But the mere gazing at, and admiration of, these pretty pictures will not conduce to a comprehension of them--will not help us to discover what formulated in the mind of the artist the design of the picture he painted. For this needful purpose it may not prove unprofitable to have recourse, in the first instance, to the metaphysics of the grand old Oriental mystic, St. Paul. By his assistance we may find that these conceptions, Heaven and Nirvana, on which so much wealth of imagery has been lavished, and about which controversy has well-nigh exhausted itself, will resolve themselves into something less indefinite, and more thinkable, of one nature and of one significance. In his Epistle to the Corinthians he tells us "God hath chosen the things that are not to bring to nought the things that are." Now, the "things that are not" must assuredly be taken to mean that which is, figuratively speaking, beyond the threshold--something, in this respect, more than the subliminal[AM] reveals; in fact, the ultra-liminal, and, consequently, the immutable. They are the quality Truth, residing in, but inseparable, as long as senses last, from, the "things that are"--namely, in materiality as we perceive it; materiality being here understood as "potential feeling, from which develop ideas, or the soul of man." [AM] "Subliminal" I use here in a strictly etymological sense--_sub limen_, up to the lintel. Ultimately perfected ideas, or soul, become this quality, Truth; they become that which is within and outside all things--in short, what Jesus calls "the kingdom of God within," as well as the Heaven around us. The expression "bring to nought" has its equivalents in the terms "annihilation" and "extinction," so often used in connection with Nirvana, for the desperate purpose of depreciating the Buddhist conception of Heaven. The "things that are" are material objects as we perceive them, which are mutable, and never the same one moment together--never really are, but are for ever undergoing a process of becoming ("God calleth those things which be not as though they were," Rom. iv. 17). Material objects are mutable, and Heaven and Nirvana are immutability. Plotinus says: "The return to God, or The One (or Truth), is the consummation of all things, and the goal indicated by Christian teaching." This oneness, however, does not imply extinction. "He who has entered upon Nirvana is not annihilated; on the contrary, he has attained the deathless." The identical idea is prevalent both in New Testament teaching and in Buddhistic doctrine, that the realization of that state of blessedness which is called "Heaven" in the one case, and "Nirvana" in the other, could be brought about during the lifetime of the saint. "But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the kingdom of God" (Luke ix. 27).