And thus, in the due time of the Lord all who have dwelt upon the earth in any age, Jew, Gentile, heathen, Christian, may hear the glad tidings of the everlasting gospel preached by those appointed and authorized, and have an opportunity of repentance, improvement and reconciliation. But the ordinances which belong to the sphere of mortality cannot be received in a spiritual estate; they belong to the flesh and must be attended to in the flesh. Consideration of the means provided by Infinite Goodness through which the benefits of those essential ordinances can be obtained by believing, repentant, disembodied persons, must be left till the unfolding of another leaf. NINTH LEAF. Decrees of God Fixed in the Spiritual as in the Natural Universe--Ordinances Essential--The Living may be Baptized for the Dead--The Principle of Proxy--The Place for the Administration of Vicarious Ordinances--Revelation of Elijah, the Prophet--Connection with the Spirit World--True Order of Communication--Blessed Results of Work Done for the Dead. The divine fiat has gone forth that "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." This is a fixed law. The same certainty that is exhibited in the government of the material universe obtains in the spiritual domain, and is as much a necessity in one as in the other. As man cannot change the revolutions of the planets nor alter the principles that underlie all motion and regulate all matter, so he cannot turn aside the decrees of Jehovah, nor modify, in the least degree, any rule or commandment pertaining to the everlasting gospel. Neither will He who reigns in the unseen world, as well as in the sphere perceived by the senses, swerve from His established laws in the former any more than in the latter. Baptism, or the birth of water in the form and mode already described, is an essential ordinance. There are others equally necessary in their time and place in the divine plan of human redemption. They must be rightly received and administered, or the blessings that spring from them, as their natural fruit, cannot be enjoyed. As aliens cannot be admitted to the rights and privileges of citizenship in an earthly government, without complying with the naturalization laws in such case made and provided, so aliens from the heavenly kingdom cannot be received into its dominion, nor be adopted into the family of the Eternal King, without obeying the laws set as the conditions of admission. These laws and ordinances will be made known to the inhabitants of this planet, either in the flesh or in the disembodied condition. They will have the opportunity of receiving or rejecting them on the agency given to man, that a just judgment may be rendered in the great day of accounts. But ordinances, such as baptism, the laying on of hands for confirmation, ordination, marriage, etc., belong to the corporeal sphere. They are set for the state of probation.