It was one of the sayings of Swedenborg, that the Aryan West had something to learn from the Turanian East. It is so--the reverend thought of the dead as still forming a part of the organism of the family. With the revolt at the Reformation at the trade made out of the feelings of the bereaved, the coining of their tears into cash to line the pockets of the priests, came an unwarranted oblivion of the dead, a dissociation from them. The thought that the departed had still a claim on our sympathy and on our prayers was banished as smacking of the discarded abuse. Prayer for the dying was legitimate and obligatory at ten minutes to three, but prohibited at five minutes to three when the breath had passed away. We have gone too far in this direction. We live in an immaterial as well as in a material world. We are planted at the overlap of two spheres, that which is spiritual and that which is physical, and we gravitate so sensibly and so rapidly to the latter as to lose touch with the former, and finally to disbelieve in the existence of such a sphere. The earth can radiate its heat, and receive and be steeped in the falling dew only when the sky is not overcast; but our heavens are so thick with clouds that our spirits can exhale no warmth into the Infinite, nor drink in any balm descending from the Unseen. It is only by detachment from the routine of vulgar life that we can enter into any relation with the spiritual world. Political interests, social obligations, financial concerns, choke the spiracles of our inner being, and we lose all concern about what is supersensible, and hold no communication with it. There are stars and planets overhead, Orion with his spangled belt, Cassiopeia in her glittering chair, and Pleiades in their web of silver, but we cannot see them because of the fog that envelops us. According to an Indian legend, the first men were bred like maggots in the heart of the earth, but laying hold of some depending fibres drew themselves up into the light of day. We reverse the order, and from the bright spiritual sphere crawl underground by the thousand tendrils of daily life.