681. If we leave this earth, in order to imagine any location beyond the range of astronomical bodies, it would place the locality at a distance, according to Herschel, requiring nineteen hundred thousand years for souls to travel, moving with the velocity of light, two hundred thousand miles in a second. In one of my lectures, in 1842, I suggested that heaven might be situated at that central space about which all the constellations of the universe have been supposed to revolve. 682. But if we infer a general place of reception for souls, then in that celestial emporium every soul from all the myriads of planets, of all the solar systems in the universe, must congregate. Far more rational does it not seem that our heaven should be associated with our own planet, in the welfare, the past history, and future prospects of which the souls who were born upon it, must take pre-eminent interest? 683. The separation of any heaven into spheres seems inevitable, since the association of spirits according to their virtue and intellectual acquirements and capacity seems indispensable to harmony and happiness. Thus the more virtuous, wise, and cultivated spirits are, the higher their spheres of existence. 684. Let any person contemplate the information respecting the spirit world given in the preceding pages, in the communications from my spirit relations and others, and then say whether, in receiving them as true, any believer in immortality, as vaguely portrayed in the gospel, will not make a beneficial exchange. 685. How can any person become a spiritualist without forthwith finding an irresistible impulse to conduct himself in this world, so as to acquire eminence in the next? For what are we all working? is it not for happiness, “our being’s end and aim,” the difference being only in the mode by which it is sought? By some it is through the good of others as well as of themselves; yet too many seek it without regard to that portion of their fellow-creatures whom they may deem it their interest to oppress, deceive, cheat, or rob. 686. But even these will perceive how much better it will be to pursue the opposite course, since every wrong done by them here, will have to be expiated by a proportionate penance in the spirit world. 687. By every good action resulting from the wish to do as we would be done by, we advance a step higher in that heavenly stairway by which we may ultimately reach the supernal heaven, and become ministering angels of God. 688. But even during our ascending progression, we shall pass through a succession of stages wherein every intellectual, social, and amiable propensity of our nature will be gratified.