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Spiritual world   /spˈɪrɪtʃəwəl wərld/   Listen
Spiritual world

noun
1.
A belief that there is a realm controlled by a divine spirit.  Synonyms: spiritual domain, unseen.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Spiritual world" Quotes from Famous Books



... the roar of it is heard in all the ministers' studies of Christendom? Sir, you cannot have people of cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things, large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually reacting on the whole conception of that other life. It is the folly of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom. Not ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... fourth, and last 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

... heathens and Christians, have been puzzled by such thoughts as these, as soon as they began to feel that there was a world which they could not see, as well as a world which they could see; a spiritual world, wherein God the Spirit, and their own spirits, and spiritual things, such as right, wrong, duty, reason, love, dwell for ever; and a strange hidden duty on all men to obey that unseen God, and the laws of that spiritual world; in short a mystery ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... individual knows the whole of truth; but every individual possesss a fragment of it, and altogether we have the whole. Look at India, there you have existing what we should become if we all followed your philosophy, they live in their own spiritual world, and are indifferent to any other, they endure first the despotism of their own government, then a foreign conqueror, and finally lose not only freedom and independence, but civilization, and become not exactly slaves, but ignorant, ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... confined to the Ainos. Possibly, like all peoples but 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

... 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

... wheel of a Buddha elect. 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 of Revelation had been deified and worshipped. It is evident that all the ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... favored by any manifestations from the spiritual world. This has proved a very matter-of-fact sort of home for us. I had almost forgotten that it was burdened with such an uncanny reputation, and I'm sure that Mrs. Packard would have shared my indifference if it had not ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green

... jostled one another on the pavements, pushed and squeezed and trampled each other's feet and skirts fighting for standing room around the Monday bargain counters, oblivious of the existence of the spiritual world, ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... 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 sight may be ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... in a spiritual world composed of all these various intelligences—one half of whom were good, and the other half evil—the early Zoroastrians added notions with respect to human duties and human prospects far more enlightened than those which have usually prevailed ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson

... of his three chums, startled the "Boss" out of his dejection, and brought him back to a consciousness of reality; for during that dreadful night he had lost himself in the infinite spiritual world of feeling, seeking some ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... other men, 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 to believe ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... that we must realize that we are under moral law before we can know that its violation will result in a state of ruin needing salvation. First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual. The phrase "natural law in the spiritual world" means that the consequences following right and wrong are as inevitable and essential in the realm of spirit ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... 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 Scripture interpretation ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg

... Puritan ministers, but had corresponded as well with Glanvill, with whom, although Glanvill was an Anglican, he seems to have been on very friendly terms.[11] Nor is it likely that in the many conversations he held with his neighbor, Sir Matthew Hale,[12] the evidence from witchcraft for a spiritual world had been neglected. The subject must have come up in his conversations with another friend, Robert Boyle.[13] Boyle's interest in such matters was of course a scientific one. Baxter, like Glanvill, looked at them from a religious point of view. In the classic Saint's Everlasting ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... scalps never displayed the slightest wish to damage a hair of the postman's head. He moved about, in fact, like a benign influence, distributing favours and doing good wherever he went. May it not be said truly that in the spiritual world we have a good many news-bearers of a similar stamp? Are not the loving, the gentle, the self-sacrificing such?—in a word, the Christ-like, who, if they do not carry letters about, are themselves living epistles "known and read of ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne

... the humble. There is nothing that has such an attraction for God, that has such affinity with holiness, as a contrite and humble spirit. The reason is evident. There is no law in the natural and the spiritual world more simple, than that two bodies cannot at the same moment occupy the same space. Only so much as the new occupant can expel of what the space was filled with can it really possess. In man, self has possession, and self-will the mastery, and there is no room for God. It is simply impossible ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray

... is the spiritual world which is governed by physical laws, and the physical by spiritual ones; that while men and women are merely the puppets of cerebrations and mentations, and attractions and repulsions, it is the trees, and stones, and gases, who have the ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley

... delight than any of those 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 the eyes ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... of faith, there must be a withdrawal from, a denial of, the visible. The spirit that seeks to enjoy as much as possible of what is innocent or legitimate, that gives the first place to the calls and duties of daily life, is inconsistent with a strong faith and close intercourse with the spiritual world. "We look not at the things that are seen"—the negative side needs to be emphasised if the positive, "but at the things which are not seen," is to become natural to us. In praying, faith depends upon our living ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray

... city of the Far East is the most significant feature of this life—so alien to all the mental, moral, and religious training of the Occident. Vain is it for one of Anglo-Saxon strain to attempt to bridge this abyss that lies between his mind and that of the Burman or the Parsee. Each lives in a spiritual world of his own and each would be homesick for heaven were he transferred to the ideal paradise of the other. So the traveler in the Orient should give heed to the temples, for in them is voiced the spiritual aspirations of the people, who have little of comfort or ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch

... it may not 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 or bad ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith

... sleep, that sleep will ever after be haunted with some fainting airs of the paradise those buds prophesied. In Mercy's case they were to grow into spiritual eyes—to open and see, through all the fogs and tumults of this phantom world, the light and reality of the true, the spiritual world everywhere around her—as the opened eyes of the servant of the prophet saw the mountains of Samaria full of horses of fire and chariots of fire around him. Every throb of true love, however mingled with the foolish and the false, is a bourgeoning of the buds of the life eternal—ah, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... the spiritual world, is being shaken no less. More and more frequently, more and more loudly, men are asking—not sceptics merely, but pious men, men who wish to be, and who believe themselves to be, orthodox Christians—more and more loudly are such men asking questions which ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley

... 'is language to express the emotions which Such a scene calls up in the bosom! Poetry alone is the voice of the spiritual world, and we, who are not poets, must borrow the language of the gifted sons of Song. Oh, Enos, I wish you were a poet! But you feel poetry, I know you do. I have seen it in your eyes, when I quoted the burning lines of Adeliza Kelley, or the soul-breathings of Gamaliel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... another. Whatever else sceptics have questioned, no one has yet presumed to doubt that if a God and a soul exist at all, they are of like essence. This firm belief has left its impress on language in the names devised to express the supernal, the spiritual world. If we seek hints from languages more familiar to us than the tongues of the Indians, and take for example this word spiritual; we find it is from the Latin spirare, to blow, to breathe. If in Latin again we look for the derivation of animus, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... with demoniac laughter, and shouts coming as for me, nearer and louder, saying, 'Cast out! Cast out!' and it rushed up to me like an unseen army, and I fled for life before it, until I came to the extreme edge of that spiritual world, where, as I ran looking backwards for terror at those viewless hunters, I leaped horribly over the unguarded cliff, and fell whirling, whirling, whirling, until ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... 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

... this is necessarily 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 ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... strove, if not exactly to set aside the original principle of Christianity, yet to bind it by dogma in such a way that it often became completely obscured. A long training was necessary before the immature nations of barbarians were fit to become citizens of the spiritual world, before they could fully assimilate the new traditions and grasp their innermost meaning, which by this very fact became altered and modified. This process of education came to a temporary conclusion ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... had, and has, a certain success. Its infinitesimal treatment being a nullity, patients are never hurt by drugs, when it is adhered to. It pleases the imagination. It is image-worship, relic-wearing, holy-water-sprinkling, transferred from the spiritual world to that of the body. Poets accept it; sensitive and spiritual women become sisters of charity in its service. It does not offend the palate, and so spares the nursery those scenes of single combat in which infants ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... wherever I presuppose them." More plainly fails to understand the basic dualism inherent in Cartesian philosophy and to sense the irrelevance of his questions. While Descartes is really disposing of the spiritual world in order to get on with his analysis of finite experience, More is keenly attempting to reconcile neo-Platonism with the lively claims of matter. His effort can be read as the brave attempt to harmonize an older mode of thought ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... what do all these manifestations tend?" asked Jane. "Of what value are the revelations you receive from the so-called spiritual world?" ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... following Letters, written by my Father, has been in 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

... 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 like ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... of spiritual beings, which he respectfully worshipped." The Emperor Yao, B.C. 2357-2255, built a temple for the worship of God, and also caused dances to be performed for the enjoyment of God on occasions of special sacrifice and communication with the spiritual world. After him, we reach the Emperor Shun, B.C. 2255-2205, in whose ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles

... link that binds us to those gone; the only link that binds us to those who remain. Surely it is the spiritual world—the abiding kingdom of heaven, not far from ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... who has keen sight but little warmth of heart; who has fine conceits but is destitute of the rich glow of love. He is en rapport with the spiritual world, unconscious of the celestial one. He is all nerve and no blood—colorless. He talks of self-reliance, but fears to trust himself to love. He never abandons himself to love, but is always on the lookout for some new fact. His nerves are always tight-stretched, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... the great forest. And it was intensified by the way he came,—singly, or with but wife and child, or at best in very small company, a mere handful. And the surrounding presences were not only of the spiritual world. Human enemies who were soon as well armed as he, quicker of foot and eye, more perfectly noiseless in their tread even than the wild beasts of the shadowy coverts, the ruthless Indians whom he came ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... dispute, had kind words of regard for the hero-monk. Even the Pope, Leo X, treated the matter amicably at first. He also was still in early life, having been made pope at thirty-six, an age quite as juvenile for the leadership of the spiritual world as that of the various temporal monarchs for theirs. Leo, being a member of the famous Medici family, was apparently more interested in art than in religion. He wanted to rebuild the gorgeous cathedral of St. Peter, and he did not want to quarrel with Germany. So also ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... 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 with ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... bosom of the earth. Here, too, at an earlier period, he had studied the wonders of the human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by which Nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from the spiritual world, to create and foster Man, her masterpiece. The latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside, in unwilling recognition of the truth, against which all seekers sooner or later stumble, that our great creative Mother, while ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... 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, and that he had been allowed ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... anxiety about the result. It was not possible to effect the materialisation by mere concentration of will, or the exercise of any faculty; otherwise many people could have done what he had engaged himself to do. His nature was phenomenal—the dividing wall between himself and the spiritual world was broken in many places. Through the gaps in his mind the inhabitants of the invisible, when he summoned them, passed for a moment timidly and awfully into the solid, coloured universe.... He could not say how it was brought about.... The experience was a rough one for the ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... go straight to St. Teresa, and inquire of her what was the method by which she taught her daughters to gather themselves together, to capture and hold the attitude most favourable to communion with the spiritual world. She tells us— and here she accords with the great tradition of the Christian contemplatives, a tradition which was evolved under the pressure of long experience—that the process is a gradual one. The method to be employed ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... once: "I have got to reap what I sowed, for God has said: 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' Then why don't you apply this in the spiritual world, and compel the sinner to pay the penalty ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world. The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist. Passion raises the nervous ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... easily depress its spirits. Nor did they contradict one another. There was a cheerful unanimity about the Author's dying at fifty-seven. But this did not perturb the Author, whose questions were all cunningly contrived to test his theory of the "spiritual world." For instance, he set them naming cards, placed on the table with faces downwards and unknown to anybody; arguing that with their bloated omniscience they could scarcely fail to name a card shoved under their very noses. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... the care of cattle, the meaning of sex and marriage, and even the mysteries of such religious ideas and rudimentary science as the tribe possesses. And by so doing one really enters into a new life. Things of the spiritual world begin to dawn. Julius Firmicus, in describing the mysteries of the resurrection of Osiris, (3) says that when the worshipers had satiated themselves with lamentations over the death of the god then the priest would go round anointing ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... 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 his 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 inkstand ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... waiting to let me in with your own dear hand, that none should witness my humiliation? Bee, apparently that was a compassionate sister, trying to save from obloquy an earing brother. But really, Bee, as the truth stands in the spiritual world, it is this: A sinner was sleeping upon one of the foulest gulfs in the depths of perdition. A single turn in his sleep and he would have been eternally lost; but an angel came from Heaven, and with her gentle hand softly aroused him and drew him out of ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... rising 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 ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... Peter's. We may 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, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... of the order of the world within us our most certain truth; and as our bodies exist only by virtue of sharing in the general order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have being only by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... 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 freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... is the point,) as seen from the providential point of view. They are a history written not on 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, by the Rev. C. ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... 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

... successor; all the men who have studied mind as opticians have studied light—two not dissimilar things—point to a conclusion in favor of the mystics, the disciples of St. John, and of those great thinkers who have established the spiritual world—the sphere in which are revealed the ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac

... date of the Apocalypse will also be regarded as fully established. For it will then be seen that the book describes beforehand events which took place in 70 A.D. and the years immediately preceding, partly on earth and partly in the spiritual world, and is mainly concerned with the downfall of the earthly Jerusalem and the setting up of Christ's heavenly Kingdom—the new Jerusalem. And its many mysterious symbols will be seen to have been a cipher of which the first Christians ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth

... these natural laws are valid in the spiritual world. The rules of moral hygiene are summed up in our Lord's prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," that is to say, do not breathe the germ-laden air, and in St Paul's precept, "Be strong in the Lord," cultivate general spiritual health, safety lies in strength. ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... 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, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... 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, before ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... I assure you that did I see my way clear to an honorable independence for my family, so as to be just, while kind to them, I should joyfully die in attesting my fixed faith in Association, and I predict that when, years hence, we meet in the spiritual world, you will smilingly bless me and say, 'My son, your personal limitations excepted, you were right.' You will feel proud of my seeming earthly failures then; at least I humbly hope so. If this is all romance it is of that earnest, living strain which ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... propagated among Christian converts, and the Gnostics quickly absorbed and spread the notion of preternatural interposition. Next to the belief in the second coming of Christ, the doctrine which most influenced the action of the early church was that of a spiritual world and its hierarchy. Terrestrial things were ruled by all ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... Mr. Ogilvie had been equally pleasant to both, for the ex-schoolmaster thoroughly enjoyed hearing of the scientific world, and the young man was heartily glad of the higher light he was able to shed on his studies, and for being shown how to prevent the spiritual world from being obscured by the physical, and to deal with the difficulties that his brother's materialism had raised for him. He had never lost, and trusted never to lose, hold of his anchor in the Rock; but he had not ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... represent to our minds the highest reality, the spiritual world, as distinguished from the world of appearance, we are obliged to form images; and we can hardly avoid choosing one of the following three images. We may regard the spiritual world as endless duration opposed to transitoriness, as infinite extension opposed ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... thence to direct Humanism, has no right from his experience to deny the probability of this)—then to fall off into the hopeless abyss of atheism. For the present life, we know, is governed by fixed laws, which the atheist acknowledges as well as the theist; and if there be no spiritual world, and no spiritual life in a spiritual world, what possible bearing can the admission or rejection of this hypothesis have on our ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... hemisphere is 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

... to man. The higher intention of the poem was to set forth the results of sin, or unwisdom, and of virtue, or wisdom, in this life, and consequently in the life to come, which is but the continuation and fulfilment of this. The scene accordingly is the spiritual world, of which we are as truly denizens now as hereafter. The poem is a diary of the human soul in its journey upwards from error through repentance to atonement with God. To make it apprehensible by those whom it was meant to teach, nay, from its very nature as a poem, and not a ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... the same direction, namely, that of rendering less necessary the conception of a spiritual world. The interest of mankind became so concentrated upon material things that the interest in the invisible decreased, while the mechanical, soulless elements with their ceaseless actions and reactions in definite order, and according ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones

... claims. But your own inward convictions alone, sincere as they may be, and possibly founded in truth, pass with us for nothing. Raise one that was dead to life, and we will believe you when you reveal to us the spiritual world and the ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... 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 ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... 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 ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... Cicero's 'Hortensius' partly called him back to himself; but before he was twenty years old he was carried away into Manichaeism, a strange system of belief which united traces of Christian teaching with Persian doctrines of two antagonistic principles, practically two gods, a good god of the spiritual world and an evil god of the material world. From this he passed after a while into less gross forms of philosophical speculation, and presently began to lecture on rhetoric at Tagaste and at Carthage. When nearly thirty years of age he went to Rome, only ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... entirely concealed by the distance. We must beware lest, in straining to get a glimpse of the invisible, we should mistake the flitting shadows that the unnatural effort sets afloat in the humours of our own eyes for the veritable objects of the spiritual world. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... of the white sails that seemed to glide along the very stones of the great breakwater. His soul demanded justice for the uncouth cuttle-fish. He did not understand how people could live in a self-centred spiritual world that shut out the larger part of creation. If suffering purified, what purification did overdriven horses undergo, or starved cats? The miracle of creation—why was it wrought for puppies doomed to drown? No; man had imposed morality on a non-moral universe, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... from mersion into this excess of beauty and to fix it on the small, warmly-coloured pattern of the domestic life within the room it was lost as completely and disastrously, so far as following its own ends went, in the not less excessive view of the spiritual world presented by this ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... itself is the Great Power, using the forces of the universe on the widest scale? Perhaps it is none other than the continuity of unchanging universal principles extending into the mysterious realms of the spiritual world. ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward

... have understood it. She would have gazed up at him trustingly out of her autumn-tinted eyes; she would have embodied all the spiritual glories of which he dreamed; and she would have understood nothing. Once he tried to share with her a passage in Drummond's 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' He was reading it with young delight a good many years behind the times, for books had usually grown very out of date before they percolated through the country libraries to him. He had read it in his pleasant, half-educated voice, dramatically and tenderly; ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... 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, and in his dream she appeared to him and showed him the spot where her body lay, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... 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 ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik

... admiration. I am sorry for the 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

... was to cool the tongue of Dives. She replied that it was the work of a mischievous spirit who had nothing better to do; they would not infrequently take in that way the reply from the lips of another. I am not sure whether we are to have lips in the spiritual world, but I think that ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... lands awed and depressed the mountain girl. They seemed to type the flat and desolate spiritual world into which she was entering, and the ride seemed interminable, carrying her every hour farther from the scenes and sounds to which her love clung. She was bitterly homesick, and nothing seemed to promise comfort. She gazed with lack-lustre eyes on the towns and rivers along the way, and she ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... 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 the furthest ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... alone, while theirs is objective, because they compare their impressions. Error is not in the impression but in the explanation. Man has more than sensual impressions. We have a faculty which brings us into contact with a spiritual world. The religious man is by necessity an anthropomorphist. He claims a personal God, a Father, a Redeemer, an Ideal. We need a sharp analysis to see the reflections of the contents of our religious feeling. Our mind seeks a conception of God, the basis of which must be the idea of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... that predisposition to believe in supernatural occurrences. It is, I think, conclusive that mankind, from a very early period, have their minds prepared for such events by the consciousness of the existence of a spiritual world, inferring in the general proposition the undeniable truth that each man, from the monarch to the beggar, who has once acted his part on the stage, continues to exist, and may again, even in a disembodied state, if such is the pleasure of Heaven, for ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... a gentleman whose family I was attending asked me if I would not like to read a work on "Heaven and Hell," written by Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed, he said, to have had open intercourse with the spiritual world, and to have written of what he had seen and heard in that world. He said that he had read it, and believed that the views therein contained were rational and true. If I had ever heard of them at all, at that time, I had never heard ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis

... occult science must begin by imparting the information which throws light on the realms of the spiritual world. So too, in this book, we shall begin with what can be unveiled concerning unseen worlds through the methods of occult research. That which is mortal in man, and that which is immortal, will be described in their connection ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... singular notion prevailing among the native population of Australia, and proving that the belief in a spiritual world and in a future state, is not quite extinct even among them, is the idea which they entertain of white people being the souls of departed blacks. This supposition may serve to explain the reason of the disagreeable process complained of by Sturt, who ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... 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 ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... physical world and a spiritual world besides; but the spiritual world which alone is is physical to man, the physical being the mode in which man, by his defectiveness, perceives the spiritual. We feel a physical world to be: that which ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... conflicting accounts are given of this singular tragedy; but in them all the chief incidents stand out so clear and unassailable that even such a hard-headed sceptic as Dr Johnson declared, "I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world that I ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... the 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 House of Souls • Arthur Machen

... chimney, the woman could not have looked more indifferent to my appearance. There was no attempt to inspire the visitor with any 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... said I, "that lost human souls in the spiritual world, as seen by the angels, frequently wear the outward shapes of the lower animals,—for instance, the gross and sensual look like swine, and the cruel and obscene like foul birds of prey, such as hawks and vultures,—and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... suspension. So forever. We actually have Infinity forced on our reason. Eternity is the correlative and co-existent necessity of infinity. Infinity, Eternity, Immortality, become the solemn Trinity confronting the physical as well as the spiritual world! God has even ordained that, when you move your hand, you affect the farthest of His worlds. Can you not grasp the idea that, in reason, the universe is boundless? Why, then, in reason, shall it not be our infinite pleasure to study God's plans forever? I know ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... 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 ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... 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

... 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

... suggested intercourse with the spiritual world more than the others had done; it suggested that, in fact, considerably less. Some of the others were frail, yearning, evaporated creatures, and the ex-priest in Paris had something terrible and condemned in his look. He ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... funeral dirge, and, last but not least, he had arranged with the man who would have charge of chopping off his head, that one fold of skin should be left uncut, as this would bring him better luck on his entry into the spiritual world than if the head were severed entirely from ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman

... the 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

... men. All spirits exert influence on the destiny of man for good or evil; the children of men are unable to soften or to subdue these spiritual beings, whence the necessity of Shamans or Priests, who alone possess power over the spiritual world."[36] ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... Law in the Spiritual World'" read Uncle Zed. "Why, Dorian, this is fine of you. How could you guess my wishes so nicely. For a long time, this is just ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson

... accompaniment to armed force. Can it be that the hellishness of battle, the wearing down of the spirit induced by trench warfare, moments of utter loneliness which every soldier has to bear, strike right at the soul and enable him to realise the nearness of the spiritual world? 'Prayer is the foundation of all grace' were the words of a dying soldier who had deliberately returned to the area of poisonous gas and had brought back the machine gun on his shoulders. Some of us have realised what individual prayer at home has done ...
— The One Great Reality • Louisa Clayton

... world does not want your spirituality. It is not a spiritual world; it has no clear ideas upon the subject—it pays its religious premium and works off its aspirations at its weekly church going, and would think the person a fool who attempted to carry theories of celestial union into an earthly rule ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... what correspondence is. The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world; and not only the natural world collectively, but also in its individual parts: wherefore every object in the natural world, existing from something in the spiritual world, is called its correspondent. The natural world exists and subsists from the spiritual world, just ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various

... but one of the organs of the body, and, by the terms of our proposition as stated, is as much the slave of the mind as is any other organ of the body. To say that the mind controls the body presupposes that mind and body are distinct entities, the one belonging to a spiritual world, the other to ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton

... him he lives in his own world in the calm of victory. No tale is so delicately wrought as this; in it the symbolism, which is carried out in minute and precise detail, the moral significance, which is as clear as it is deep, and the presence of a spiritual world in life for which a visible language is found, are all present, in harmonious blending; and it has the added and rare charm of happiness without loss of truth. It is unique; and if one were to choose a ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... spiritual that it cannot be because the human brain is unable clearly to grasp it, we ought to look at the physical universe with a deeper insight and see in it the image, the shadow, the reflection of the spiritual world, and learn the spiritual verities by studying the images that exist of them in the physical world around us. The physical world is easier to grasp. Do not think the spiritual is modelled on the physical; the physical is fundamentally ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant

... 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

... mortality were indeed cordial to the soul. Death was the event, the condition, which brought him near to God and that unknown world, that "life elysian" of which he constantly spoke, dreamed and thought; and he rejoiced mightily in that close approach, in that sense of touch with the spiritual world. With unaffected cheerfulness he yielded himself to his own fate, with unforced resignation he bore the loss of dearly loved ones, and with eagerness and almost affection he regarded all the gloomy attributes ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... 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 ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... stop us short. Breathe upon the passion and the phantasmagoria will vanish. This power of mirage, by which we are able to delude and fascinate ourselves, is a moral phenomenon worthy of attentive study. We make for ourselves, in truth, our own spiritual world monsters, chimeras, angels, we make objective what ferments in us. All is marvelous for the poet; all is divine for the saint; all is great for the hero; all is wretched, miserable, ugly, and bad ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... union-in-separateness of God and the soul, is a necessary doctrine of all sane mysticism; for no scheme which fails to find a place for it can represent more than a fragment of that soul's intercourse with the spiritual world. Its affirmation was one of the distinguishing features of the Vaishnavite reformation preached by Rmnuja; the principle of which had ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)

... always so with me as it iss this day, for I once had no ear for God's voice, and my eyes were holden that I saw not the spiritual world. But sore sickness came upon me, and I wass nigh unto death, and my soul awoke within me and began to cry like a child for its mother. All my days I had lived on Loch Tay, and now I thought of the other country into which I would hef to be going, where I had no nest, and my soul would ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... rare-ripes were planted, and cabbages; and corn began to appear. One thing after another, till Lois got the garden all planted; and then she was just as busy keeping it clean. For weeds, we all know, do thrive as unaccountably in the natural as in the spiritual world. It cost Lois hard work to keep them under; but she did it. Nothing would have tempted her to bear the reproach of them among her vegetables and fruits. And so the latter had a good chance, and throve. There was not much time or much space for flowers; yet Lois had a few. Red poppies found ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner

... communicated it to a small number of His apostles, and then arose to the intermediate region inhabited by Ialdabaoth, where, unknown to him, He sits at his right hand, taking from him the Souls of Light purified by Christos. When nothing of the Spiritual world shall remain subject to Ialdabaoth, the redemption will be accomplished, and the end of the world, the completion of the return of Light into the Plenitude, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... here admit that, among all the wondrous provinces of Teufelsdroeckh's spiritual world, there is none he walks in with such astonishment, hesitation, and even pain, as in the Political. How, with our English love of Ministry and Opposition, and that generous conflict of Parties, mind warming itself against mind in their mutual wrestle for the Public Good, by which wrestle, indeed, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... first know them, and advanced to the belief in great gods ruling great provinces of nature, the Latins, whose mind was organising rather than productive, made this advance more slowly, and instead of making it organised the spiritual world of animism with a thoroughness nowhere else equalled.[1] They had, therefore, no gods properly so called, but only a host of spirits. Even the beings they possessed, who afterwards became great gods, were at first ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... pre-eminence of reason is acknowledged. The atmosphere of the 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 known by faith seems strange ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... and one so noble, I was led into an error by these miracles, expecting no less than a translation of yourself into the person of some famous wonder-worker. It is, you know, a day of miracles, and even kings have their salaried seers, and take counsel of the spiritual world. More!—let ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... 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

... discern it, they, at the same 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 that is urging us forward ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... exciting incidents of our own day. And it is that which I want to do in these lectures—to take our movement as a part of a world series, to study the principles that underlie the whole of that series, to trace out the working of these principles amongst the societies that have preceded us in the spiritual world, and then, having grasped them, to apply them to the solution of the problems of our own time. For there is a tendency in the Theosophical Society to narrow itself down to its time, instead of trying to widen out the thought of its time. It is a tendency which ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... inventions. This sort of fascination The Ancient Mariner brings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the dreamy [97] grace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge's work so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of crudity or coarseness. Coleridge's power is in the very fineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings home to our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are—the skeleton ship, the polar spirit, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... 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, which Jacobi regards ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... intimate friend has left you and become your open enemy; an open enemy has been reconciled and has returned to the affection and confidence of your heart. Your plans in life have to be changed to suit such events as these. Several friends and relatives, that were near to you, have been removed into the spiritual world. It may be that by such providences, your feelings, thoughts, and actions have been changed—changed utterly and for ever. Darkness of mind, gloominess of life, and anguish of spirit may have come upon you, by some such unexpected ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... 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 ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... argument is as follows: The things of the spiritual world having no visible existence upon earth, the hope of blessedness rests only on belief unsupported by material proof; this belief is Faith, and since on it alone are the high hopes founded, it is properly called their substance, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri

... 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 in this single instance will be able ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond

... to a thrift of the highest kind, as contrasted with a waste the most deplorable and ruinous of all; thrift of those faculties which connect us with the unseen and spiritual world; with humanity, with Christ, with God; thrift of the immortal spirit. I am not going now to give you a sermon on duty. You hear such, I doubt not, in church every Sunday, far better than I can preach to you. I am going to speak ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... if he seeks to maintain his consistency, will be plunged, sooner or later, into the dreary gulf of atheism. Common sense, philosophy and religion alike teach us to receive all undoubted facts in the natural and the spiritual world, with becoming reverence; assured that however mysterious to us, they are all most beautifully harmonious and consistent in the sight of ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... I would lay down my Bible? This is the book that mother loved. It has always been my Book of books. It contains the code of laws that controls the whole spiritual world, and it is the only lamp that leads to light and to the gates of Heaven. You need it as much as I. Why ask ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... been a member of some pious fraternity in America, that you are so well acquainted with the proceedings of the spiritual world?" inquired Anton, looking ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... Greek fire and gunpowder, the same thing cannot certainly be said, for they have the air of accidents due to the attraction of religious motives. They belong to the spiritual world; or to the doubtful ground of Magic which lay between Good and Evil. They were chemical forces, mostly explosives, which acted and still act as the most violent educators ever known to man, but they were justly feared as diabolic, and whatever insolence man may ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... living in one's self in it, like a mere shadow or altruist, egoism were superficial enough. As it is, egoism being terribly or beautifully alive, so far as it goes, is now and always has been, and always must be the running gear of the spiritual world—egoism socialised. The first person is what the second and third persons are made out of. Altruism, as opposed to egoism, except in a temporary sense, is a contradiction in terms. Unless a man ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... awful is He in that spiritual and moral world, of which our senses tell us nought? That unseen world of justice and truthfulness, of honour and duty, of reverence and loyalty, of love and charity, of purity and self-sacrifice; that spiritual world, I say, which can be only seen by the spiritual eye of the soul, and felt by the spiritual heart of the soul? How awful is God in that eternal world of right and wrong; wherein cherubim, seraphim, angel and archangel cry to Him for ever, not merely Mighty, mighty, mighty, but "Holy, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... us 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

... evidence. He who claims to give a message must satisfy us that he has himself received it; and, inasmuch as transcendent things are in themselves inexpressible, he must convey to us in hints and figures the conviction which we need. Prayer may bring the spiritual world near to us; but when the eyes of the kneeling Dominic seem to say "To son venuto a questo," their look must persuade us that the life of worship has indeed attained the reward of vision. Art, too, may be inspired; but the artist, in whatever field he works, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... another, its sense of time with that of eternity. Confucius aims at peace, order, outward prosperity, virtue, and good morals. All this belongs also to Christianity, but Christianity adds a moral enthusiasm, a faith in the spiritual world, a hope of immortal life, a sense of the Fatherly presence of God. So that here, as before, we find that Christianity does not exclude other religions, but includes them, and is distinguished by being deeper, higher, broader, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... lying about on the asphodel, among their friends and kinsmen, all arranged according to their clans and tribes.' 'There now!' exclaimed Ion; 'after that I should like to hear the Epicureans say another word against the divine Plato and his account of the spiritual world. I suppose you did not happen to see Socrates or Plato among the Shades?' 'Yes, I did; I saw Socrates; not very plainly, though; I only went by the bald head and corpulent figure. Plato I did not make out; I will speak the plain truth; we are all friends ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... Transience holds its tyrannical sway not only over the material but over the spiritual world. At its touch Atman, or soul, is brought to nothing. By its call Devas, or celestial beings, are made to succumb to death. It follows, therefore, that to believe in Atman, eternal and unchanging, would be a whim of the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... was the idea which underlay the Semitic conception of a spiritual world. He believed in a god in whose image man had been made. It was a god whose attributes were human, but intensified in power and action. The human family on earth had its counterpart in the divine family in heaven. By the side of the god ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce

... Take from mankind the shadowy dream of himself implied in his desire for a chivalrous world, and you leave him a naked animal from the jungle, more despicable the more skillful he becomes in gratifying his lusts. The Latin vision of life includes also beauty of art, man's radiation of his inner spiritual world, and closely woven with the love of art is respect for tradition—reverence for the past which has been bequeathed to him by his ancestors, which is ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... minds prompted no other thought, their spiritual experience brought no other suggestion, than to continue the old appeal to the supernatural world. The creed of Calvin is harsher than the creed of Rome; its spiritual world no less definitely conceived and authoritatively taught; its insistence on belief no less absolute. The traditional Protestant orthodoxy is only the Catholic theology a little shrunken and dwindled. Its appeal to the reason is hardly stronger, and its appeal to the imagination ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... because he did not try to comprehend it, the youth was intoxicated by the belief that he possessed the clue to all these mysteries, and had a working theory of all the phenomena in the natural and spiritual world in which he moved. To such mystical natures this confidence is unavoidable anywhere through the period of the pride of adolescence; but it was heightened in this case by the simplicity of life's problems in this narrow valley, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... the inside of the man. Soliloquy is only rare, not unnatural, and in art serves to reveal more of nature. In the drama it is the lifting of a veil through which dialogue passes. The scene is for the moment shifted into the lonely spiritual world, and here we begin to know Hamlet. Such is his wretchedness, both in mind and circumstance, that he could well wish to vanish from the world. The suggestion of suicide, however, he dismisses at once—with a momentary regret, it is true—but he dismisses it—as ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald



Words linked to "Spiritual world" :   belief, Kingdom of God



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