly, but the mortal life is no concern of yours at present. You are dead." All this as in a flash, for words do not belong to this state, ideas rather, the spiritual essences of thought that seem to need no time whatever to make their mark upon the mind. To some of these the mind is so receptive that they sink at once to the very core of being, while others are held upon the surface.