If any vision should reveal

Thy likeness, I might count it vain
As but the canker of the brain;
Yea, though it spake and made appeal

To chances where our lots were cast
Together in the days behind,

I might but say, I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past.

Yea, though it spake and bared to view
A fact within the coming year;
And though the months, revolving near,
Should prove the phantom-warning true,

They might not seem thy prophecies,
But spiritual presentiments!

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear

The wish too strong for words to name;

That in this blindness of the frame
My ghost may feel that time is near.

Come-not in watches of the night,

But where the sunbeam broodeth warm Come, beauteous in thine after form, And like a finer light in light.

Be near us when we climb or fall:

Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
With larger other eyes than ours,
To make allowance for us all.

And all at once it seem'd at last

His living soul was flashed on mine,

And mine in his was wound, and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world."

WHITTIER's testimony:

"With silence only as their benediction

God's angels come,

Where, in the shadow of a great affliction,
The soul sits dumb "

"Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow;
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at noed the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,

And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?"

"There are, who, like the seers of old
Can see the helpers, God has sent,
And how life's rugged mountain side
Is white with many an angel tent."

LOWELL'S testimony:

"One day, as Ambrose was seeking the truth

In his lonely walk, he saw a youth
Resting himself in the shade of a tree;
It had never been given him to see

So shining a face, and the good man thought
"Twere a pity he should not believe as he ought.

Now there bubbled beside them where they stood,

A fountain of waters sweet and good:

The youth to the streamlet's brink drew near,

Saying, Ambrose, thou maker of creeds, look here!'

Six vases of crystal then he took

And set them along the edge of the brook."

Discoursing of the figure of the vases, and the water assuming different forms, the poet continues

"When Ambrose looked up, he stood all alone

The youth, and the stream, and the vases were gone;

But he knew by a sense of humbled grace,

He had talked with an ANGEL, face to face,

And felt his heart change inwardly,

As he fell on his knees beneath a tree."

CHAPTER XXV.

EXISTENCE of god.

"The people were astonished at his doctrine."-Matthew.

"My doctrine shall drop as the rain ;

My speech shall distil as the dew;

As the small rain upon the tender herb,

And as the showers upon the grass.”—Jehokah.

“As other men have creeds, so I have mine;

I keep the holy faith in God, in man,

And in the angels ministrant between.”—Tilton.

"I hold a faith more dear to me

Than earth's rich mines, or fame's proud treasure,—

*

A faith that plucks from death its sting;

Communes with angels every day,

Sees God, the good in everything,

Where Truth Eternal holds her sway."-Powell.

Reason pertains to God; reasonings, with their inductive and deductive methods, to progressive man. Moral freedom is liberty of action, achieved in accordance with the divine forces of our being and the laws of the Infinite. The sphere of freedom is the relative. It stands related to the absolute, eddy to the deep, clear, rolling river, destined to sweep onward to the ocean.

something as the varying

Belief is an assent of the mind to certain propositions. It is based principally upon testimony. Sufficient evidences compel it; a lack of demonstration precludes any rational

belief. The reasonableness of evidence is the soul of evidence, and the highest authority that any individual can possibly have, is the voiced command of God in his own soul.

Spiritualists have no authoritative book-oracles, nor petrified Apostles' creeds to be interpreted by cowled priests or mitered pontiffs. They bow to no kingly master-Chrishna, Jesus nor John. They trust in no external signs, ceremonies or institutional law-logic, scriptural or secular, for salvation. They rely upon no wafers, sacramental altars red with the crimsoned currents of slain goats, kids or Christs, to remove the legitimate consequences that result from infringements of natural law. They acknowledge no ecclesiastical authority, nor lean upon clergymen or popes, Romish or American, for their knowledge of those spiritual matters that relate to immortality and eternity.

In giving general doctrinal statements, then, we define not for such Spiritualists as the King of Bavaria or Napoleon of France, or Garabaldi of Italy; not for the Howitts and Wilkinsons of England; not for Senator Wade and other honorable members of Congress; not for Robert Dale Owen, Prof. Upham or Col. Higginson; not for numbers of the most celebrated judges, jurists, poets and writers of the age; not for Theodore Tilton's "many honored members in evangelical churches who are Spiritualists; " neither for Judge Edmond's estimated "eleven millions of believers" in this country; but for ourself only, with an eye to the usually accepted opinions of the main body, and are therefore alone responsible for these doctrines and definitions.

Ignoring the fetich gods of Africa—the repenting, jealous god of Judaism—the changing, angry-getting god of Catholicism, the partial, malicious god of Calvanism-the masculine, miracle-working god of Universalism-we find infinitely higher conceptions of Deity in the definitions of Plato, Proclus, Jesus, John, Mahomet, Parker and Davis:

"Of good there is one eternal, definite and universal Cause-the Infinite Soul."

"God is spirit, and spirit is causation underlying all things."

"God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

"God is love."

"There is one God."

"To God-our Father, and our Mother, too-will we ascribe all praise."

"The great positive mind of the universe-Father God and Mother Nature."

Those accepting the Spiritual Philosophy believe in the Divine Existence, the Infinite Esse, embodying and enzoning all principles of mind and properties of matter; all wisdom and love; life and motion; God manifest in everything from sands to solar systems. This is the spontaneous concession of the world's consciousness. Egypt's Osiris, India's Brahma, Judea's Jehovah, the Grecian's Jupiter, the Mussulmanʼs Allah, the Platonist's All-Good, the Theist's Deity, the Christian's Our Father, the Northman's Odin, the Indian's Great Spirit, express more than glimmerings of universal beliefs in that God whose altars are mountains and oceans, and whose pulpits are fields, earths, orbs and circling systems, perfect in order, musical in their marches, and flaming with holiest praises.

Rejecting the human-shaped, prayer-idolized, personal God of evangelical theologians,-because personality logically implies locality, and whatever becomes localized in space is necessarily limited and imperfect-to us, God is the Infinite Spirit; Soul of all things; the incarnate Life-Principle of the universe; impersonal, incomprehensible, undefinable, and yet immanent in dewdrops that glitter and shells that shine --in stars that sail through silver seas, and angels that delight to do the immutable will. When we designate God as the Infinite spirit-presence and substance of universal Nature, from whose eternally-flowing life wondrous systems of worlds have been evolved, we mean to imply, in the affirmation, all divine principles, attributes, qualities and forces, positive and negative-Spirit, as spirit-substance, and matter as physical substance, or a solidified form of force, the former