often preach better than they believe-wiser than their confessions of faith warrant. As in apostolic times, a "rushing wind," a descending afflatus from circling bands of spirits, sometimes completely overmasters them. They then speak as with tongues of fire, and their words touch the heart, the conscience and the reason.

Souls thus kindled from the love-flames of heaven, pulsate in harmony with the infinite Over-Soul. Spirit answers to the spiritual. Partially intromitted, at times, into the realm. of that quickening inner life, as was John, of Patmos, "on the Lord's day," the better portion of American preachers often preach Spiritualism; admitting the reality of its phenomena, and the truth of much or all of its philosophy. REV. H. W. BEECHER'S testimony:

Oh, tell me not that the fathers of this Republic are dead-that generous host, that airy army of invincible heroes. They hover as a cloud of witnesses above this nation. Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society, and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?"

In one of his practical sermons, delivered on the 8th of Jan., 1867, he says:

"Our field of conflict is different from that on which men oppose each other. It comprises the whole unseen realm. All the secret roads, and paths, and avenues, in which spirits dwell, are filled with a great invisible host. These are our adversaries. And they are all the more dangerous because they are invisible. Subtle are they. We are unconscious of their presence. They come, they go; they assail, they retreat; they plan, they attack, they withdraw; they carry on all the processes by which they mean to suborn or destroy us, without the possibility of our seeing them.

"I confess to you, there is something in my mind of sublimity in the idea that the world is full of spirits, good and evil, who are pursuing their various errands, and that the little that we can see with these bats' eyes of ours, the little that we can decipher with these imperfect senses, is not the whole of the reading of those vast pages of that great volume which God has written. There is in the lore of God more than our philosophy has ever dreamed of.

"An evil spirit may be consummately refined, may be inspired. Our first thought in contemplating this subject is, that an evil spirit must

be a vulgar thing Doubtless there are vulgar spirits; but it does not follow at all that spirits who are most potential, and most to be feared, are vulgar. On the contrary, where spirits are embodied, it is supposed that those who are the most cultured are the most powerful for evil.

"The perversion of moral ideas-the suborning of all things to selfishness the want of truth and equity-the corruption of religionthese things are inexplicable on any other supposition than that there are mighty powers at work above the agencies of nature, and beyond the will of men; that there are spirits of wickedness that are abroad in the world, and that render life unsafe.

"On the other hand, I believe that there are angels of light, spirits of the blessed, ministers of God. I believe, not only that they are our natural guardians, and friends, and teachers, and influencers, but also that they are natural antagonists of evil spirits. In other words, I believe that the great realm of life goes on without the body very much as it does with the body. And, as here the mother not only is the guardian of her children whom she loves, but foresees that bad associates and evil influences threaten them, and draws them back and shields them from the impending danger; so ministering spirits not only minister to us the divinest tendencies, the purest tastes, the noblest thoughts and feelings, but, perceiving our adversaries, caution us against them, and assail them, and drive them away from us.

"The economy, in detail, of this matter, no man understands. All we can say is, in general, that such antagonism exists; that there are spirits that seek our good, and other spirits that seek our harm; that that there are spirits that seek to take us to glory, and honor, and immortality, and other spirits that seek to take us to degradation.'

In another discourse reported in the New York Independ ent, he employed the following unmistakable language. The quotations are introduced without any special view to their logical connection. Mr. Beecher himself is a stranger to the logic of the schools:

"There is an atmosphere of the soul as well as an atmosphere of nature. In the atmosphere of the soul, God sometimes brings down the divine landscape, heavenly truths, so clearly that the soul rests upon them as upon a picture let down.

"Out of the dust and din and mist and observations of life, there come moments when God permits us to see, in a second, further, wider, and easier, than by ordinary methods of logic we can see in a whole life. Do I undervalue logic when I say that it is inferior to intuition? Intuition, when at white heat, teaches a man in a single moment more thau logic ever teaches him. Logic constructs the walls of thought, throws up ramparts, and lays out highways; but it never discovers. Logic merely builds, fortifies, demarks. The discovering power is intuition. There are certain times when parts of the mind lift themselves up with

a kind of celestial preparation, and we see and think and feel more in a single hour than ordinarily we do in a whole year. And however useful and needful reasoning may be, as compared with these sudden insights, it is scarcely to be mentioned with respect.

"Ordinarily we are under the influence of the things which are seen. In our lower life we must be under the influence of sense. But now and then, we know not how, we rise into an atmosphere in which spiritlife, God, Christ, the ransomed throng in heaven, virtue, truth, faith and love, become more significant to us, and seem to rest down upon us with more force, than the very things which our physical senses recognize. There have been times, in which I declare to you, heaven was more real than earth; in which my children that were gone spoke more plainly to me than my children that were with me; in which the blessed estate of the spirits of just men made perfect in heaven, seemed more real and near to me than the estate of any just man upon earth. These are experiences that link, one with another and a higher life. They are generally not continuous, but occasional openings through which we look into the other world. * * * * * These glimpses of the future state are a great comfort and consolation to all those who are looking and waiting for that development of perfect manhood."

This clergyman doing an immense work for freedom and religious progress, should not be too severely criticised by such uncompromising progressionists as were fortunate enough to snap their ecclesiastical fetters at a single bound. Though contradictory, though his clerical trumpet often gives an "uncertain sound," he is a grand man with a warm heart and an inspirational brain. Pardon him, then, for occasionally "falling from grace," to flounce, at intervals, in the miry clay of his childhood catechism. The history of mediumship furnishes many similar cases.

REV. E. H. CHAPIN's testimony:

In a masterly discourse, entitled "the voices of the dead," this eminent pulpit orator breathed these words of cheer. It is Universalism just blooming into Spiritualism-faith smiling at its first glimpse of knowledge:

"Well, then, is it for us at times to listen to the voices of the dead. By so doing we are better fitted for life and for death. From that audience we go purified and strengthened into the varied discipline of our mortal state. We are willing to stay, knowing that the dead are so near us, and that our communion with them may be so intimate.

We

are willing to go, seeing that we shall not be wholly separated from those we leave behind. We will toil in our lot while God pleases, and when he summons us we will calmly depart."

Referring to certain moods and "consecrated nours," he adds:

"Then, though dead, they speak to us. It needs not the verbal utterance, nor the living presence, but the mood that transforms the scene, and the hour supplies these. That face that has slept so long in the grave, now bending over us, pale and silent, but affectionate stillthe more vivid recollection of every feature, tone, and movement, that brings before the departed just as we knew them, in the full flush of life and health-that soft and consecrating spell which falls upon us, drawing in all our thoughts from the present, arresting, as it were. the current of our being, and turning it back, and holding it still, as the flood of which rushes by us-while in that trance of soul, the beings of the past are shadowed-old friends, old days, old scenes recur, familiar looks beam close upon us, familiar words re-echo in our ears, and we closed up and absorbed with the by-gone, until tears dissolve the film from our eyes, and some shock of the actual wakes us from our reverie; all these, I say, make the dead commune with us as really as though in bodily form they should come out from their mysterious silence and speak to us. And if life consists in experience, and not mere physical contacts-and if love and communion belong to that experience, though they take place in meditation, or dreams. or by actual contact-then, in that hour of remembrance, we have really lived with the departed, and the departed have come back and lived with us."

REV. THEODORE PARKER's testimony:

This individual, so self-poised and towering in intellect, was the man-colossus among American clergy. Ascended he is living and speaking still, through our media. Assuming that revelation was no green-house exotic, but perpetual as cycling ages, and that inspiration, native to the postures of the soul, is cognate with the races, he propagated a religious philosophy that will stream in increasing beauty through all the future eras of free thought. His grave is a Mecca under the mellow skies of Florence. Considered mentally he was thoroughly self-conscious of his greatness.

"Tend this head well," says Mirabeau, on his death-bed; "it is the greatest head in France." "God gave me great powers," says the expiring Parker, "and I have but half

used them." The coincidence was singular, while saying in his last hours-" There are two Theodore Parkers, the one here sick and struggling, the other at work at home." There was a friend reading at the time one of his great sermons in Music Hall. There were "two Theodore Parkers"-the shadow and the substance, for man is dual, aye, trinal. The papers thought him "wandering a little." The Jews evidently thought Paul was "wandering" when "caught up to the third heaven," not knowing whether he was in the body or out.

In thought and speech, relative to the Spiritual Philosophy, he was manly and heroic. In notes made for a sermon we find the following:

"In 1856 it seems more likely that Spiritualism would become the religion of America, than in 156 that Christianity would become the religion of the Roman empire, or in 756 that Mohammedanism would be that of the Arabian populations:

"1. It has more evidence for its wonders than any historic form of religion hitherto.

2. It is thoroughly democratic, with no hierarchy; but inspiration is open to all.

3. It is no fixed fact-has no punctum stans, but is a punctum fluens.

4. It admits all the truths of religion and morality in all the worldsects."

Death does

"Shall we know our friends again? For my own part I cannot doubt it; least of all, when I drop a tear over their recent dust not separate them from us here.

Can life in heaven do it?"

The succeeding paragraphs we transcribe from Wm. Howitt's "History of the Supernatural." Who but Theodore. Parker could have written thus upon Spiritualism?

"Let others judge the merits and defects of this scheme; it has never organized a church-yet, in all ages, from the earliest, men have more or less freely set forth its doctrines. We find these men amongst the despised and forsaken; the world was not ready to receive them. They have been stoned and spit upon in all the streets of the world. The 'pious' have burned them as haters of God and man; the wicked called them bad names and let them go. They have served to flesh the swords of the Catholic Church, and fed the fires of the Protestants; but flames and steel will not consume them; the seed they have sown is quick in many a heart-their memory blessed by such as live divine. These are