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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 5

Concerning the Summer-Land

Concerning the Summer-Land,

The reason for the free use of the beautiful phrase, "Summer-Land," in this little Manual, may not be fully understood by the general reader. A few explanatory words, therefore, in this connection, may give the questioning mind some satisfaction.

In the third chapter of John, twelfth verse, you will find the following passage: "If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?"

The phrase "Summer Land" is applicable to all that inconceivably vast "Second Sphere" which is the next future residence of mankind. (For descriptions of locality, scenery, &c, we refer to other volumes.) The Summer-Land is seen to be a natural state of human existence—growing out of the universal system of causes and effects, laws and ultimates, just as naturally as to-day grew out of yesterday. Are you not to-day, in all parts of your being, the legitimate result of what the laws, conditions, and experiences of yesterday made you? You absolutely died to yesterday. All you know of yesterday is remembrance. No man or woman can live in any past hour, except in the chambers of intangible memory. You live now, and thus it will be innumerable ages hence. The universal verdict of reason will be this ever-present consciousness of Existence—the Past merely a ghost of the memory; the Future a picture, illuminated by the inextinguishable lights of eternal hope. Throughout innumerable ages, to every one the Past will be a dream, The Future will be a subject of curiosity, of sur- page 19 prise and attractiveness, in the succeeding ages of eternal life, on the same principle that to-morrow will be new and attractive to those who live in the present. None can tell with absolute certainly what will happen to-morrow. There is, nevertheless, an universal confidence in its coming, because of the immutable and perpetual flow of Nature's laws, causing the revolution of the planets, and the rising and setting of suns—thus all men believe that to-morrow will surely come.

Death is a chemical screen—a strainer, or finely-woven sieve—through which, by the perpetual flow of the laws of Mother-Nature, individuals are passed on to their true stations in the next stage or degree of life.

A process of refinement is this wondrous inevitable death-experience. The spirit with the encasing soul, hidden centres of life, all the characteristics that have distinguished, and all the motives that have influenced the person—all these easily pass through the death-strainer, the screen or sieve; while the physical body and its particles, which cannot get through, are dropped; and, what is more gratifying, with the physical body are left behind many of those hereditary predispositions and abnormal conditions which gave rise to discordant passions and fake appetites, which (in the language of the East) are called "demons" and "unclean spirits." The causes of these vapourish demons and unclean spirits remain on the earth-side of the death-strainer; while the effects, which those causes impressed on the soul—being so fine and so mixed with the soul-substance—pass through and remain with the individual long after he has attained to his social centre in the Second Sphere.

In brief, then, this is my testimony: The Summer-Land, as to the composition of its social centres, is made of persons from all parts of this inhabitable globe not only, but populations also from far-distant planets that are constituted like this earth—each globe producing an infinite variety of radical personal characteristics and temperamental differences. All these individuals carry upon the life within their faces, as well as in the secret chamber of their affections, the effects of life on the globe that produced them. If the person has been moved and governed by high and beautiful motives, he naturally and instinctively seeks association with those who have been similiarly actuated and developed. If, on the other hand, the person has been led by low and demoralising motives, he as naturally seeks those, who, before death, had been correspondingly influenced. There a man can elect his friends and gravitate to his own congenial social sphere. Progression out of imperfection is a purely spiritual transaction, growing out of the same general causes and resulting in the same internal effects upon character. Societies in the Summer-Land, therefore, are, in general terms, natural exponents of the interior realities of the societies of men and women on different planets.