Improvement Era, April 1929

Improvement Era Vol. XXXII APRIL, 1929 No. 6 The Veil: Its Uses and Abuses By Professor N. L. Nelson II. ITS HUMAN ABUSES IN a previous article, it was maintained that the power to look behind the Veil is innate in every child of God sent to this lower world to finish his divine education; but that it is an occulted or static faculty, and one evidently intended by our Father in heaven to remain dormant during earth life, save as he himself quickens it, in prophet or seer, to put over the mortal horizon some message for the good of mankind. At the same time, so it was also pointed out, he does not leave us without guide in the darkness of mortality; some light, some echo, some infinite refrain, of the life that was and the life that is to be, gets across or through the Veil to each of us. Respecting the life that was, situations constantly arise which are apparently new, yet strangely familiar; faces, voices, ideas, seem to stir up, as it were, memories of that previous life. As Zion's poet has said: "Yet oft-times a secret something Whispered, 'You're a stranger here,' And I felt that I had wandered From a more exalted sphere." The same sort of submerged reminiscence led the poet Words- worth to exclaim: "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us — our life's star — Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home." Outside the glimpses we obtain in scripture, the Veil in the East (pre-existence)has had few interpreters, though many have done violence to it.