Spirit Life: Or, Do We Die?

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Stanton and Van Vliet Company, 1920 - 272 pages
 

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Page 112 - I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.
Page 147 - Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance ; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility ? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact : we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions ; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity ; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons.
Page 148 - ... some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago, they were...
Page 149 - ... So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forthissuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow: — and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even...
Page 118 - I merely mean to say what Johnson said. That in the course of some six thousand years, All nations have believed that from the dead A visitant at intervals appears ; And what is strangest upon this strange head, Is, that whatever bar the reason rears 'Gainst such belief, there's something stronger still In its behalf, let those deny who will.
Page 4 - Who, hopeless, lays his dead away, Nor looks to see the breaking day Across the mournful marbles play! Who hath not learned, in hours of faith, The truth to flesh and sense unknown, That Life is ever lord of Death And Love can never lose its own...
Page 117 - This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth : those that never heard of one another, would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence, and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.
Page 149 - God-created, firebreathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive?
Page 145 - The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, "See, this is new"? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
Page 147 - Alexander of Macedon : does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battleshouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him ; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must ? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt ; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away? — Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide ; some half-hundred have vanished from...

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