"Spiritual world" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... In the spiritual world, as in the natural, God has made greater lights and lesser lights. Some have more light and some have less. The main thing is, to use well such light as we have. A traveller is making his way home. He is very glad to have daylight, ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... things that are round about us": and Gregory says in the same sense (Hom. xiv in Ezech.): "The contemplative life is sweetness exceedingly lovable; for it carries the soul away above itself, it opens heaven and discovers the spiritual world to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... every great man is intrinsically a poet, an idealist, with more or less completeness of utterance, which of all our great men, in these modern ages, had such an endowment in that kind as Luther? He it was, emphatically, who stood based on the spiritual world of man, and only by the footing and power he had obtained there, could work such changes on the material world. As a participant and dispenser of divine influence, he shows himself among human affairs a true connecting medium and visible messenger between heaven and ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... description rather than at the reality of the thing described. It implies a tacit agreement, among cultivated people, that the unseen world must be purely spiritual in constitution. The agreement is not habitually expressed in definite formulas, for the reason that no mental image of a purely spiritual world can be formed. Much stress is commonly laid upon the recognition of friends in a future life; and however deep a meaning may be given to the phrase "the love of God," one does not easily realize that a heavenly existence could be worth the longing that is felt for it, if it were to afford ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... beautiful associations, flowed in upon the world without a formal proclamation. I feel thankful to God for so regarding our intelligent natures, as to leave some things, relating to ordinances, modes, and forms, to be inferred, bringing great changes over the moral and spiritual world, and leaving us to adjust ourselves and the administration of the appointed ordinances to them. We can add nothing, we take nothing away from an express, divine command; but, as the first disciples were left to infer that a Sabbath was as ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... old shepherd had merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts so frequently startle the night traveller; but the apparition now filled his whole mind, as one vouchsafed from the spiritual world, and ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... those days formed no idea of a spiritual world, or of a spiritual divinity. They however imagined, that heroes of former days still continued to live and to reign in certain semi-heavenly regions among the summits of their blue and beautiful mountains, ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... upon their foreheads the mark of guilt for the misery in which my poor people were toiling. And no sooner had I gained sufficient knowledge of the sentiments, the desires, the ideas that peopled the spiritual world of the young man appointed as my shepherd, then I knew once for all that ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... their call. Sir Walter Scott took this view of the transaction. His opinion, it is true, would be considered more important in any other department than that of biblical interpretation: on all questions, however, connected with the spiritual world of fancy and with its history, he must be allowed to speak, if not with the authority, at least with the tone of a master. This wonderful author, in the infinite profusion and variety of his productions, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... the absolute promise from God of protection for His people from every evil. We are not to cut it down, not to say that it applies absolutely in regard to the spiritual world, but that it does not apply in regard to temporal things. Yes, it does entirely, only you have to rise to the height of God's conception of what is good and what is evil in regard to outward things, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Earth, but above the skies. Events are spoken of therefore in this view. A man's obduracy is recorded thus,—'GOD hardened his heart.' A king numbers his people; it is recorded as a thing suggested in the spiritual world. In fact, the historic volume of the Old Testament is a history of the secret springs of things; it is a narrative of things which none but GOD ALMIGHTY could know; not Man's Word therefore at all, but GOD'S."—Sermons, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... would come back and "judge the world," raising the dead,—and then all who had believed in him would be "saved," but the rest would be "lost forever;" a new world would take the place of the old, and the Christians would have a good time in that Kingdom of Heaven. This new "spiritual world" would contain some extraordinary things; thus, "every grape-vine would have ten thousand trunks, every trunk ten thousand branches, every branch ten thousand twigs, every twig ten thousand clusters, every cluster ten thousand grapes, and every grape would yield twenty-five ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... reached only through the assimilating life of the spirit. The spirit may be so "cabined, cribbed, confined" as not to come to any consciousness of itself; or it may be so set free as to go forth and recognize its kinship, respond to the spiritual world outside of itself, and, by so responding, KNOW what merely intellectual philosophers call ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... and to send me to teach the things relating to the New Church, which is meant by the New Jerusalem in the Revelation: for which purpose he has opened the interiors of my mind and spirit; by virtue of which privilege it has been granted me to be in the spiritual world with angels, and at the same time in the natural world with men, and this ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away? Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... complement and spiritual exponent thereof, a Poet Goethe and German Literature is to me another. The old Secular or Practical World, so to speak, having gone up in fire, is not here the prophecy and dawn of a new Spiritual World, parent of far nobler, wider, new Practical Worlds? A Life of Antique devoutness, Antique veracity and heroism, has again become possible, is again seen actual there, for the most modern man. A phenomenon, as quiet as it is, comparable for greatness to no other! 'The great event for the ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... put down at pleasure, and which may be subjected to repeated readings. The work is pleasant, however, in spite of this—pleasant because of its facts, its numerous details of mystery, its vast collection of anecdote, its developments of diablerie, its tidings from the spiritual world, and the many cases which it brings together of the curious and the wonderful in nature and art, which former ages, and ignorance and superstition, have concluded to consider supernatural. Where science and modern speculation ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... having the judgment of a sincere mind on the subject. In his own mind, I should suppose, he is past the stage of doubt and inquiry; for he told me that in every action of his life he is governed by the counsels received from the spiritual world through a medium. I did not inquire whether this medium (who is a small boy) had suggested his visit to me. My remarks to him were quite of a sceptical character in regard to the faith to which he had surrendered himself. He has formerly lived in America, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy anticipated in the occasional temporary absorptions ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... with that of the New Jerusalem Church. Two preliminary facts were brought before us; the Higher Spirits were in theology Swedenborgian, and in medical practice homoeopaths. So was the Medium. Although there was no marriage in the spiritual world, in our sense of the term, there was not only this re-sorting and junction of the disunited bivalves, but there were actual "nuptials" celebrated. We were to be careful and understand that what terrestrials called marriage celestials named nuptials—it seemed to me ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... be also harmony and concord in that spiritual world, the Church of God, the grandest conception of His omnipotence, and the most bounteous manifestation of His goodness ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... of our sojourn here is that we have a strange and beautiful device—a window, I will call it—which admits one to a sight of the spiritual world. I was to-day contemplating, not without pain, but with absolute confidence in its justice, the sufferings of some of these lost souls, and I observed, I cannot say with satisfaction, but with complete submission, the form of my friend, whom my testimony might ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... there is also a sense in which it may be said that the Venus of Melos, for instance, is but a supremely well-executed object of vertu, in the most limited sense of the term. Those solemn images of the temple of Theseus are a perfect embodiment of the human ideal, of the reasonable soul and of a spiritual world; they are also the best made things of their kind, as an urn or a ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... ruin; the natural, psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on" incorruption and immortality. He is a member of a new order; he is "heavenly," a creation "not made with hands," but wrought out of the substance of the spiritual world, and furnished with the inherent capacity of eternal duration, so that "mortality is swallowed up ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... consisting of the sun, moon and planets. The sun is the center around which all the planets revolve, and from which they receive their light. The moon borrows its light from the sun. When some object interposes between the moon and the sun the moon is left in darkness. In the spiritual world there is a spiritual solar system consisting of sun, moon and stars. As in the literal system, the moon and stars revolve around the Sun and borrow ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.' This experience marked the rebirth of Thoreau, as truly as a new and delightful sensitiveness to a spiritual world marked the re-birth of Bunyan. The whole secret of re-birth lies in the recovery ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... the prediction of the time of his death, and its exact fulfilment;—JOHNSON. 'It is the most extraordinary thing that has happened in my day. I heard it with my own ears, from his uncle, Lord Westcote. I am so glad to have every evidence of the spiritual world, that I am willing to believe it.' DR. ADAMS. 'You have evidence enough; good evidence, which needs not such support.' JOHNSON. 'I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... question of the relation between abnormal and morbid nervous states and religious illumination. How far has the one been mistaken for the other? To what extent have people accepted the outcome of pathological conditions as proofs of intercourse with an unseen spiritual world? There is no doubt that among uncivilised people this is usually, if not invariably, the case. And our knowledge of the relations between the nervous system and mental states—imperfect as it still is—is so recent, that it is not surprising that fasting, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... an interior process taking place on the mental plane; but if we realize that the creative process is always primarily one of involution, or formation in the spiritual world, we shall grasp something of the meaning of Christ as "The Son of God"—the concentration of the Universal Spirit into a Personality on the spiritual plane correlatively to the individuality of each one who affords the necessary thought-conditions. To all who apprehend it ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... struggled together, suffered together. Was it as lovers torn asunder by calamity? was it as combatants forced by bitter necessity into bitter feud, when we only, in all the world, yearned for peace together? Oh, what a searching glance was that which she cast on me! as if she, being now in the spiritual world, abstracted from flesh, remembered things that I could not remember. Oh, how I shuddered as the sweet sunny eyes in the sweet sunny morning of June—the month that was my 'angelical'; half spring, yet with summer ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the great object of her prayers, and fully satisfied all the desires of her soul. The most astonishing visions and divine manifestations were presented to her view in so clear and striking a manner that the whole spiritual world seemed displayed before her. In these extraordinary manifestations she had a full and clear view of the mystery of iniquity, of the root and foundation of human depravity, and of the very act of transgression ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... thunder-clouds and shouts with glee amid the lightning's play; who learns to know that whatever he looks upon is thereby humanized, and to feel that he is part of all he sees and loves. He will carry with him to the study of the intellectual and spiritual world of men's thoughts shut up in books, a strength of mind, a depth and freshness of heart which only those can own who have drunk at Nature's deep flowing fountain, and come up to life's training-course wet with her dews and with the fragrance of her flowers on their ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... undertake some higher calling, from being tradesmen to turn generals or politicians, from being schoolmasters to become philosophers:—or imagine them on a sudden to receive an inward light which reveals to them for the first time in their lives a higher idea of God and the existence of a spiritual world, by this sudden conversion or change is not their daily life likely to be upset; and on the other hand will not many of their old prejudices and narrownesses still adhere to them long after they have begun to take a more comprehensive view of human things? From familiar ...
— The Republic • Plato
... legendary as well as sacred history is almost made up of instances of the interpenetration of the two worlds; the response of those in the spiritual world to the needs of those in the natural world. Pope Paschal recorded that he fell asleep in his chair at St. Peter's (somewhere about 8.20 A.M.) with a prayer on his lips that he might find the burial place of St. Cecilia, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... with religion: a good and wise man differs from a bad and idiotic one, simply as a good dog from a cur, and as any manner of dog from a wolf or a weasel. And if you are to believe in, or preach without half believing in, a spiritual world or law—only in the hope that whatever you do, or anybody else does, that is foolish or beastly, may be in them and by them mended and patched and pardoned and worked up again as good as new—the less you believe in—and most solemnly, the less you talk about—a spiritual ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... laws—and I, for my part, do not see what escape there is from utter materialism and necessarianism. For it is obvious that our knowledge of what we call the material world, is, to begin with, at least as certain and definite as that of the spiritual world, and that our acquaintance with law is of as old a date as our knowledge of spontaneity. Further, I take it to be demonstrable that it is utterly impossible to prove that anything whatever may not be the effect of a ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... time and in so doing, touch the very foundations of Nature as well. Mathematicians have discovered that there is no such thing as a perfectly straight line, and that curvature is a fundamental property of the physical world. So also is it in the spiritual world. As we reach the topmost height of the ideal we find that it has curved round, and that we are at that moment at the very base and foundation. What is attracting us forward in the farthest distance in front is the very thing ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... aspect of the spiritual world, or at least the sound of it, might well seem to the eyes and ears of Saints (such as we had) of the period—dismal in angels' eyes also assuredly! Yet is it possible that the dismalness in angelic ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... to our hearts the wonderful tenderness of God to his children. But there is nothing in the material world that forms a full and perfect analogy for the things in the spiritual world. ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... and its emanation from Intelligence. In the conception of the human soul the Jewish philosophers vary from the Platonic view, related to the Biblical, that the soul is a distinct entity coming into the body from a spiritual world, and acting in the body by using the latter as its instrument, to the Aristotelian view that at least so far as the lower faculties of sense, memory and imagination are concerned, the soul is the form of the body, and disappears with the death of the latter. The human unit, according to this ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... that these men had come to what may be called Unitarianism, though, more properly, Arianism; and not as a mere result of a reaction from Calvinism. A new time had come, and with it new hopes and thoughts. The burdening sense of the spiritual world that belonged to the men of the seventeenth century did not belong to those of the eighteenth. Men had come to see that God must manifest himself in reason, common sense, nature, and the facts ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... that Schwedenborg thought that he was in constant communication with the spiritual world; but felt convinced, and avowed, that though he saw his visitants without and around him, they reached him first inwardly, and communicated with his understanding; and thence consciously, and outwardly, with his senses. But it would be a misapplication ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... doors, we find ourselves meeting the cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of reality; and discover that such spiritual life as we possess has got to accommodate itself to the conditions in which they live. If the claim of religion be true at all, it is plain that the conservatory-type of spiritual world is inconsistent with it. Imperfect though any conception we frame of the universe must be—and here we may keep in mind Samuel Butler's warning that "there is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth"—still, a view which is controlled by the religious ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... brought into ultimate communion with Supreme Goodness—the finite possessing and enjoying the Infinite. Here the human mind, let us repeat it, finds earthly images powerless to translate its thought, for it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive the glory of the spiritual world. These two methods Dante ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... himself to be misled by what individual representatives of natural science would dictate to him. He must investigate in the spiritual as they do in the physical domain, but he need not adopt the opinions they entertain about the spiritual world, confused as they are by their ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... a kind of spell Upon the silent listeners fell. His solemn manner and his words Had touched the deep, mysterious chords, That vibrate in each human breast Alike, but not alike confessed. The spiritual world seemed near; And close above them, full of fear, Its awful adumbration passed, A luminous shadow, vague and vast. They almost feared to look, lest there, Embodied from the impalpable air, They might behold the Angel stand, Holding the sword ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... two powers until a time to come when Ormuzd would be victorious over Ahriman. Ormuzd, as the ruler of the universe, seeks to draw men to the light, to dispel the darkness of ignorance, and to extend the triumph of virtue over the material and spiritual world. It may be said of the Persians, as Tertullian said of the Roman Pagans, "that in their highest moods and beliefs they were naturally Christian." Among a Persian sect called the Sufis' there is a belief that nothing ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was when he made it. That which we do not believe we cannot adequately say, though we may repeat the words never so often. It was this conviction which Swedenborg expressed when he described a group of persons in the spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which they did not believe; but they could not, though they twisted and folded their lips ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... clergyman absolutely canonized his deceased parishioner, and opening, as it were, a vista through the roof of the church, and thence through the firmament above, showed him seated, harp in hand, among the crowned choristers of the spiritual world. On his tombstone, too, the record is highly eulogistic; nor does history, so far as he holds a place upon its page, assail the consistency and uprightness of his character. So also, as regards the Judge Pyncheon of to-day, neither clergyman, nor ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... production they have had no share are practical rationalists. Those who come in direct contact with things and have to adapt their activities to them immediately are, in effect, realists; those who isolate the meanings of these things and put them in a religious or so-called spiritual world aloof from things are, in effect, idealists. Those concerned with progress, who are striving to change received beliefs, emphasize the individual factor in knowing; those whose chief business it is ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... possible, theory is that the mass of religious Scripture contains merely the best efforts which we hitherto know to have been made by any of the races of men towards the discovery of some relations with the spiritual world; that they are only trustworthy as expressions of the enthusiastic visions or beliefs of earnest men oppressed by the world's darkness, and have no more authoritative claim on our faith than the religious ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... mind, too, was essentially plain. He was perfect in his loyalty to duty; he was, as we have seen, very good in business matters, had a clear head, and could give shrewd advice upon any solid, matter-of-fact difficulty, but the spiritual world was non-existent for him. He attended chapel regularly, for he was a Dissenter, but his reasons for going, so far as he had any, were very simple. There was a great God in heaven, against whom he had sinned and was perpetually sinning. To save himself from the consequences of ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... my possession fifty years. He intended to publish it at the time of Mr. Beckford's death, in 1844, but delayed the execution of the work, and sixteen years afterwards was himself called to enter on the higher life of the spiritual world. ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... was born at Stirling, Scotland, in 1851. His book, "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," caused much discussion and is still widely read. His "Ascent of Man" is regarded by many as his greatest work. The address reprinted here has appeared in hundreds of editions, and has been an inspiration to thousands of peoples all over the world. There is an interesting biography ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... contrary tendencies. I find my account in sots and bores also. They give a reality to the circumjacent picture which such a vanishing meteorous appearance can ill spare. In the morning I awake and find the old world, wife, babes, and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I mainly wish to do is to help you firmly to grasp this simple principle of Cause and Effect in the spiritual world. And instead of applying the principle generally to each of the Christian experiences in turn, I shall examine its application to one in some little detail. The one I shall select is Rest. And I think any one who follows the application ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... Standing on a tortoise, with a sword in his right hand, and with the left hand half open—a gesture which symbolizes the male and female principles in the physical world, and the intelligence and the law in the spiritual world—Mioken is a striking figure. Indeed, the list of glorified animals reminds us somewhat of the ancient beast-worship of Egypt. In the Nichiren hierology, it is as though the symbolical figures in the Book ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... two pair of eyes in order that we may be happy in two respects. First, physical light for the physical eyes, in order to the enjoyment of physical life in a material world. Second, the light of knowledge for the eyes of the understanding, in order to the enjoyment of spiritual life in a spiritual world. It is universally conceded that there are means provided in nature to meet man's physical wants and adaptations that manifest the wisdom that belongs to God; also, that it would have been the work of a demon to create man with these wants, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... shed light on the problem in question. Hence each has necessarily become "a sublime architect of words," whose grand and imposing system of shadows and abstractions has but a slight foundation in the real constitution and laws of the spiritual world. Their writings furnish the most striking illustration of the profound aphorism of Bacon, that "the usual method of discovery and proof, by first establishing the most general propositions, then applying and proving the intermediate axioms according ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... be made, however, that while its application may be admitted in the physical world, it is not so certain in the spiritual sphere. It is just here that modern research steps in. The laws of the spiritual world have been largely identified as the same laws that exist in the natural world. Indeed, it is claimed that the spiritual existed first, that the natural came after, and that when God proceeded to frame the universe, He went upon lines already laid down. In short, that ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... safely say, however, that it exists in all his works. It is in the Medicean statues; it is in the Julian marbles; it is in the Sistine ceiling. What is there in these figures that they leave us so awestruck, that they seem so like the sound of trumpets blowing from a spiritual world? The intelligence that could call them forth, the craft that could draw them, have long since perished. But the meaning survives the craft. The lost arts retain their power over us. We understand but vaguely, yet we are thrilled. ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... logicians, have crowded him out. Why do we read the Old Testament at all? Not for the laws of the Levites, not for the battles and hangings, but for the inspiration of the prophets. The authority of the prophet comes through personality, the source of which is in what Myers calls the infinite spiritual world—in God. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... history of philosophy. The practical question which arises is whether the individual has any power by which the gulf between the natural and the spiritual can be transcended. Can man choose and decide for a spiritual world above that in which he is by nature involved? The revelation of the good must, indeed, precede the activity of man. But at the same time the change cannot merely happen to him. He cannot simply be a passive recipient. The new life must ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... extraordinary. "She died expressing her eager desire to see me. Can it be, then," was his natural course of reflection—"can strong and earnest wishes, formed during the last agony of nature, survive its catastrophe, surmount the awful bounds of the spiritual world, and place before us its inhabitants in the hues and colouring of life? And why was that manifested to the eye which could not unfold its tale to the ear? and wherefore should a breach be made in the laws of nature, yet ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... have plied their keenest wits to discover the processes of the rappings—and Mrs. Fish and the Foxes in spite of them all preserve their secret, or at least are as successful as ever in persuading themselves and others that they are admitted to communications with the spiritual world. For ourselves, while we can suggest no explanation of these phenomena, and while in every attempted explanation of them which we have seen, we detect some such difficulty or absurdity as makes necessary its ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... while, on the other, his fancies and his visions assumed the absoluteness and the literal existence of positive external facts. The remotest flights of his imagination never carry him where his sight becomes dim. His journey through the spiritual world was no less real to him than his journeys between Florence and Rome, or his wanderings between Verona and Ravenna. So absolute was his imagination, that it often so far controls his reader as to make it difficult not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... everything else,—relations which our minds have no power of creating, but which we are obliged to ascertain before we have a right to boast that we really know any thing about them. Yet, when the mind looks out for the first time into this manifold spiritual world, it is just as much confused and dazzled and distracted as are the eyes of the blind when they first begin to see; and it is by a long process, and with much effort and anxiety, that we begin hardly and partially ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... who has not himself impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away by their demon, while talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of its sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is ever rent asunder, that it may perceive the ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man of mere talent ever flung his ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... occupied with political work and sociology (especially after 1866), he abandoned the positive monistic position for one of agnosticism and scepticism, and made concessions to the dualistic dogma of a spiritual world apart from the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... person, understand then, is merely a sound attached to their physical appearance at birth by the parents—a meaningless sound. It is not their true name. That, however, exists behind it in the spiritual world, and is the accurate description of the soul. It is the sound you express visibly before me. ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... a strong objection to a voyage pittoresque through the planets; we bear in our own breasts a heaven full of constellations. There is in our hearts an inward, spiritual world, that breaks like a sun upon the clouds of the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, beauty, and truth,—three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, nor copy of the outward. We are less astonished at the incomprehensible existence of these transcendental ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... veil of appearances by means of intellectual intuitions, mystical visions, feeling, or faith, i.e., through the emotional and instinctive parts of our nature. It is the presence of the moral law or categorical imperative within us that points to a spiritual world beyond the phenomenal causal order and assures us of our freedom, immortality, and God. It is because we possess this deeper source of truth in practical reason that freedom and an ideal kingdom in which purpose reigns are vouchsafed to us, and that we can ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... and conscientious occult work published in years. Teaches how to pierce the veil—enter at will into the spiritual world and converse with your loved ones now across ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... class of feelings which correlate us with a supersensuous world, and these feelings, also, must have their cause in some objective reality. Just as sensation gives us an immediate knowledge of an external world, so there is an internal sense which gives us an immediate knowledge of a spiritual world—God, the soul, freedom, immortality. Our knowledge of the invisible world, like our knowledge of the visible world, is grounded upon faith in our intuitions. All philosophic knowledge is thus based upon belief, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... limitations to the law of heredity. I do not know that in the spiritual world a sentiment or emotion may not survive the heart that held it, and seek expression in a kindred life, ages removed. Surely, if I were to guess at the fate of Bramwell Olcott Bartine, I should guess that he was hanged at eleven o'clock in the evening, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... endless calculations in executing his will in the material universe, but in the intellectual, moral and spiritual world as well. We can not measure, with any human instruments, the amount of mental discipline and improvement, resulting from a certain amount of study. But God calculates unerringly the precise amount of mental discipline or improvement earned by every mental exertion. The amount ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... this true in the case of mediumistic messages. If these prove to be delusory—the result of subliminal activity and so forth—if there be no spiritual world, then "psychics" may be said to be "founded upon the sand." It can hardly be called a "science." Only when the fact of communication is proved, will the real study of the subject begin. Much of the work, up to the present, has been undertaken ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... serve in the revelation of "doctrine for a New Church" became his Divinely appointed work. He forwent his reputation as a man of science, gave up his assessorship, cleared his desk of everything but the Scriptures. He beheld in the Word of God a spiritual meaning, as he did a spiritual world in the world of phenomena. In revealing both of these the Lord, he said, made His Second Coming. For the rest of his long life Swedenborg gave himself with unremitting labor but with a saving calm to this commanding cause, publishing his great Latin volumes of ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... happiness, and this is JOY. Happiness comes through service and overcoming, but joy comes only to one who realizes his oneness with his Divine Source. The reality is ineffable joy. Behind this world of shadows is the real, spiritual world of splendour and delight. When the soul, after its immense journey through matter, time and space, at last finds its way back to its Divine Source, it becomes aware of this intense joy, too great to be ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... have well been called "the arguments of a coward," raise rather than disarm opposition. (d) It has a bad effect spiritually. (1) The man of evil temper wants the calm disposition of soul necessary to communion with God. The glass through which he looks into the spiritual world is clouded and gives a distorted vision. He whose soul is filled with anger and clouded by passion cannot pray. Before he lays his gift upon the altar, he must be reconciled to his brother. (2) ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... regard to the spiritual world. Imagine a population of blind, deaf men inhabiting this earth. One of them suddenly gets his sight and hearing, and lo! in a moment an unutterable glory, a whole world of beautiful colours and forms and music has flowed into his life. But he cannot convey any notion of it to his former companions. ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... cases, to a place she did not name; and that these places, each in its own way, entirely absorbed the attention of its inhabitants. Further, it was established in her view that all the members of the spiritual world, apart from the unhappy ones, were a kind of Anglicans, with their minds no doubt enlarged considerably, but on the ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... physical heaven seems to do towards each of us, only with this blessed difference, that in the natural world the place where heaven touches earth is always the furthest point of distance from us: and in the spiritual world the place where heaven stoops to me is always right over my head, and the nearest possible point to me. He has come to lift us to Himself, and this is the height of His love, that it bears us, if we will, up and up to sit upon that throne ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... culmination and fruit of literary artistic expression, and its final fields of pleasure for the human soul, are in metaphysics, including the mysteries of the spiritual world, the soul itself, and the question of the immortal continuation of our identity. In all ages, the mind of man has brought up here—and always will. Here, at least, of whatever race or era, we stand on common ground. Applause, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... soul-life, and that mechanical causality which prevails throughout all the processes of nature does not exist for the soul. The Psyche, in a word, is a supernatural phenomenon, and the supernatural department of the spiritual world stands free and independent of the natural department of the ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... yet they are devices, based on Nature, wherewith to supplement the deficiencies of Nature. However in themselves un-aesthetic, for those who need them they make the aesthetic possible. Eye-glasses and contraceptives alike are a portal to the spiritual world for many who, without them, would find that ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... rain. There was no sign of it. The heavens were as brass, the sky was without a cloud, everything was burned up with dry heat, and yet, said Elijah, "There is a sound of abundance of rain." It is so in the spiritual world. There are those who know of a coming Revival long before there is any sign. They have felt their prayers being answered, and have heard the cry of the penitent sinner, though, as yet, he seems to be as hard ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul." She was determined to do her part in ushering in a new social and spiritual world, and it seemed to her that The Dial would be a mighty lever in accomplishing this result. She struggled for two years to make the magazine a success. Then ill health and poverty compelled her to turn the editorship ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... lapis-lazuli—that belongs alone to the basements of Italian mountains; higher, the roseate whiteness of ridged snow on Alps or Apennines; highest, the blue of the sky, ascending from pale turquoise to transparent sapphire filled with light. A mediaeval mystic might have likened this chord to the spiritual world. For the lowest region is that of natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man. It is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built and work is done. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... love as an eager "desire for another's happiness." "Love," he adds, "is the most beautiful phenomenon in all animated nature, the mightiest magnet in the spiritual world, the source of veneration and the sublimest virtues." Even Goethe had moments when he appreciated the purity of love, and he confutes his own coarse conception that was referred to in the last section when he makes Werther write: "She is sacred to me. All ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... that there is no escaping the fundamental aesthetic problem. Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands that he live, with however pure a standard, in the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... I think of it?" she replied. "Can I not trust Him in whom I have believed? What is it more than passing from a lower to a higher state of life—from the natural to the spiritual world? When the hour comes, I will lay me down in ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... woodsmen, around the cascades, and over tracts of intervening land through virgin forests, without roads, and, to a large extent, without paths. I hoped here to find new subjects for art, spiritual freedom, and a closer contact with the spiritual world—something beyond the material existence. I was ignorant of the fact that art does not depend on a subject, nor spiritual life on isolation from the rest of humanity, and I found, what a correct philosophy would have before told me, nature ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... be so obvious, this general principle is just as true in the moral and spiritual world as in the physical. All progress, material and moral, consists in the due subordination of natural to human agencies. Laws, institutions and systems of government are in a sense artificial creations, and must be judged in relation to the ends which they have in view. They are good ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... to labour in harmony with the will of God; so that we may never run counter to His wishes or His laws, but, both in the material and spiritual world, ever seek to be "fellow-workers" ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... of this constellation was, for ages, concealed from all but Initiates; for the reason that, it contains the most important mysteries connected with the human soul. It is the grand transition are between the spiritual world and the astral world; in other words, between ideal conceptions and elemental forms, between the world of design ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... the purpose of sweeping her chimney, the woman could not have looked more indifferent to my appearance. There was no attempt to inspire the visitor with awe. Everything bore a simple and practical aspect. This intercourse with the spiritual world was evidently as familiar an occupation with Mrs. Vulpes as eating her dinner or riding in ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... sufficient argument against the indulgence of unavailing sorrow or anxiety:—'It has always appeared to me, that there is so much to be done in this world, that all self-inflicted suffering which cannot be turned to good account for others, is a loss—a loss, if you may so express it, to the spiritual world.' There is plain truth, too, in the next, though it is not likely to be much remembered by those who are most in need of it:—'An ill-tempered man often has everything his own way, and seems very triumphant; but the demon he cherishes, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... holy and gracious works be thrust on her in particular? There were saints enough who liked such things; and people could get to heaven without,—if not with a very abundant entrance, still in a modest way,—and Elsie's ambition for position and treasure in the spiritual world was of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... spirit, and by that spirit the members are henceforth profoundly influenced. It is not the spirit of the Colonel, or of any particular member. It is the spirit of the Battalion, something compounded by the subtle alchemies of the spiritual world out of the individual souls of ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... have either never felt or have long lost their power and inspiration, then too it is deadly dull. When a sharp line, moreover, is made between all the various influences that elevate us, and place us in presence of the ideal and spiritual world; when the common relations of life, when art, poetry, criticism, science; when educated and refining intercourse and conversation, and all that occupies us on our intellectual sides is classed as secular, ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... is it too proud? Look at the worldly and all who set themselves up above the people of God, has not God's image and His truth been distorted in them? They have science; but in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual world, the higher part of man's being is rejected altogether, dismissed with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... university and the college which surrounds the favored young men and women is an atmosphere of scientific accuracy, where reason applies the tests. The world of business, of finance and of statecraft all bow to reason,—why not the spiritual world, and then by searching, the soul attempts to find out God. As in the wisdom of God divine things do not yield up their treasures in intellectual investigation but in revelation, the thick darkness gathers. Even that which had been once ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... of progress from the inorganic world of matter and motion up to man, point clearly to an unseen universe—to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate. To this spiritual world we may refer the marvellously complex forces which we know as gravitation, cohesion, chemical force, radiant force, and electricity, without which the material universe could not exist for a moment in its present form, and perhaps not at all, since without these forces, and perhaps others ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... coarseness of some of his later writings; but he was, after all, a great novelist, second only in our times to George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray.... I shall be glad to hear more about Mr. Wood's and Mrs. ——'s talks. Any hint or sign or token from the unseen and spiritual world is full of solemn interest, standing as I do on the shore of 'that vast ocean ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... and feed the ray Of her eternal shrine, to them alone Her glorious countenance unveiled is shown: Ye, the high brotherhood she links, rejoice In the great rank allotted by her choice! The loftiest rank the spiritual world sublime, Rich with its starry thrones, gives to ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... unaccustomed light before its gaze can be clear and steady. So, too, the ear long shut up in profound silence is deafened by an ordinary sound. Even so the soul, suddenly entering upon the unaccustomed and stupendous sights and sounds of the spiritual world, would be blinded, dazzled, as I have said, to annihilation. It is necessary that its newly awakened faculties, which during its long earthly life have lain in a comatose state, should not be too suddenly called into action, lest they be overpowered by the awful revelation. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dawn upon the eyes, ill from vice, with prudent foresight. Hear my proposal. Summon the three circles of the brothers of the highest degree to a sitting to-night. You have told me that the prince desires to belong to the seeing ones, and be in communion with the spiritual world. This night his wish shall be fulfilled, to see the spirits, and a new future shall rise before him. My time is limited; let us arrange every thing, for the voices of the ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... creed as to demons. With this one exception, standing by itself and self-explained, there never was a gleam of revelation granted by any authorized prophet to speculative curiosity, whether pointing to science, or to the mysteries of the spiritual world. And the true argument on this subject would show that this abstinence was not accidental; was not merely on a motive of convenience, as evading any needless extension of labors in teaching, which is ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... sinners, too. I think you are falling into the very general error of confining the spiritual world to the supremely good; but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... result of rejecting the new conception of God which I had worked out for myself, but with it I threw over the old one and ceased to believe in the existence of a conscious, personal divinity. Of course, my faith in the existence of a spiritual world and hope for a future life in it ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... too often all the facts which they meet by the very few laws which they know; and especially moral phaenomena by physical, or at least economic laws. There is an excuse for this last error. Much which was thought, a few centuries since, to belong to the spiritual world, is now found to belong to the material; and the physician is consulted, where the exorcist used to be called in. But it is a somewhat hasty corollary therefrom, and one not likely to find favour in this University, that moral laws ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mr Udd, "Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... jarring everywhere more and more with the religious as well as the philosophic impulses of the time. Men of the most different tendencies were reaching forward to the same conception of law. Bacon sought for universal laws in material nature. Hooker asserted the rule of law over the spiritual world. It was in the same way that the Puritan sought for a divine law by which the temporal kingdoms around him might be raised into a kingdom of Christ. The diligence with which he searched the Scriptures ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... college studies). The number seven soon came to be used also conventionally as an indefinite or round number, indicating abundance, completeness, perfection.[1] Cicero calls seven the knot and cement of all things, as being that by which the natural and spiritual world are comprehended in ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... "an abridgment of the universe," [1] uniting in himself in the extremes of being; in his body connected with the material, in his soul with the spiritual world;—by his corporeal constitution a fit inhabitant of the earth; by his intellectual faculties, a suitable tenant ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... little advanced or developed mentally, their religious conceptions are of the vaguest and have assumed no definite shape. A fear of the unknown, a blind groping in the dark are, mayhap, all that the Aino possesses in reference to the spiritual world. ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... regulation. What the eyesight does to the rest he does to the rest. Who knows the curious mystery of the eyesight? The other senses corroborate themselves, but this is removed from any proof but its own and foreruns the identities of the spiritual world. A single glance of it mocks all the investigations of man and all the instruments and books of the earth and all reasoning. What is marvellous? what is unlikely? what is impossible or baseless or vague? after you have once just ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot |
