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God works with all who dare to win,
And the time has come-to reveal it—
The People's Advent's coming!"

Spiritualism has incarnated itself into our literature, art, music, philosophy and legislation; and it gathers strength and courtly symmetry as it sweeps through the land, destined to become the universal religion of the enlightened world.

"They builded wiser than they knew;

The conscious stone to beauty grew."

LECTURE

VIII.

EXEGETICAL SPIRITUALISM.

CHAPTER XXIV.

POETIC TESTIMONY.

"Sounding through the dreamy dimness

Where I faint and weary lay,

Spake a poet: 'I will lead thee

To the land of songs to-day.'

Sweet and heavenly sings the Poet Laureate of England:

'How pure at heart and sound in head,

With what divine affections bold

Should be the man whose thought would hold

An hour's communion with the dead.

In vain shalt thou, or any, call

The spirits from their golden day,

Except, like them, thou too canst say

My spirit is at peace with all.”

Exalted minds dwell in the element of the spiritual. The spiritual is the real. Poets are the soul's prophets. Unlike metaphysicians, they give us the product of their spiritual life and intuitive insight, and appeal to the consciousness and deep sympathies of humanity for the verification. Poets are divinity-appointed interpreters, employing the shadows of the outer world to reveal the substance of the world within. From the Vedic hymns of the Hindoos their glory gleams all along the pages of thought and culture. Brain, sunned from heaven, pen afire with truth, their lines ever tender, glow with the fadeless radiance of immortal

love. Divest God of the attribute of love-disrobe literature of its ideal-strip poetry of its Spiritualism, and the residuum is shells-nothing but shells. The nature-poet of Galilee, Jesus, walked under Syrian skies a Spiritualist, guarded by a legion of angels.

Want of space warrants but a few quotations from the rich poesy fields of Spiritualism. Grand this apostrophe of Coleridge:

"Contemplant Spirits! ye that hover o'er
With untried gaze the immeasurable fount
Ebullient with creative Deity!

And ye of plastic power, that interfused
Roll through the grosser and material mass
In organizing surge! Holies of God!"

LONGFELLOW's testimony:

"Some men there are, I have known such, who think
That the two worlds-the seen and the unseen,
The world of matter and the world of spirit-
Are like the hemispheres upon our maps,

And touch each other only at a point.

But these two worlds are not divided thus,

Save for the purpose of common speech.

They form one globe, in which the parted seas
All flow together and are intermingled,
While the great continents remain distinct."

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"A drowsiness is stealing over me

Which is not sleep; for, though I close mine eyes,

I am awake, and in another world.

Dim faces of the dead and of the absent

Come floating up before me."

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