Romans, he exclaimed-" Death shall be conquered; hell disappointed; the devil confounded, and sin totally destroyed!" Writing of the passage of the apostle John"God is love"-he says, "God is an infinite fountain of benevolence and beneficence to every human being. He hates nothing that he has made. He cannot hate because he is love. ** He has made no human being for perdition; nor ever rendered it impossible, by any necessitating decree, for any fallen soul to find mercy. Love seems to be the essence of the Divine nature, and all other attributes to be only modifications of this.”

ANN LEE, honored by her admirers with the appellations, "Sainted Mother," and "Sister," overshadowed by angels of purity, and enlightened by the descent of celestial influences, received her heavenly commission in 1758, near Manchester, England. Her visions were remarkable; her prophecies, oracles. The physical manifestations, relating to herself and adherents, consisted of dancing, trembling, whirling, and speaking with tongues. These exercises and spiritual gifts called down upon them the hostility of the Church. Priests and magistrates, who have ever sought to gag the truth, dungeon conscience, and impeach the inductions of science, charged them with disorder and Sabbathbreaking. The religious authorities slandered, fined and imprisoned them.

In 1774, inspired by the "Christ of the new order," she received a revelation to emigrate to America. A few purepurposed, loving souls clustered around her as a central teacher directed by angel ministers.

This new church-the "Shakers"-much resembles the Essenes of Philo's time. The Nazarene had but three hundred followers when martyred upon Calvary. The increase of the Shaker fraternity has not been rapid; but is permanent. Holding that God is dual, eternal, Father and Mother in deific manifestations, they practically teach the strict equality of the sexes. "First pure, then peaceable,”

they profess to live in the "resurrection state," and preach to those "without "-the Gentiles-to raise few and better children. They all believe in spirit manifestations and revelations.

*

Elder F. W. Evans wrote Robert Owen, in 1856, that,

seven years previous to the advent of Spiritualism, the Shakers had predicted its rise and progress, precisely as they have occurred, and that the Shaker order is the great medium betwixt this world and the world of spirits. Physical manifestations, visions, revelations, prophecies, and gifts of various kinds, of which voluminous records are kept, and, indeed, divers operations, but all of the same spirit,' were as common among us as gold in California."

Elder J. S. Prescott, connected with the community near Cleveland, Ohio, made a similar statement to us during the session of the 4th National Convention of Spiritualists. Mr. Dixon, an English writer of considerable note, visiting Elder Evans, of Mount Lebanon, during his American tour, wrote thus of the Shaker doctrines:

"To this dogma of the existence of a world of spirits-unseen by us, visible to them-the disciples of Mother Ann most strictly hold. In this respect, they agree with the Spiritualists; indeed they pride themselves on having foretold the advent of this 'Spiritual disturbance in the American mind.' Frederick tells me-from his angels-that the reign of this Spiritualistic movement is only in its opening phase! it will sweep through Europe, through the World, as it is now sweeping through America; it is based on facts, representing an active, though an unseen force.'

"These Shaker communities all claim to be of spiritual origin !-to have spiritual direction!-to receive spiritual protection! Hundreds of spiritual mediums are developed throughout the eighteen societies. In truth, all the members in greater or less degree are mediums.

"Spiritualism," he continues, "in its onward progress, will go through the same three degrees in the world at large. As yet it is only in the beginning of the first degree, even in the United States. It will continue until every man and woman upon the earth is convinced that there is a God-an immortality-a spiritual, no less than a natural world; and the possibility of a social, intelligent communication between their inhabitants respectively," &c., &c.

Basing our opinion upon reliable testimony, these Shaker communities constitute a body of the neatest, healthiest, the most pure-minded and kind-hearted souls of earth. Certainly they are the only people on this continent, who have successfully maintained, for more than seventy years, a system of rational living, one of the fundamental principles of which is the apostolic community of property.

JOHN MURRAY, the father of American Universalisms, born in England, persecuted for his beautiful heresy in his native country, was a Spiritualist. The birth of all great religious thoughts have their origin always in some spiritual agency It was so with Murray.

As early evidence of his mediumship and control by spirits, when but two years old, at his baptism, he articulated "Amen"-the first word he ever spoke. Clairvoyant, he saw a spirit-his Eliza-in Newgate prison, "irradiating the walls," before whom he, in his sorrow, prostrated himself, and, inspired by her sweet magnetism, found relief. Speaking of this happy visitation in an hour of deep anguish, he said: "My soul became calm, and although every hope from this world was extinct in my bosom, yet I believed I should be the better able to accommodate myself to whatever sufferings the Almighty might think proper to inflict."

When about to leave England for America, having served his time in prison for heresy, and feeling disconsolate over the departure from the scenes and associations of his home, he heard the voice of a guardian spirit, saying, "Be of good cheer. Be not afraid when thou passest through the waters; I will be with thee, fear no evil!"**

But the most interesting feature of his spiritual experiences, showing how well and wisely the messengers of heaven direct even life's events, for the consummation of divine purposes, is delineated in his interview with Mr. Potter, after his arrival in America.

By angel direction, Mr. Potter was impressed to build a meeting-house in the woods of New Jersey, under the assurance that in due time the true gospel would appear. Believing in the holy voice that appointed him, Mr. Potter faithfully built his house, and there it stood for years a monument of his so-called "folly," in the estimation of hist orthodox neighbors, who taunted him about his "forthcoming minister." Are the winds, too, under the command of spirits, as with Jesus on the sea of Tiberias? They tost that vessel into the intended harbor, and Murray was thus brought to the very shore where lived Mr. Potter, of whom he requested a fish for the hungry sailors.

In the meanwhile, the moment that vessel touched the shore, the familiar voice of the angel, who ordered the house to be built, spoke in his ear with thrilling, melting cadence

"There, Potter, in that vessel, cast away on that shore, is the preacher you have been so long expecting!"

Convicted, believing, nothing wavering, he waited the sequel, his heart serene with the love which the angelpresence inspired. When Mr. Murray came up to the door, asking for the fish, the mystic voice that, in other climes and ages, entranced the faithful to lofty, sublime deeds, was heard again

"Potter, this is the man, this is the person, whom I have sent to preach in your house!"

Mr. Murray, astonished, bewildered-for he had resolved to abandon the ministry forever-persuaded, entreated, prayed to be absolved from the task; but no, angel voices spoke to him in his nights of reflection; and the strange circumstances thus developed, showing a heavenly providential overruling of tides and seasons, all crowded upon him with the afflatus of prophetic divinity. Yielding at length to the order of powers above, whose forces are law, and whose influences are sunbeams that bud and

blossom the flowers of hope under tears of sorrow, he buckled on the armor of the "soldier of the cross," waked up the slumbering people to the action of freer thought and character, led to glorious victory, and, departing, left a trailing light of inspiration that has flooded deeper, higher, broader, till all the land is under the auroral baptism now of angels.

When the heavenly inspirations of the faithful Murray and his self-sacrificing coadjutors, crystalizing into a creed, were chilled by formularies, interpreted by fossiliferous Conventions, stultified by straining after "ecclesiastic respectability," the angels of progress left the denomination to wither, shrivel, die! 'Tis God's voice to every organic body-grow or perish! Universalism was a stepping-stone from a broad Protestant faith to demonstrated immortality. The good it had is blossoming and seeding into Spiritualism.

The tendency of all Christian sectarisms is downward, demanding faith without evidence, and saying to the aspirational soul-" thus far and no farther." The followers of all religious iconoclastic chieftains have, in after years, fallen far below their original standard-bearers. The Lutherans are per se sectarians. Methodists, degenerating from Wesley, Whitefield, Fletcher, as a church, virtually now deny all spiritual gifts and communications. Calvinists, condemning the barbarities of Rome, turned inquisitors and persecuted dissenting souls unto death. The Puritans, leaving England, settling at Plymouth, and founding the New England colonies, fled professedly from persecution, seeking a place to worship God according to the dictates of conscience, with the ulterior purpose of christianizing (?) the Indians! Settled, they commenced robbing those Aborigines, enslaving their women and children, and visiting upon them inhuman and self-degrading cruelties. They plundered the towns of the natives; paid bribes to assassinate Indian chiefs; burned hundreds of red men alive-and all in the name of Christ, the "Prince of Peace!"