A prominent New England author bears the following testimony: * "Their ablest and favorite divines declared that the burning of four hundred Indians at once, mostly women and children, seemed a sweet savor to God, while they admitted that it was awful to see their blood running and quenching the violence of the burning wood. * * They turned upon the Quakers. They imposed heavy fines for hearing them speak. They passed blue-laws. They flogged, inhumanly, women and children. They put them in prison and whipped them daily. They cut off their ears. They bored their tongues with redhot irons. They hung men, women and children as witches, and continued it for fifty years. * * * They banished Roger Williams. They drove women and helpless children, under severest penalties, to seek protection among the savages, (where they were all murdered) because they differed with them on metaphysical divinity. * As late as 1740, they enacted the most barbarous laws against heretical thinkers, and enforced the Saybrook Platform." * Such was such is, though modified by the genius and intelligence of the age, creedal Christianity, devoid of spirituality-formal Christianity, unbaptized of Spiritualism. Chaff without wheat! shell without substance! a swollen body without the spirit that giveth life! CHAPTER XIX. THE PRELUDE. "Through the harsh noises of our day That angel song, now low and far Ere long shall sound from star to star! Circles are the highest symbols. There are probably no straight-line motions in the universe. Those seeming such are on a scale so vast the curve cannot be perceived. Fragments are all parts of circular bodies, as a piece of granite rock is a part of those primitive formations that encircle the earth. Atoms gyrate upon their axes and follow the line of their strongest attractions. Things move in spirals, and generally with the sun, from left to right. Sea-shells are built up spirally. Vines ascend forest trees spirally. Particles of steel flying toward a magnet move spirally. This law, with few exceptions, applies to atoms, worlds, systems, civilizations, and all those historic cycles of ever-recurring spiritual epochs and eras that distinguish antiquity. Progress underlies all things, and Spiritualism, though ever majestic in its past windings, may be compared to the ocean waves that rise and fall. It has had its mornings and evenings of decline. Its careers fleck the nights and |