A blind man's offering.

  • Bowen, B. B. (Benjamin B.), 1819-1905
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A blind man's offering. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of paradise is an abode where we shall be united to those we have loved, and where, in the society of puri- fied spirits, we shall spend the ceaseless ages of eter- nity, in perfecting or completing what we have but commenced in the present world, and in glorifying God. The certainty of our immortality is revealed in the New Testament; but the place where we are to spend our future existence, its nature and character, as well as the forms we are to assume, the parts we are to act, the laws by which we are to be governed, is shrouded in mystery, or, at most, is left to mere conjec- ture. Various and contradictory have been the theo- ries or hypotheses by which enlightened and Christian men have endeavored to explain the nature of the life beyond the grave. Some have maintained that death will effect an entire change in our condition, and that in the next world the manner in which we are to exist will be altogether unlike our present life. Others, and we think with far more probability, insist, that heaven is but another state, from which we are separated only by a thin veil; and that we shall be there in every respect as we are here, excepting only that we shall be placed in more favorable circum- stances to improve or progress. There has been a great deal of dispute among theologians and divines, as to whether we are to have in heaven the same bodies that we inhabit here. Volumes have been writ- ten upon this single question, but without mankind becoming any wiser.* The Scriptures, we think, favor the idea of a spiritual body, resembling in form, —if indeed it may be said that spirits can have form, — the one we at present inhabit, but freed from all its * See Taylor’s Physical Theory of Another Life.