Heavenly Photography

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 11, 1871

Heavenly Photography.

Fresh information from the next world has lately been received in London of a most interesting character. A certain Miss Houghton has furnished (under spiritual guidance) a series of portraits which are now on view and for sale in Bond street. All London is crowding to see them; and it is no wonder, as among the subjects are to be found likenesses of the crown worn at present in his new abode by Prince Albert, flowers from heavenly hills, the Hollow of the Hand of the Holy Ghost, and eight separate views of the eye of Jehovah.

“The paintings, to a purely earthly observer, resemble,” the Examiner tells us, “splodges and dashes of lurid colors, or a full-bodied black beetle mashed between two sheets of marbled paper;” which description assumes a deep significance when we learn that each color has its spiritual meaning. Thus the “Rock of Ages” is expressed by yellow ochre (delicacy of mind), raw sienna (considerateness), madder (adjustingness of temper), and more than all, brown pink (economy). This medley, which is to several minds pure blasphemy, is daily studied, we are told, by crowds of devout believers in Miss Houghton and her angelic painters with earnest zeal. We are led to suspect that either American spirits are sharper and more matter of fact than their brethren, or else that only the work-a-day part of heaven lies over our patch of the world’s surface. We have no such subtle glories unfolded as these. Our spirits, it is true, have devoted themselves lately to pictorial art, but it was rather in a photographic line. They have been going about through Ohio and among the Pennsylvania Dutch leaving likenesses of themselves on street lamps and drug-shop windows, in indubitable trousers, coats, and crinoline. Occasionally, the portrait of a ghostly pup, or chicken, or other spiritual poultry, has been found with the others. In one house in Ohio, the spiritual artists varied their labors at the camera by chipping the dresses of the women into shreds, tumbling old ladies down the cellar stairs, and abstracting greenbacks to no inconsiderable amount from the breeches-pocket of their host.

Seriously, we have every cause to think that art in all its branches is but poorly comprehended in the future world. If the Ohio lamp-post daguerreotypes and Miss Houghton’s efforts are the best which newcomers of aesthetic tastes may look for throughout the coming ages in the heavenly regions, it is a pity that moth and dust will be left to corrupt their Turners and Geromes here, and that they cannot be taken with them.

Belief in these things is by no means confined to the illiterate or vulgar. Some of the wisest, most practical, most refined men and women among us give them unswerving confidence. How do they explain these mysteries? Is there no way by which they can make this hurly-burly of raps, dancing tables, insane rhapsodies and colored daubs representing the “Eye of Jehovah,” as attractive to the ordinary mind as the Heaven of which they have robbed us—the shadow of eternal beauty and eternal peace from hills afar off, beyond which each man in his rare best moments saw his God and his loved ones as in a dream?—N. Y. Tribune.