A Stellar Key to the Summer Land

Excerpt:

THE discovery and announcement of that wonderful and interminable relationship between the material universe and the spiritual universe-a relationship founded in the immutable laws of existence, by which things visible are bound by the ties of fertile sympathy to realms of causation invisible-could not but astonish and delight the boldest poetic imagination, and excite the opposition and ridicule of those skeptics who rely for what they term "positive knowledge," upon the industry and testimony of their five bodily senses.

The discovery of the law of Gravitation, notwithstanding its far-stretching penetrations into the profoundest secrets and fixed operations of the great Positive Mind, was not a thousandth part as important and world-lifting as was the disclosure of an inhabitable and a really inhabited belt of solid spiritualized matter in the heavens, adapted to the new bodies, and new senses, and new necessities, of men, and women, and children, who are born on this planet, and who unfairingly withdraw from it through the process called " Death."

Like thankful children, bending in reverential gratitude beneath the unutterable glory of the Central Sun -the throne, so to speak, of the all-loving Mother and omniscient Father of All-we approach the repositories of ideas and essences, and ask for such facts and such illustrations as can be seen and admitted by philosophers and skeptics of the most materialistic habits of thought.

We seek for data in the recognized fields of positive knowledge, for scientific facts and recent discoveries in matter, which shall serve as stepping-stones for the millions, whereby they can, intellectually and rationally, gain a clear vision of spheres celestial and heavenly.

The world-cheering discovery of the shining belt, to.which I have alluded, has arrived by degrees; coming through the hazy glimmerings of man's intuitions from remotest ages; stealing with beneficent mysteriousness through the hopes of mankind; seen like the light of a distant taper shining through openings in thinnest clouds; felt in the reasonings and wonderful generalizations of astronomers; beheld by the entranced poet and by the inspired artist as a permanent reality beyond the starry confines; contemplated by analogical reasoners as a capacious Existence-adapted to, and yearned for by the immortal mind - a world swimming somewhere in space, where star or planet never rolled; demonstrated to the senses of spiritualists by " sounds," not uncertain, like e voices of distant waters heard through a landscape unrknown, but distinct and positive, telling of a home for you and for me in the solemn abysses of space; and, lastly, looked upon by tile bright eyes of independent clairvoyants, who have discerned its constitution, read its sublime mysteries, disclosed the grandeur of the planetary mechanism, described the illustrious beings who repose there in contemplation, and the thronging hosts, also, who, with human affections and infinitely diversified attractions, people that substantial and eternal sphere, not built with hands, in the bosom of the heavens.

The relationship and sympathy between tile orbs and spheres of immensity -between this world of humanity and that better world of humanity arisen-are recognized naturally and inevitably by man's intuitions and reason. It comes like a gleam of glory sent into finite minds from the Central Sun; and he is unreverential to truth, not to say wicked and dogmatic, who turns away from it with contempt. '

" Man is immortal, " is the world's affirmation. "'Is it otherwise possible in the government of the Universe?" asks a writer. "Shall the material thing, inorganic, inert, impercipient, move on in this wondrous perpetuity; and shall the soul which discerns its order and tracks its career, and detects its laws and speculates on its constitution, be swept away as nothing before it?

Shall unconscious matter last, while the mind, to which alone its functions are subservient, which interprets its mysteries and reads them in the signature of God, vanish like the passing wind? Shall the knowledge and the thoughts of men be handed down in endless genealogy, teaching and inspiring the soul of other times; and shall the conscious creature which called them into being be blotted ignominiously from creation. Impossible! It cannot be but that they, through the medium of whose thought we now gaze at the skies, witness elsewhere the excellence of their past toils, the triumphs of their studious meditations.

Surely the Heavens which they deciphered, they behold with eyes undimmed by age, and minds yet yearning, but in a spirit of profounder adoration, to press forward toward vaster disclosures of the infinitude of God!" Looking far into the ages past, and making the laborious march of man's history with regard to his acquisition of positive knowledge, I find accurate conceptions, more or less mixed with the reflections of superstition and the colorings of fancy, of the realities pertaining to a higher sphere of human existence. At first it was natural for the individual mind to be narrow in its conceptions, because its views were mainly derived from outward observations of the skies.

But now, at an era when the human race is no longer in its infancy, the individual's reason can take in purer sentiments and larger conceptions, derived from discoveries of those unchangeable laws and principles which sustain and regulate the stupendous combinations of infinite harmonies. The Intuition of past generations, like the totality of the Reason of those now living, gives out no conflicting testimony on the physical possibility of an inhabitable sphere or zone of spiritualized matter in space, called recently the Summer Land.

It is no dream, remember, but a demonstration consummated at the lower end of Herschel's telescope, that scattered through tihe measureless expanse of blue ether, but in the very perfection of order and harmony, are groups of stars and systems of suns, occupying the heavens positions which are, to the unarmed eye, covered and filled with only boundless fields of nebula. Scientific astronomy, by its marvelous discoveries, has thus expanded men's minds with respect to the firmamental magnitudes and planetary splendors of the material universe.

The cosmogonies of illimitable space are fast coming into popular education. It is now conceded, even by anthropomorphists and other unprogressive religionists, that instead of the earth being at the center of God's universe, and instead of the doings and omissions of its denizens being the chief concern and perpetual misery of the entire Trinity, our sun and its planets belong to the Milky Way not only, but that the Milky Way itself is merely one community of suns and planets of an infinitude of similar systems and communities that float and sing the songs of harmony, in the celestial atmosphere of the univercoelum! "Where are we, after all," asks an astronomer,' but in the center of a sphere, whose circumference is 35,000 times as far from us as Sirius, and beyond whose circuit boundless infinity stretches unfathomed as ever. In our first conceptions, the distance of the earth from the sun is a quantity almost infinite. Compare it with the intervals between the fixed stars, and it becomes no quantity at all, but only an infinitesimal.

Now, when the spaces between the stars are contrasted with the gulfs of dark space separating firmaments, they absolutely vanish below us. Can the whole firmamental creation, in its turn, be only a corner of some mightier schemer-a mere nebula itself? Probably Coleridge is not in error:-' It is not impossible that to some infinitely superior Being the whole universe may be as one plain-the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain and the grain adjacent!"

The stupendous character of the truths thus far unfolded by astronomy must act beneficially upon the human mind. But it is my impression that the resolution of the nebula of immensity into millions of suns, with their attendant minor systems of inhabitable planets and uninhabitable satellites, asteroids, and comets, is, notwithstanding its amazing, and engrossing, and overwhelming vastness and sublime beauty, nothing more than a look within the vestibule of the Eternal Temple! The measureless systems of stars and suns, which roll and swim and eddy and waltz about in their harmonial circles, shine upon landscapes more beautiful, and into eyes more divine than ours!