The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891Various
General
The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891
Various
American literature -- Periodicals
By the breaking of the bread of life, the hidden manna of the Word,
the reality behind appearance, the multitude of faculties is fed and
that unseen assembly nourished whose lives are linked with ours at
this Lord's Supper of the soul. Blinded perceptions are restored to
sight from day to day, and gifted with a constantly enlarging field of
vision in the realm of truth and law. The understanding that was deaf
vibrates with joy in response to the call of a salvatory science. The
antitypes of palsied arm and crippled foot, which are the lack of
power to do and of ability to advance in a higher, mental life, are
healed by the transforming touch that makes its impress on the soul
when first made conscious, that by its own free will its highest
ideals are to become realities. Even those who have been so
earth-bound and selfish as to be lifeless, cold, and dead to the
knowledge of God and love to the neighbor are commencing to arise in
answer to the spirit of the approaching altruistic age. Accompanying
this present resurrection, the veil is being rent that for so long has
intervened between this life and the next. And although no outward
cloud is sundered for a personal Messiah to descend to rule as
temporal prince, the denser fogs of a gross materialism are parting
fast before the rising glory of that day whose dawn we see afar on the
horizon. For the signs are many and are strikingly apparent that those
splendid souls, the wisely great ones of the past, the saviors and
educators of the race, are to co-operate with us in the formation of
that kingdom and republic which their prophetic vision saw and fervent
words foretold. Then, as a spiritual reality, will we understand the
truth symbolized by the doctrines of the church concerning the
resurrection of the dead and communion with the saints, as the first
fruits of them that slept appear to us. And what is now prefigured by
the phenomena and personations of modern spiritualism, will then
become a blessed fact as our missing loved ones labor with us for our
and their redemption and the good of all mankind. Had they been
permitted, or were they able, to return for any other purpose, the
result would be the furtherance of selfishness and materiality.
Spiritualism, with its convincing tests of an unseen intelligence, and
its crude communications, sustains the same relation to the angelic
intercourse which it simulates, that the symbolic conversion, baptism,
and bread and wine of the church bear to the organic experiences of
a true life. They are all, alike, signs and forms, shadows cast before
the substance drawing nigh, the Christ that is to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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