pupil like any other sunlight, and that the Italian breezes fan the brow
like those of the sunny south the world over. I understand that the
general forms of human consciousness in Europe and Asia, are like those
in America. The operations of the five senses are the same in the Old
World that they are in the New. But what do I know of the surroundings
and experience of a man who has travelled from time into eternity? Am I
not completely baffled, the moment I attempt to construct the
consciousness of the unearthly state? I have no materials out of which to
build it, because it is not a world of sense and matter, like that which
I now inhabit.

But death carries man over into the new and entirely different mode of
existence, so that he knows by direct observation and immediate
intuition. A flood of new information pours in upon the disembodied
spirit, such as he cannot by any possibility acquire upon earth, and yet
such as he cannot by any possibility escape from in his new residence.
How strange it is, that the young child, the infant of days, in the heart
of Africa, by merely dying, by merely passing from time into eternity,
acquires a kind and grade of knowledge that is absolutely inaccessible
to the wisest and subtlest philosopher while here on earth![1] The dead
Hottentot knows more than the living Plato.

But not only does the exchange of worlds make a vast addition to our
stores of information respecting the nature of the invisible realm, and
the mode of existence there, it also makes a vast addition to the kind
and degree of our knowledge respecting _ourselves_, and our personal
relationships to God. This is by far the most important part of the new
acquisition which we gain by the passage from time to eternity, and it is
to this that the Apostle directs attention in the text. It is not so much
the world that will be around us, when we are beyond the tomb, as it is