If your life has been little more than a revolution around yourself, measuring everything by its relation to your personal advantage as you saw it, you will be surprised to find how small and dark a space will bound your being; and it may be a long time before you cease to dwell upon the memories of the world left behind, or cease to hope that in some way you can return to make a better use of its opportunities. And when you shall fairly come to understand that you have been living in the generous air and sunshine of the spirit of God, and that, instead of seeking to imitate Him by making your life a blessing to those less favored than yourself, you have employed your brief span in the effort to appropriate to your private use everything that could be lawfully seized on, you will wonder why the certainty that earth-life is limited had not impressed you more; and when you perceive, through the soul-consciousness which has taken the place of the bodily, that you have no data whatever upon which to base even a surmise as to how long your new kind of life is to continue, such measureless despair may fall upon you as shall even make tears impossible. CHAPTER XVII. On the other hand, if anywhere along your life-journey you have scattered any seeds of kindness, they will every one of them bear fruit in the Beyond. From the moment when you perceive and acknowledge to yourself that you are not in every way fitted to enter the courts of heaven and become associated with those to whom selfish thoughts have become simply memories, you are likely to have experiences tending to refine and purify your nature. No longer active in the outward, you must bear what influences come upon you from without as best you may. An infant in the cradle is not more helpless than the great majority of those who enter the Beyond; and the invisible nurse that may have you in charge will not ask you what kind of medicine is most agreeable, but will administer what is best for you. Picture to your mind, if possible, what it would be like to lie physically helpless, with your outward consciousness telling you that you no longer appear as a man, or as a woman, but only as an infant to any eyes able to see you, while at the same time your mental vision is perfectly clear and takes in all your past life in every aspect of its relation to other lives, and especially in its relations to the great all-pervading life which seems now to be somehow lost out of all possible reach.