Strange Visitors: A series of original papers, embracing philosophy, science, government, religion, poetry, art, fiction, satire, humor, narrative, and prophecy, by the spirits of Irving, Willis, Thackeray, Brontë, Richter, Byron, Humboldt, Hawthorne, Wesley, Browning, and others now dwelling in the spirit world; dictated through a clairvoyant, while in an abnormal or trance stateHorn, Henry J.
Religion
Strange Visitors: A series of original papers, embracing philosophy, science, government, religion, poetry, art, fiction, satire, humor, narrative, and prophecy, by the spirits of Irving, Willis, Thackeray, Brontë, Richter, Byron, Humboldt, Hawthorne, Wesley, Browning, and others now dwelling in the spirit world; dictated through a clairvoyant, while in an abnormal or trance state
Horn, Henry J.
Spirit writings
But as mankind has a natural love of locality, and as congenial minds
will select similar locations, adapted to their ideas of beauty and
comfort, the result is that spirit inhabitants unite and form cities
and towns as on earth. Thus combining, they must have some points of
interest to occupy their minds, and as they still possess their power
of construction and ingenuity, their love of beautiful forms and of
architecture, they prefer not to live in the open air and on the bare
ground (as they can certainly do), but choose rather to employ their
various faculties in building cities and habitations in accordance with
their tastes and ideas of convenience.
Once grant that man is provided with a spiritual body after he emerges
from his original one--accept the hypothesis that this body must
possess form and sensation, and with sensation, eyes, ears, mouth,
taste, and motion--then you must provide means for that body to exist.
In providing these means you must place him upon a soil capable of
producing vegetation, where his intelligence may compound the various
articles adapted to his use.
Some individuals enter the spirit world deformed, some feeble in
intellect, some incapable of constructing or arranging. All these must
have provision made for them; their wants must be supplied. The effort
to supply want or demand produces a system of exchange or barter.
Many of the inhabitants of the spirit world are both good and kind.
They are spiritualized in their natures, and are influenced by a desire
to assist those who are needy.
Nature, or God, has ordained that existence should depend upon effort;
that a state of inactivity should produce dissolution; and much the
same means are taken there to enforce activity as in the material world.
True, some men possess natural gifts, by which knowledge is acquired
without labor. The power of seeing before the demonstration belongs
to all humanity. It is the negative form of knowledge; but combined
with that power is the positive, which compels man to desire a visible
representation or demonstration of the knowledge he has received by
intuition.
The astronomer thus, before he constructs his telescope, perceives
intuitively the very stars which his telescope proves as existing,
where none are visible to the eye.
It was this active-positive principle, that made him construct the
instrument; and in the spirit world, as on earth, that active-positive
principle acts in conjunction with the negative-intuitive one, in
impelling him to exertion, and forcing him to acquire knowledge in
every department of science, art, philosophy and religion. As well
expect this earth to rest in her revolution and still retain her place
in the solar system, as to suppose that the spirit of man can lose its
activity and sink to rest eternal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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