The Peeress of Provost; Disclosures Concerning the Inner Life of Man
INTRODUCTION.
DISCLOSURES CONCERNING THE INNER LIFE OF MAN.
As must every man who, isolating himself from the hurry and bustle of
external life, to contemplate his inner self, you will feel, dear reader,
that our inner and outer life are not only different, but often in flat
contradiction of each other.
What the outer life finds decorous, the inner frequently condemns; and in the midst of the world we are often disquieted by a still small voice that whispers us from within.
If you examine further, you will feel that this external life is the dominion of the brain—the intellect which belongs to the world—whilst the inner
life dwells in the region of the heart, within the sphere of sensitive life,
in the sympathetic and ganglionic system.
You will further feel, that by virtue of this inner life, mankind is bound up in an eternal connexion with nature, from which his imperfect external existence can only apparently release him.
It is true, indeed, that this inner life is overshadowed and obscured to the world-possessed brain; but still irrepressible and immutable, it lives on, a concealed but vigilant guard on the conduct and economy of the outer. Every ct and thought, however trifling it may now appear, is by it noted and numbered; and will one day or other appear in bright relief before our spiritual eyes, when our bodily ones are for ever extinguished. of conviction.
It is when we know that life is fading from us, and that for us there is no
more pleasure in the world, we first begin to live for God.
Then, when the external world sinks from us, the inner life ascends. It needs no sleep-waking to perceive this inner life; to every man who is not too much entangled in the world—to him who lives in it, but is not of it—is
given an eye to discern it.
You will also feel, that it is this secret unseen connexion with nature which unites man with the other world, and conducts him on his way towards it.
The more, in the tumult of the world and the bustle of existence, this
inner life makes itself felt— the more the gentle voices within us drown the loud music of the world—the greater is our debt to the spirit that guides us.*
But if thou art carried away by the current of worldly life, seeking only what belongs to it, believe, dear reader, that an hour will one day come, and God grant it be not thy last!— an hour of sorrow and of tears—an hour when thou shalt stand by the death-bed of thy beloved, or from the summit of earthly happiness be cast into the depths of repentance and of shame, deserted and alone—
when thy inner life shall rise up before thee, embracing thee again within its sphere; that life which, since thy childhood, has been hidden from
thee, of which thou hast only been visited by glimpses in thy dreams—
dreams which thou k newest not to interpret.
Beloved, to so many has this befallen!
To so * Kern er here alludes to the protecting spirit, to be afterwards alluded to. many will it yet, who, now joyous and with unclouded brows, are
wholly engrossed with the inter. eats of this world, and devoting all
their best faculties to their advancement! By the bedside of such an
one I once stood, and, with the death-rattle in hit throat, he said to me,
” I feel that my life has passed from my brain to the perigastric region ; of my brain I have no more consciousness—I no longer feel my arms nor my feet; but I see inexpressible things— things which I never believed; there is another world !” —and so saying, he expired.
“When by the graves of the just, the flowers we have planted as memorials, invite us to a far distant world, or when we first see the gulf of death yawning for ourselves, then—but, alas ! too late—we are seized with a trembling awe at the thoughts of eternity.
Strange presentiments creep round the failing heart, and anxious sighs burst from the oppressed bosom. But these thoughts are far from us by the
cradle of infancy, and in the flower of our age,—far from us at the marriage feast, in the glittering halls of the wealthy, and the joyous circles of Bacchus.”
And thus once wrote to us a spiritually-minded medical friend, after the death of one much honoured and beloved:— i “It was not terror at the sight of death that so shook me and incapacitated me for the office of a physician, nor was it altogether grief for my loss.
The concussion awakened the inner life within me and in despair I was ready to sink into its depths.
I contemplated with horror the monstrous blindness of the soul, the vanity and nothingness of our self knowledge and self-will, the fearfulness of the inevitable and concatenation of things, our deeds and their consequences—indelible, ineffaceable, —fast in the gripe of eternity.
Ah! I should despair, did I not look for help from God. Beloved, it has become clear and evident to me, that there is but one mode of deliverance from this bond! this chain by which we, blind and bewildered, are dragged forward, knowing nothing, neither what we do nor the consequences of our actions;
that there is a kingdom of grace and of love; and that when we stand before the judgment-seat, face to face with God, he only can be set free, and reach eternal rest and happiness, who is to it reconciled and into it received.
In God we must live, w rk, and act, if we would not, according to the eternal laws of nature, have our souls ensnared and plunged into a darkness through which no beam of light and joy can penetrate.
So, beloved, let us love life, yea covet life, yet live not for ourselves; but make our peace with God, and through the living God within us, do our work.
Ah ! it is awful to think that every step a man takes is on the brink of a
thousand precipices.” ~Andreas Justinus C. Kerner, The Peeress of Provost, Page 17-19
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