Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SPIRITUAL RECLAMATION. The progress of souls from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, is among the more beautiful spectacles of our spiritual life. And, soon or late, this is a consummation which awaits us all. Yet, spiritual reclamation, whether on the large scale or the small, demands concentration of purpose, energy, and intelligence. Would we realise heaven, let us begin now. The paradise of our aspirations has its foundations here, and the capacities of the future are grounded on those of the present life. A twofold cosmos, natural things and spiritual, Must go to a perfect world. For whoso separates those two, In arts, in morals, or the social drift, Tears up the bond of nature and brings death. As we love here, we shall love in a degree hereafter, as we feel and think now, so must we in somewise feel and think for ever. The unseen world, with all its momentous transactions, let us be assured, is simple and natural as that in which we dwell. Ascetic horrors and ascetic gloom, travestying and deforming with frightful, yet vain imaginings, the beautiful eity of God, are sorry preparatives for heaven. How, indeed, should sourness and formality, convictions on which no ray of imagination or feeling seems to shine, consort with the angelic amenities, the transporting assurances of the life to come. For this, let us be well assured, is not as some inquisition torture-chamber, reformatory hulk, or condemned cell. In the celestial life, as here, so surely as God is light, and truth, and love, goal shall succeed goal, and quest follow quest, for ever. A new iris shall spring up, not to foil past efforts, but to allure us on to new, a constant becoming of which the perfect realisation is never. There, indeed, the great- souled patriot shaM freedom find at ...