Page:The Other Life.djvu/180

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CHAPTER VIII.

THE OCCUPATIONS OF HEAVEN.

HOW are we engaged hereafter?

Dr. Chalmers, in an admirable discourse on "the new heaven and the new earth," exposes with a masterly hand the metaphysical delusions which exist in his own and all other evangelical denominations on the immateriality of the life to come.

He characterizes as "an imagination to be rectified, the product perhaps of a wrong but fashionable philosophy," the prevalent idea, "that when a spiritualizing process has purged away all our corruption, then by the stepping-stone of death and resurrection, we should be borne away to some ethereal region, where sense and body and all in the shape either of audible sound or of tangible substance are unknown."

"The common imagination," says he, making a most humiliating confession, "that we have of paradise on the other side of death, is that of a lofty aerial region, where the inmates float in ether