aroundworldortra00peebiala-1

A SERIES OF SEANCES UPON THE OCEAN. 129
SEAKCE
VI.
What have you been doing in spirit-life to-day, friend
Knight?
" Accompanied by a sympathizing band of philanthropists,
I have been teaching the truly repentant how to make reparation
for wrongs done on earth ; the ignorant and superstitious,
how to rise out of their darkened spiritual
conditions.
. . . There are no arbitrary barriers to coarser, undeveloped
spirits passing to the outer and higher zones of perpetual
joy. It is only a law of adaptation that attracts,
chains, them to the plane of their own preferences. Clairvoyants
who speak of a summer-land only in spirit-existence,
convey an erroneous idea. There are summer-land
surfaces on the outer belts, freighted and dotted with magnificent
forests, fountains, fields, fruits, gardens, and flowers,
of the exquisite beauty of which mortals have no conception ;
and there are dark winter-lands too, corresponding to the cold,
selfish, and perverted natures of those dwelling on earth.
" The lower, grosser planes of spirit-existence necessitate
animal life ;
not the individualized spirits of your animals, but
the legitimate productions of the sphere in which they exist
something as the birds and animals of your physical ' earth
are its natural productions. As you pass outward and
upward through almost measureless spaces, you find less of
animal life, till in the celestial spheres there are no animal
forms whatever. This might suggest a question relating to
the unhappiness of certain spirits if
deprived of pet animals.
If unhappy for this reason, it would only prove that they
were yet clogged and tainted with earthly tastes and tendencies.
Angelic aifections do not flow out to animals.
This explanation harmonizes the seemingly different statements
of claii-voyants ; and, more particularly, those who
pass out of their bodies, traversing spirit-spheres. Some
while thus disinthralled, save by the silken cord of magnetic
life, beheld animals of a low type, others of a high type,
9