PREFACE.

Any person having a reasonable education will admit that there are many planetary worlds besides the one on which we live.  But whether or not they are inhabited is an open question with most people.  We had been in doubt on this point for many years, but now we are settled in our conviction that human life exists in many different worlds of space.  We can give no proof of this except that we have just returned from the greatest journey we ever took.  We went from world to world over long distances of space as easily as one could go from place to place on the surface of our earth. This was a journey of the soul, for surely flesh and bone could not have traveled such amazing distances.  At times we were lost to this world, being entirely absorbed in the glimpses of other worlds that were flashing upon our view in happy succession.

It can been seen without saying that this book contains no more than a fragment of the things we saw and heard—­the fragment that is most easily understood by human creatures born under the rules and regulations of this little dark world of ours.

There are, in certain other worlds, such wide extremes of bodily formation and mental capacities, that a picture of them in word or art would only be unbearable and in some instances decidedly revolting, just because we are trained here to one set of standards and chained to one surface of world conditions.  It will be different in the after-death life to those who are wise enough to be pure and good in this world.

To make the book as practical as possible we have given a picture of some worlds where human life is inferior to ours, and of others where it is vastly superior,—­saying nothing of the millennial life which we found in far off space.

Comparisons are made throughout the book between the life, habits, and customs of other worlds and our own.  In picturing the low life of certain worlds we are led to see what a highly favored and greatly civilized people we are, and in describing the human achievements of certain other worlds we are led to see how short a distance we have traveled in the path of human glory and civilization.

We have also endeavored to set forth in this humble volume the common relation of all rational creatures of all worlds to one Infinite Creator.  We do not question the truth of this fact, and those who ask for proof must wait to find it.

We hope that this book will be inspiring to every thoughtful mind who loves to learn more and more of the great system of intelligent life of which the human creatures of this world form one link in the chain.  If the reading of this volume should open to your mind numberless suggestions and compel you to ask a host of questions, perhaps you will do as we have done,—­spend a long time in training your wings to be swift enough to take the journey yourself.  If you will not do this, you must patiently wait until the clods of clay are shaken off, so that your free spirit may go out to live the life more vast in other worlds.