Skip to content
MRM Library
Previous sectionHeaven versus Nirvana. IINext sectionChanges in Belief

Savings of Franklin

Improvement Era, vol. 8, no. 8, June 1905, p. 599

Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations

HEAVEN VERSUS NIRVANA. 699 son, but rather by the undivided intelligence; in which, as I firmly believe, direct intuition of truthness forms by far the most important part. Spsaking for myself, I may say, that though I have read a score of volumes supporting the thesis of this paper, from data collected by the Psychic Research Society, yet the assurance that comes to me from direct spiritual insight— from faith, if you please,— outweighs them all, with the considerations of this essay thrown in. The fact that I had no beginning as an ego, that I am ultimately a free agent, thatI am moving upward in a scale of psychic evolution, but may move downward should I so will, and that I may win heaven and immortality, — these things appeal to me with the same inevitableness with which I sense the infinitude of space, time, and causation; which latter fact my reason is equally powerless to assure me. And so I infer that, receive it or not, the Bible truth remains respecting ontological concepts: Man is fitted to live by faith and not by sight. Nor are racial sanity and eternal progress maintained so much by the disjointed concepts which we worm out of life and set down in books, as by the infinite spirit which bathes and saturates us, as it were, with the will of the Father, in what might be called ethnic waves of Tightness which sweep over us. And, therefore, if this opinion is well taken, we need not hesitate to believe that the great hope of heaven and immortality will live on in spite of the aberrations of philosophy. Worcester, Mass. SAYINGS OF FRANKLIN. Many estates are spent in the getting. Since women for tea forsook spinning and knitting And men for punch forsook hewing and splitting. The Indies have not made Spain rich, because her outgoes are greater than her ir comes. Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship. Buy what thou hast no need of, and, erelong, thou shalt sell thy necessaries. Many have been ruined by buying good pennyworths. It is foolish to lay out money in a purchase of repentance, and yet this folly is practiced every day at auctions.