Our information of the next world is meagre, and yet our friends leave our side year after year, and go to the unseen land.
How do they reach it?
Do they walk―ride―or fly?
Do they have individualised bodies―or are they mere souls, without form―or substance?
Do they live there as birds in the air―or do they live in houses as we do?
Do flowers bloom and trees grow there, and if trees thrive, as the old prophets seemed to have discovered, can they be cut down and formed into articles of use as here?
Can the inhabitants of that unseen world make tables, chairs and pianos, as well as harps of gold―or are they so familiar with the secrets of nature that they can create these desirable forms from the elements by an effort of will?
Do they retain their organs of sight, hearing and speaking?
If they speak, do they have tongues and palates?
If so, can they taste, eat―or drink, as the Old Testament relates―
The Lord smelled a sweet savour of Noah's sacrifice.
Angels ate with Abraham when he was promised a son in his old age, and Sarah listening from behind the folds of the tent laughed incredulously.
If they have form and proportion are they in the habit of clothing themselves as we do?
The ancient clairvoyants describe them as clothed in white raiment, and we―in our states of trance and in dreams―see them in customary garments.
Whence do they obtain these robes?
How is the tissue manufactured?
Can it be removed at pleasure―or is it an addendum to the spirit like the wings of a butterfly?
What is the trance state, and how is it superinduced by the inhabitants of the Next World?
A feeling of awe comes over me as I enter this mysterious condition.
The room I am in vanishes―the friends who surround me seem removed an immeasurable distance―no longer part, nor parcel with me―
I appear to be falling through space―all is darkness about me, when suddenly the air becomes illuminated, like floating points of light, each twinkling with a golden splendour.
What transpires around me I only know as a person asleep in a stage coach―or a rail-car is conscious that he is travelling―he lifts his heavy eyelids, and closes them over a knowledge that a forest of trees skirt the roadside―that hill and plain and smiling river bound the distance, and yet he sleeps.
How are the sensations thus described produced on the clairvoyante?
All these questions pour in on the mind of the medium, and it is in the endeavour to answer them that the spirits give the following accounts―
The Next World
