Chapter II: Part 2

By help of divine love alone can the soul journey safely onward and upward through this great concentrated, immediately-environing earth grade. It is solidly compact, sleepless and untiring, seeking ceaselessly whom it may win to its realm. It is the unrecognized longing of the soul for restoration to its divine heritage of love.

EXPERIENCE.

Experience is at the same time the surest and the slowest teacher of men. Wisdom, the crowning glory of humanity, is but an enlarged perception of man's needs, and how to meet them, based upon individual experience and observation of the effects of natural law upon all. An individual is an epitome of the world--society. Discipline is everywhere considered indispensable to the individual. Far more is it so to the world of society. Anarchy and revolution are no more efficient for the body politic than for the individual. Growth, slow and gradual, aggregation of power and wisdom through the education and enlightenment of its individual members, is the only safe and sure way to permanency and enduring life.

SPIRITUALISM.

In Spiritualism alone is to be found an expression of the religion of Jesus of Nazereth. It is truly democratic, giving to saint and sinner alike both here, in this life, and after death, an opportunity for redemption. Its first mission to the world is the proof it gives of a continued existence in which is still experienced all the idiosyncracies which marked the individual in earth life. This fact has either been ignored by certain classes of minds, or has been taken by them as proof positive of the hellish origin of its phenomena, whereas in this very expression of characteristic life lies its wonderful power and potency. From long-continued educational influence people out of churches, as well as inside of the influence of their superstitions, have come to idealize death, its awe-inspiring mystery and its strange variety. It is thought, by them, to be a sudden translation from a lower condition to a higher, wherein, through some divine hocus-pocus, the members of certain so-called "Evangelical" churches, no matter how worldly-minded, and selfish, or however false to their teachings they have been, or how false their lives to the divine ethics taught by the Lord, whose name they assume as their prerogative, that their through tickets to the supernal spheres are assured. It is believed that death purges them of all their sympathy with and attraction to mortal life, and that they are forever absolved from all their responsibilities, and freed from dependence upon the inter-relationships between the two conditions. Exactly the reverse is true. Multitudes of souls only begin their true living, their comprehension of life's meanings, after death has sifted them out of the ashes and lifeless embers of their mistaken ideas, or vicious indulgences. Shall these, then, be brought beneath the ban of limitless darkness, and exiled from the "many mansions" of our Heavenly Father's and Mother's house? A tiny rap, untraceable to any material source, a table moved by invisible force, a closed and locked piano skillfully played upon by unseen hands; these were the first links in an endless chain of eternal benefits pouring down from the smiling heavens upon the benighted children of earth. Again was heard "the voice as of one crying in the wilderness" of this world's marts for barter, and selfish gain; "Let him who hath ears to hear, let him hear." "The grave has lost its victory" and death is but a halt called in mercy and loving tenderness, that your weary souls may be refreshed by a draught from nature's founts and bountiful resources that you may mount upward as on the mighty wings of eagles; or discover for your wandering feet the path of rectitude and safety.

PHENOMENA.

All expressions of nature are phenomenal. Man is of all the most wonderful. A tiny spark of spirit encased in matter, by the irresistible law of progress evolving powers of brain, thought, consciousness, reason, intuition; unfolding, expanding; realizing finally his at-one-ment with his source, the cause of him--God--man immortal, illimitable. At certain points of unfoldment seemingly lost, great hue and cry from many--pin heads--who think they have discovered God, a failure. Watch out and see. Give the Lord a chance. Nothing is done with yet. In a very old hook of Hebrew history, there are recorded well-attested accounts of phenomena, which are so distinctly outside of the ordinary happenings of this material existence, that they were always recognized as being of a purely spiritual origin, method and purpose. Within the last century the same experiences have been vouchsafed to present humanity. Millions of people have attested the truth of a continuance of these same phenomena; they having taken place within the range of their own personal experience. And why not? The Creator knows what his children need in this, as well as in other ages. That human souls, the lives of human beings, persist after physical death, does not prove their eternal existence along the lines of highest soul evolution. The greatest possible unfoldment is not a gift of God. It is held only by the individual soul as the result of age-long study, and toil, through manifold embodiments, long-continued self renunciation, and sacrifices not yet known or understood. Its initiations are endless; its revelations of the infinite law are, at times, too seemingly trifling for recognition; but as the lapidary leaves no facet of the jewel uncut and unpolished, so the guardians--the guides and teachers of the candidates for spiritual unfoldment--omit no least lesson or discipline that can aid in perfecting the individual soul.

It is the meanest kind of bosh teaching people that there will be eternal punishment for ignorant wrong-doings in this short kindergarten experience of life, making them believe their last chance for anything better is gone forever. Half the sins that are committed here anyway are either sins against the conventionalities, or they have been hatched up by some unsext priests and have nothing to do with the case. Besides, the sins of the body in many a poor mortal are left with the body in the grave.

The ages, the aeons required for the perfecting of any given soul, are known only to its Creator, or how great must be the accumulation of ages ere the whole human family--the children of God--will respond to the eternal roll-call that shall usher in the redeemed of every land and clime, not one "Lost," or gone astray. Those who have stepped forth into the arena of this present manifestation of life on this planet, have, each in their place, their responsibility and task, to keep alight the beacons of reason, and intelligence, as guides to truth, and to pander never to the powers of ignorance and superstition, however manifested by Church or State.

MEDIUMSHIP.

Mediumship today is clearly an abnormalism. But the history of the world has been that the so-called abnormalisms of one generation are the accepted, commonplace realisms of the succeeding types. Sight, the desire to see, existed first in the mind of the unfolding human brain; the will joined its forces to aid the work of liberation and the visual nerves began to form and grow. The imprisoned soul within kept pushing on, until gradually the beautiful, complex organ of sight was evoluted and the soul possessed a window through which it could see things for itself. The evolutionary processes attending mediumship quite correspond to this physical process. Man demands to know concerning those things that have long been hid, and to understand the "deep things of God," and so the soul of him is saying, "I, too, have visions unspeakable," and closing up the avenues of his external sight, he sees and apprehends truth, a light upon his path, of which in his previous, darkened state he had never conceived. The intuitional faculties being the true interpreters of the immortal soul, are capable of unlimited cultivation, unlike those of the intellect which have always the limitations of cerebral organization. These powers are as limitless as God, and only through the expansion and recognized rational, practical use and application of these faculties--now sometimes falsely named supernatural--can the human race pass out from its present environment of darkness, and crime, and reaching upward expand into a saving knowledge of the truth, as made known by the Christs.

THE MIGRATIONS OF OUR RACE.

Vast numbers of times has the human race marched around this world on which we live. Each journey of the whole family has embraced a cycle of time. Each cycle has been rounded up by some great cataclysm of nature, which has left the earth desolated, in ruins, to rest from the invasions of its nomadic children.

Of the truth of these great convulsive throes of the planet we have many ancient legendary accounts. The Biblical accounts, and the irrefutable testimony of the globe itself, as recorded in the veined strata which have held their record for ages inviolably concealed, until man should finally bring to the unmasking of her secrets an intelligence clarified from the mists of superstition, and illuminated by the intuition not only of the soul, but of the intellect and reason.

THE DISCIPLINE OF LIFE.

"The mills of the gods grind always,
They grind exceeding small,
And with great exactness grind they all."

Their "hoppers" are too numerous to be counted. Physical pain, sorrow of many sorts and kinds, losses and crosses innumerable, unending disappointments, holding back the ambitions from all satisfactory realization of pet schemes, and finally, physical death. Not one human creature escapes. Into the hoppers they go, again and again, time after time, till the refining process is completed and the soul is fit to stand in holy and exalted presence, and to be set to do the work of the Master. Here and there some gifted soul realizes that its anguish means "growing pains." A was described as a "good man who let the Lord do anything He wanted to, to him."

The discipline of this life is hard to bear; but if people will not learn the lesson intended, here and now, they will be forced back through reembodiments until this life can teach them nothing more, and they have finally earned a right to a place in the heavens--the home of the gods--where perfect peace abides.

Men are naturally gregarious. In all phases of life they seek sympathetic comrades, or followers that they can hypnotize to do their will. They instinctively set themselves off into classes, and while this is useful as a protection from invasion, conditions in India show the evils of class-caste distinctions carried to a ridiculous extreme. The vast, surging, unyielding predatory classes on this earth consist of those who have but lately--comparatively--emerged from the animal kingdom, and have not yet been put through the mill of reincarnation times enough to rid them of their wild beast "tricks and manners," and make of them men and women fit to have around. The dreadful thing is, having to live on the same planet with them, and endure their terrible onslaughts upon the peace, and happiness of the unfolded, the civilized portions of the race. But all are of common origin. Such as they are, all have been, and such as the highly developed, educated and useful class are now, they will surely become.

HOMOGENEITY OF THE RACE.

The "dreamer" who passes through this life, satisfied with the creations of his own fancy, adds nothing to the practical needs or demands of his day and time. In all the years and ages of the intellective life of the planet, such men and women have lived and walked their little round atween the two oceans which bound the shores of birth and death.

But a truer concept of the meanings of an earthly existence has arisen in the minds of gifted humanity. The cloister gives way to the open court; the inspired ones are seeking the roads which may lead out from hazy, unproven cloud-land into the brightness of the everyday, practical life which the world must have experience of, along all lines, among all classes, high and low, ignorant and learned, ere it can dislodge the incubus of superstition, and undevelopment under which it has staggered along, through devious ways of despair and unbelief, to awaken at last to a realization of the final destiny of humanity.

To the average mind the far-off, unascertained and dim, is what is most attractive. Sending missionaries to the so-called "heathen," or speculating upon the social conditions of people supposed to be living on other planets, is of vital interest to their soaring minds. Any amount of money and good red blood of humanity, if need be, are not too large a price to pay for the gratification of these projects of unsatisfied mentality. The vast body politic, the struggling, seething masses of humanity grope and dig along their appointed ways, and the progress of the entire race of man toward an enlightened homogeneity is at a seeming stand-still. The homogeneity of the whole race in its absolute entirety, is the key-note of the life which is to be here, on this mortal earth, and thus every experience of individuals or of nations becomes of vast importance.

Every event, small or great, that serves to illustrate the possibility of fellowship, and brotherhood among the children of men, is a milestone on the way to this recognition of the homogeneity of the human race. In obedience to this law, this demand of the evolutionary forces our brave sons, and lovely daughters, are, all unconsciously to themselves, following the beckoning hand of noblest progress toward peace, and mutuality, and are allying themselves with the representatives of races and peoples hitherto considered foreign and unrelated to us, in all ways save the commercial. What bonds shall ever be forged between the nations of the earth that can supersede such ties of love and fealty to family and home?

The external aspects of these alliances, though yielding honors, and coveted opportunities, are of the smaller importance compared with the amazing factors of peace and amity between the nations that are silently and certainly working themselves out toward the beautiful exemplification of the universal Fatherhood of God, the inextinguishable sentiment of the final unity of his earthly children.

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One of the strangest phases of human life here is the almost universal resistance to improvement. But this conservative attitude is also a balance, prevents running off on tangents.

OF GOD.

It has been popularly reported that science has driven God out of the world. Science has refuted ignorant beliefs, driven superstition out of the minds of people, and opened many minds to the great facts of life as against the silly beliefs of primitive peoples. It is thought by many that the history of all God's doings is writ in the Holy (?) Book--the Bible. From the study of his character, one might fancy that "Great Jove of Mount High Olympus" was come again with only his name changed from Jove to Jehovah, for He brought with him all the "high days," and ceremonies, and every vice and delinquency, and outrage that had marked pagan rule. He gave special directions as to the killings-off of the Hitites, and the Jebusites and all the other ites. There weren't to be any Ites or any other "furriners" left alive to pester his chosen people. He went right on giving directions as to how these people were to be disposed of, making such awful suggestions, specially as to the women, that if He had not been known to be God, He might have been recognized as the Head-up Devil. It has been written: "By their fruits ye shall know them." What are the results, the "fruits," of the Jehovian dispensation? They are just exactly such as must naturally follow the teachings and influences of the spirit of hate and vengeance; the suppression of reason, holding back the progress of the race, fettering the brains of men with bonds of ignorance and superstition, a network of lies and myths. Through the dominance of selfishness and greed, the boasted freedom of men has been lost--they are slaves to a man-made religion. So science has served the highest interest of humanity in doing all it can to drive out this sort of a God, with his hell and eternal punishment, from the world. The reasoning, thinking world has outgrown such a wicked, despotic God, and is demanding quite another sort of Deity. Humanity has to be taught what it must have to equip it for its higher, nobler destiny. Justice to all in equal measure; Reason and Love must abide and work out their results, their "fruits," in human lives. The unanimous refusal of the framers of the "Constitution" of the United States to set forth therein the will of God, and his commands was wise and farseeing. It has raised up a barrier against the encroachments of every form of popular religion and has given a semblance to freedom of thought and speech.

All along the way, seers and prophets--inspired mediums--have wrought and sung of the days to come when all the earth should rejoice in peace and good will. The magnificence of their inspired and inspiring words, their immortal melodies of praise of the Creator will stand while this world lasts. The fact that his people had diviner instincts than had He whom they worshipped as God, showed that "Yahweh" was only the guardian spirit of the great and wonderful Hebrew race.

The greatest discovery of the past century, far greater than any revelation of science or knowledge of past ages, revealed by modern research is the discovery of a God of Love. Not of that sentimental expression of maudlin emotion that soon evaporates in hypocritical make-believe; but the profound recognition of the rightful consideration of every human being, regardless of race, color or belongings.

OF JESUS.

The knowledge we have gained through the study and research of earnest, truth-seeking souls who have found that all known religions have a common root--have the same basis of truth--is a proof of the value of the revelations given to the world through the teachings of our Christ.

From no other have we been given, in an externalized, practical form, those great, eternal religious principles which must forever stand as the rule and guide of human souls. No ancient philosopher had evolved to a God-likeness that enabled him to go beyond a high stand-point of moral perfection, or to give to his disciples what was most needed by the world for its comforting in the accumulating, expanding experiences incident to earthly life.

Jesus, our Christ, the Christ of the religion named for him was the transmitter of heavenly truths. To him the world owes forever a debt for making known a knowledge of the fact of the continued existence of the individual being after physical death, and it was given to him to point out the way of life that can alone lead to eternal happiness and peace. He is our Teacher, our Leader above all others. We have nothing to do with the impossible, faked-up personality that the priests have so long exploited as the "blood Redeemer" of the world; it is to the inspired philanthropist, the greatly-loving man that we owe our allegiance. This will appear more and more as time goes on, and a lot of untruths will fade out and give place to great realities.

THE GODS.

The pagan gods were innumerable and their distinctive attributes were understood. They well might be, as they were only deified men and women. The next unfoldment caused them to raise altars to "the unknown God." Then came Jesus, the Nazarene, who told them that the "unknown God" was their Heavenly Father, not of a chosen people only, but of all the human race. The new religion, inspired by Jesus--our Christ--and which was to bear his name, naturally brought with it all the superstitions of the pagans, and these have been handed down through the ages, and accepted and believed as true.

The primitive conception of a god was of a being with qualities like their own, and as men delighted in rapine and every possible accompanying vice and crime, so they endowed their gods in like manner, fashioning beings to be feared and to whom must be given big offerings and sacrifices. So long as these were limited to beasts it was a good thing, because the priests who ate the flesh thus consecrated were sure of cheap meat for a long time thereafter. But when the "firstlings of the flock" failed to bring satisfactory responses to the demands of the suppliants, they began sacrificing human lives in the vain hope of allaying the anger and vengeance of the dissatisfied all-powerful gods, and beautiful young maidens were thrust into the fiery jaws of Moloch, or crushed in the coils of sacred serpents, or slain upon altars according to the special god whose propitiation was sought.

From all these inhuman practices to a recognition of a God of love and mercy was a step so long that even yet there remain in the teachings of religionists indications of similar ideas, wherein not only nature's culminating efforts, but all the painful experiences of human beings are accepted and feared as expressions of the "wrath of God."

KNOWLEDGE OF OCCULT LAW.

The invitation of one of old to his followers, and fellow believers: "Come let us reason together," marks the dividing line between knowledge and superstition. The daring of the mind of man proves him to be, in very truth, "a child of God." No arcana of knowledge are too deeply hid in mystery to escape the prying of his curiosity, his longing for enlightenment, his long-sustained and vigorous efforts to surprise the hidden things of God and Nature. Livingston and Stanley wrought in the jungles of Africa, Audubon and Agassiz in the fastnesses of tropical America. These in the material world, the world of effects. Gessner and Varley, Darwin and Spencer, together with a long list of other inspired minds, have given their best thoughts, devoted their noblest energies to the explorations of the world of causes, the occult and invisible realms of pure principles in God and Nature. Back of all these there lies the richest bequest ever made to humanity in the discoveries and revelations of the most ancient "adepts," the fathers of mystical lore, in the light of modern discoveries and inventions, mystical no longer; but practical and full of earnest meaning in their adaptation and adjustment to the needs and wants of the citizens of the world today.

EVANESCENCE OF MERE BELIEFS.

Proclaim not mere beliefs today, and be not labelled and pigeon-holed and held to account on any special line of thought or action lest the individual soul be barred out from a conception and knowledge of some far grander truth. At best our view is narrow and contracted, else were we gods, and as we grow we discover our little, vaunted beliefs to be but as tiny shreds of color in God's great mosaic, our song of triumph and discovery but as the buzzing of the insect to the chorals of the chanting hosts of heaven. So, then, an eternal negation is the safest attitude of the unfolding soul. Mere beliefs, unproven by facts, are so many barriers set up for the soul to overleap and leave behind on its onward march.

THE FOUNT OF INSPIRATION FOR ALL.

"The righteous shall inherit the earth." Just so far as we are able to prove our rightness, the world--nay the whole universe of God--is ours. Our Heavenly Father has never said: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther, upon the road to knowledge." Everything invites us; get wisdom, get understanding, and to thy knowledge add virtue are the recommendations from inspired sources, and to the soul that fears not, revelations upon every line stand invitingly open.

MAN VERSUS DEATH.

In all the domain of organized being, it is only man, who, in his crude egotisms, and defiant resistance to nature's laws, makes ado with death. The dainty denizen of the air, and the things that creep over the earth, the leviathan in his nature element, and his warmer-blooded brother whose passage causes the earth to tremble beneath his tread, all the multitudinous expressions of the animal kingdom, that disport themselves in fur, or feather, in filament of scales, or covering of hair, each and all recognize the approach of their final experience on earth, and hie themselves to their appointed coverts, to keep their tryst with their old mother in utter privacy. How well she loves her children! She sheds over them her varied mantle of leaf, and piney bloom, or scented brake, and soothes them with softly falling rain, or tender dew, and woos their elements back into her bosom from which they sprang. All this is in consonance with nature's arrangement for caring for her own. There is no such thing known among these as a vulgar display, or a flaunting of the deposed forces in the faces of the creatures left behind.

In man's treatment of his kind, there is everywhere betokened his unfaith and fear. His undeveloped spirituality leaves him without even so much power to adjust himself to the divine order of progress, by way of the gates of death--rebirth--as have his humble progenitors, his representatives in the animal kingdom; and so he plants himself upon his fancied prerogatives, and turns his dulled senses away from the God-call: "Come up higher," and moans and raves, and howls his despair in sounds and terms indicative of his tribal, or racial environment and relationship.

A voice of love has sounded down throughout the ages in unmistakable terms to the children of men. "My father has many mansions, invisible to your seared, earthly vision, but beautifully furnished forth for all your needs; nor hath eye seen or ear of yours heard the wonderfulness of the great preparation He hath made to receive you into his kingdom." And seer and sage have reiterated this in unmistakable language, and the enlightened of the older races have caught the straying tones of the vibrant air of the beyond, and have beheld the mirage of the homes of the blest, and have sought to impress the truth of the living reality of the beyond upon the inchoate brains of their fellows. But superstition rears its grizzled front alike in seats of learning, in the homes of the cultured, and in the hovels of the outcasts; in this sense, all the human family are of hellish kin, and in a large percentage of them their whole lives are given over to their effort of resistance to the divine ordering which speaks ever to the soul of man in unmistakable terms of tender consideration, saying: "Thy poor days here are full of pain and sorrow, because of necessary crudities. So live that when thy summons comes to join the everlasting cavalcade which sweeps across the world, thou shalt apprehend thy high emprise, and go forth exultingly to claim thine own meed of further existence in spheres yet undiscovered to thy longing ken."

"Earth loses thy pattern forever and aye" that thou mayst be renewed and set up in the finer mould of thy most excellent Karma, which is thy hidden reality of character. Rejoice then, O mortal! in the beneficence of nature and of thy Parents, God, for surely it is well that they call a halt for thee and thine beside the river of death, and loosen thy burthens of pain and heart-breaking sorrow, and let loose from thy soul that raven, "Never more," which has preyed long upon thy soul and held thee in the grip of unspoken despair and anguish. This is of all demons the blackest and most subtle. In tones of love it has been proclaimed by the divine mind that nought is ever taken away that shall not be restored to thee. Not as thou, in thy small, limited way, wouldst hold it back from its own high place, and mission in the universe and bend it to thy purpose; but according to the wisdom of its Creator and thine, shalt thou see and know and claim all that belongs to thee, be it the inspiration of thy nature, unexpressed here amid the din and rush of this chaotic existence; or power to carry forth thy grandly bold designs in conjunction with nature's illimitable chemistry; or to perfect within thy mind a knowledge of her laws; or to fold to thy bereaved heart thy lover, friend, or child, so lost to thee now in the great unexplored silences, that thou wilt not even try to see their way of life, but art ever persistent in saying they are dead. Whatever thy soul shalt cherish as highest and best good to be longed for, that shall be given to thee, in its new and resurrected form, over which has passed the chrism of the immortal and everlasting life. We need a new perception of that great law of the "survival of the fittest." Who are the "fit"? The nomadic tramp who yields no meed of use to his fellows? The willfully sin-sodden who poisons all his surrounding atmosphere with the noxious exhalations from his decaying organism? He who hoards and locks away from his fellows his treasures of gold or precious knowledge, and he, who having in his hands the powers of wealth and influence, never deigns to stretch forth his hand to relieve the cruel stress of the needy or to protect the helpless, or to sustain and strengthen the weaker ones of earth?

Nay! The true "survival" is not here on this underdone sphere, but outside, beyond, above, in the realms of the spiritual where our burdens are loosed and the souls of men are set free, and true liberty is accorded to each and everyone to be, and to do, all that in him lies toward the upbuilding of the great sum of the soul life we call God.

Once this perception of the soul and even some slight degree of knowledge concerning the laws which hold over the destiny of each individual being becomes, through a familiarity with phenomena now everywhere common, understood and accepted, the entire life on this planet will be changed, elevated and happified. Fancy living day after day under the bondage of the fear and dread of what everyone knows to be as inevitable as is the experience of each, of physical dissolution; and yet multitudes of people do so live. It is debasing, and disennobling in every way. It robs the soul of all its natural dignity and sends it through the world orphaned, and mourning, where it might and should recognize its divine relationship, and rejoice in its unfolding powers; and so you who may be giving a moment to the reading of this brief testimony to the great truth of immortality, consider, and realize thy divine paternity and demand what is, and has always been thine own by right of interblending of thy own inner nature with that of thy soul's origin, the heart of Him who hath made us.

The bond is eternal and indestructible. God in all humanity and we in Him, and the sooner we see this and yield ourselves in obedience, not like "dumb driven cattle" but as self-respecting, self-asserting mortals--within the law of accord with the highest--the sooner shall we enter into that "Nirvana" which is "peace."

FEAR OF DEATH.

In the childhood of the race, the time of its exclusively animal life, it was necessary for its protection that there should exist in the slowly unfolding human mind a great, overwhelming terror of death. In fact at that time indifference to death would have involved the entire race of man in utter extinction. From that time have come down to us superstitions and fears which, while acting still in the minds of the ignorant as a preservative of human life even under most terrible conditions, have at the same time shrouded countless numbers of good and useful lives with gloom, overshadowing them with a horror from which they could not escape. It has been less the actual fear of death, but of what might be in store for them after they should have passed through this experience which is so inevitable to us all. Jesus prophesied of a time to come wherein death should lose its sting, and thus be swallowed up in the victory of the spirit over matter.

The enjoyment of this life demands that, right here and now, we should begin to know and understand how we are to establish our individual relationship to the invisible, the real world--the world of causes, the world of law--so as to bring to us a sufficient knowledge of the hidden mysteries of the future life to give us some certain grounds for faith in the unseen. This can only be accomplished by the development of our own occult powers, or by learning of the psychic experiences of others which serve to point the way to what we may come to know for ourselves.

It is all one, here, hereafter, anywhere. Caught in the web of life, there is no escape from its demands upon the individual soul. Somewhere along the way it has to decide its own fate. Upward and onward, or down into the purlieus of the crude beginnings of things. It is free to make its choice. It can pursue the hard and toilsome path of earning its right to eternal happiness, or it can flop around through all the hells of life unrelated to God, and resistant to the Christ.

It is the fear of death, of physical dissolution, that is to be individually conquered. This can only come as a result of a perception of spiritual law, and the unfoldment of the spiritual nature.

The fear of death, of what may lie beyond, has been nature's safeguard against a universal stampede out of this life when the miseries of existence on this earthly plane become too dreadful to be borne; when the tortures of the soul in the tortured body drives out all reason and all philosophy, and the consciousness senses only the demand for surcease of agony. But when the "golden bowl" is broken--the silver cord of human life is severed--by suicide--nothing has been gained by a changed environment. There are the same responsibilities and soul needs, and the miseries and unsatisfied desires of their minds are exactly the same. Nothing has been gained, but much has been lost. Brave, staunch souls one by one obey the call to march over the "border land" into nature's invisible realms; they cannot help themselves, no one can. On they go, an endless caravan into the land of revelations, the place of reviews, where the utterly selfish are fetched up with a "round turn," and made to realize that a real godliness is the only thing that can "pass muster," that mere beliefs do not count, and only character tells. How swiftly, how inevitably their places are filled; nothing stops; prince or peasant, it is all one; the will of the gods--the guardians of this planet, is being fulfilled. Life here is just one link in the endless, unbreakable chain of individual existence.

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Most fortunate is the soul that is started out to make the journey of life without being handicapped by some narrowing religious superstition or an intellectual bias that limits the mind, preventing all unfoldment of originality.

TEST OF CHARACTER.

Sooner or later everyone who has character enough to make any sort of a test worth while, has to have a regular bout with his "evil genius." Christ said: "The devil hath desired thee that he may sift thee as wheat." The form which the test takes depends entirely upon the organization of the individual. But it is in every case the same thing. The thorough arousal of the latent powers of the nature, and the suffering which ensues from the results of its unbalanced actions, constitute the discipline of this life. We can no more escape it, or subvert the action of this law of evolution than we can put a stop to any of the upheavals of nature. The volcano and the earthquake are but the expressions of power in the globe which we inhabit to throw off her old, and ascend through violent agitation to higher conditions. There is a natural correspondence in the experience of her inhabitants and that of our old, old mother!

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Back of protoplasm, back of organic human form is the soul--a thought of God, a spark of divine, eternal life; imperishable, immutable as God himself.

CHARACTER FORMING.

All animals, the human creature included, are born blind and this physical condition of man absolutely typifies his life-long state, owing either to his environment, his heredity, or his false education. The great mass of humanity come into the world unmarked by any specially-developed individuality. These are the legitimate prey of priests and teachers who have their place, or use in the evolution of the lower grades of life on this planet.

The smaller number of advanced souls that are "cast upon the shoals of time," the evolved thinkers, the philosophers have by far the more trying, and difficult life; for the highly individualized man or woman cannot belong to any set school of ethics; there are no fixed landmarks, religious or otherwise. Blinded by inherited prejudices, if not by destructive tendencies, with ideals for which there is no seeming avenue in this commonplace, workaday world; the life of such an one is ever a grope toward the light of truth.

Lacking the sagacity, the primal instinct of self-protection in common with the nature children of the wilds, he plunges forward on his unlit way, and has many a fall into the bogs and morasses of life until he finally sees that only from the higher, the spiritual side of existence can come to humanity redemption from the errors, wrong thinking and action that is the cause of all sin and sorrow of the world. Blessed, indeed, are those to whom this understanding comes in time to harmonize conflicting beliefs and tendencies, and to be the means of rounding out the life, and perfecting that most potent and powerful of all things, a noble human character.

MAN THE FINAL EARTH PRODUCT.

In man Nature has reached her highest evolution. His life and being are the topmost rung of the ladder, but she has not finished with him. It is universally believed that physical death severs everlastingly her dominion over him, and thus ends all her service to him. This is by no means true. Man is her offspring, her child, and to her he returns again and again, drawing from her complex, multitudinous, many-chambered heart such forces as shall bring to him the experiences he requires to further unfold his nature and bring forth all his possibilities.

Not man alone but the planet itself is in the mills of the gods. The seeds, the germs of life that were expressed in such ways in the beginnings of life on this world, still exist in a greatly modified degree and the misunderstood phases of nature's ministry are the results of the out-working of these primitive elements still inhering in the world-stuff of which human bodies are made.

Nature wields her powers of fire and flood and devastating epidemics mercilessly; she constantly rids herself of her superfluous offspring, and forces them to a new environment in her invisible realms, through which they pass, gaining more or less by the experience and from which each must emerge, and continue to evolve and grow according to the law of his own being.

SUPERSTITIONS.

Fear of the unknown has given birth to all the superstitions that have afflicted the minds of ignorant and unthinking people. Few people escape some form of superstition. For instance, the silly sayings, anent the moon, "Fair Priestess of the Night." It is unlucky to see it in its newness--so and so--when the real fact is, it is a merciful Providence that permits us to see it in any of its phases, over the left shoulder or over the right, or through the glass, or in any way at all. There is nothing more "lucky" or glorious than to have good eyesight of one's own, with which to behold this and all the other beauties of nature. The man who chanced to be passing under a ladder just at the moment when a workman half-way up let fall a bucket of paint which struck and deluged him, had some reason for thinking it "unlucky" to go under instead of around such an impediment to travel. But not once in a lifetime would such a thing happen to any one, and it is impossible to imagine what going under ladders or meeting loads of barrels, or funerals, or opening umbrellas in the house, instead of outside of it, or any of the hundreds of silly, puerile, fool superstitions that have sprung from no one knows where, and that have no scientific meaning, and no earthly bearing upon the realities of any life have "to do with the case." These are all the offsprings of minds tinctured by fear of they know not what, and which are peddled around and handed down religiously from one generation to another, to keep alive a sensationalism whose tendency is to blind those who accept them to the great living fact of God's providence which is and has ever been ruling the lives of his earthly children.

SELF-JUSTICE.

While self-abnegation is a valued experience in the spiritual discipline which goes to the formation of a perfect character, the reaction where the ego posits itself upon the law of justice to self, is in reality the beginning of salvation to the individual. But preachment from any source cannot avail with any soul deeply immersed in work for others. There is too much in array against it. The established heredity concerning the first duty of woman is of itself alone a formidable influence to be overcome; then either the real needs, or the selfishness of others, present obstacles beyond the power of loving, sensitive souls to resist. The change must come from the consciousness of the individual of her own needs along these lines, which alone can arouse one to sufficient will, and purpose to be true to one's self if the heavens fall. This is first, and above all other considerations.

SYMBOLISM.

A crude and inartistic symbolism is revolting to a spiritually-unfolded consciousness. True mystic symbolisms must observe accurately the finer law of correspondences or they fail to appeal to such as these, and become to the occult a mild form of blasphemy.

LOVE.

No phase of human character--of mental or spiritual philosophy--has engrossed so much attention or received such a variety of treatment as has human love. Nearly everyone who thinks at all, has been brought, at some stage of experience, to an attempt at analyzing the emotional, sentimental nature, asking: "What is Love?"

In contradistinction to that which repels, and disintegrates, it is attraction. Love is God, it draws elements together, and holds them in proper spheres. It centralizes and builds up. It is controlled by fixed laws; it is only "blind" to those who have not investigated its nature, and office unshrinkingly, with an eye to a complete understanding of its true function. Devoted humanitarians have shown us how to feed, exercise, and rest the physical system, in order to produce health. Ministers of the Gospel have taught souls the way of life ever-lasting. Professors of the various sciences and arts, useful and ornamental, have instructed the intellects of men, and now and then a woman; but with all these, the affections--the crowning--rather the integral element of all life and being, have had few, or no exponents who have ever attempted to treat them from any basis which can be called philosophical, or which could ever serve as a guide to one uninitiated in their occult phases.

The ordinary expression of this part of the nature, is a vampyrism which is constantly on the alert to see what, and how much it can gobble up for its own delectation. This is the lowest grade. It begins with the selfism of the individual, its manifestations are named lust. It seeks expression through the sensuous nature, but extends to the spirit and will.

O Love! What crimes are committed in thy name! What laying waste of true and tender hearts, what defacing of sweet bodies, fashioned and set up as temples of the spirit!

This vampyrism extends through every department of the affectional nature. It exists not only among men and women recognized as lovers, married or otherwise, but parents are ghouls to their children, and friends devour each other without stint. Attraction is that law which draws together two opposite elements or forces, positive and negative, or male and female. As the nature and attributes of a human being are multiform, so are the attractions, or loves, numerous. Ignorance of the laws which ought to control and adjust these loves, is the prime cause of all the misery and crime with which the earth is flooded. Two people of the opposite sex are attracted through the intellect on this plane, and realizing the limit of the law which draws them together, they could be admiring friends forever; but ignorant of their needs outside of this, they attempt to force a conjugal relationship which too often ends in dislike. Every grade of lust and love finds representation in the so-called marriage relation, as it stands today. Intellects and spirits without any bodies--worth mentioning--and gross mortal remains unvitalized by souls. The former class ignore the claims of the physical, and gather their robes together sanctimoniously indicating: "Avaunt, lest my purity be contaminated"; while the latter laugh their spiritual pride and fastidiousness to scorn. The war goes on between good and evil, whereas there is really no just ground for difference. All that is needed for the attainment of harmony and peace is a wise adjustment of these forces in individuals and in society.

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The growth of all true character must be slow and gradual. It is not enough that the soul perceives the beauty of a grand, moral life, it must also learn to live it humbly, earnestly and truly.

"IDEALS OF LOVE."

"Greater love hath no man than that he shall give his life for another," whether the scene be set upon the mimic stage, or on the broad theatre of the world. Heroic rescues, desperate efforts to save endangered lives, care of the battle-wounded or fatally diseased meet, from great and small, brutal and cultivated, deserved recognition, even to the extent of making the individual actors--so favored by the gods--famous, throughout the world.

The patient service of men and women to their families, of children to their parents, or of friends who rejoice in serving, that goes on all around us conforms so entirely with our established ideals of what is right and becoming, that it is unnoticed and wins no applause, but oftener only calls out from the recipient demands for further sacrifice.

In all such related service the real blessing comes to those who give far more than to those who receive. The operation of this law hallows all the relationships of this life, and must finally yield to the unselfish giver undreamed of compensations. Not here, perhaps, but in that sphere of being where love is indeed the fulfilling of the law, shall the patient givers, those who have served at love's altars, find themselves closely allied to the immortal ones, "who do his pleasure."

Love, garlanded, and adorned with all that wealth can bestow, enthroned in seats of honor, and social recognition is accepted as our ideal of what love should claim, and win from life; but I have looked into the faces of humble, patient toilers, and there I have seen that the sustaining influence with them was love, and have marvelled greatly over the compelling power of their ideals of love.

Remembering that foundations of love upon this earthly planet were, of necessity, laid in the selfish instincts of the race--a race as yet so undeveloped in all that "makes for righteousness"--we need not despair of the final outcome, and realization of its high behest to the children of men; for no expression of love, however mean in view of our own exalted ideals, but is, in reality, an effort towards something higher and better. The obdurate and selfish are unfolded, and taught by its painful misunderstandings, and awful tragedies.

Those poor souls who expect everything from this life, whose ideals are bounded by their own selfishness, who have never discovered that God is Love, and that only through love, purified, exalted and idealized can any of his earthly children ever reach to any conscious relationship with our Father in Heaven, and who, failing to realize even their low ideals, pass on from one experience to another vainly searching for the realization of what their dimly perceived intuitions of love constantly assure them should be theirs--for even such as these there must be a final redemption; for, like one of old, they have "loved much," and the sins of a vast ignorance are at last condoned by God's all pervading, untiring, illimitable law of love.

O ye! who labor for humanity's uplifting; O weary workers in the homely ways of the unskilled in every relationship of life, unrecognized by your fellows be ye of good cheer! As the circling waves of a calm lake spread wider, and more widely from a center disturbed by some heavy substance, so shall your least word, or thought of pure, unselfish love, from your overburdened lives, reach out and diffuse an influence throughout the universe of God, and become a part of the life immortal!

Love, and love alone creates the desire for immortality, lifts up and renews the oft fainting faith, the faltering, changeful hope, and perpetuates the expectations of the restoration of beloved companions, the reunion of families, and friends. It inspires the spirit, and seals the brokenhearted to the service of "ideal love." It leads the human soul onward, and upward, until it triumphs, at last, over this life's defeats and losses, and its manifold despairs.

Undeterred by the alarms of war, the wails of the diseased and famine-cursed, and the violent protests of the oppressed, and misery-steeped unfortunates of this plane of being, the "Prince of Peace" is calling together his scattered forces. The beacon lights shine along the high places where dwell the exalted, and powerful ones of earth, and glimmer faintly from the lowlands, where the dire enemies of mankind--ignorance and superstition--are, at last, learning that God, the true God, loves, and cannot hate.

The "ground-swell" of the "ideal love" cannot be resisted, nor overborne by any competing power in the universe, and with ever-increasing force and power to conquer all of earth's conditions of unrest, and dissatisfaction, born of false ideals, it will sweep resistlessly on, until it is merged in God. The recognition of the homogeneity of the race, and the "Fatherhood of God," shall bring the longed for fulfillment of the ancient prophecy of "Peace on Earth, and good will to Man."

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The priests endowed the gods with vices which they knew to be popular among their rich and powerful patrons.

THE NEEDS OF WOMAN.

Women need any and all disciplines which teach them self-justice. There are many noble and good women who allow their whole lives to be picked away from them by demands upon their time and strength which come to them under the guise of duties. Viewed from a higher standpoint, they are not duties, in that they conflict with the great underlying principle of self-justice. This is the pivotal idea of a true religion; for it is impossible to be true, to be just to others save as we are so to ourselves, and while no character can be perfected, except through the fiery ordeal of an entire self-abnegation, there is a higher, and a holier life in store for those who have the strength, and the courage to plant their feet upon this God-given and eternal law of justice to self.

It is comparatively easy to gird one's self for the conflict which is apparent, nearly all women souls are equal to that heroism; but it is in the daily round of the household, in relation to the church, and to society, or to the professions where women need to watch most jealously the weakness of self-sacrifice. Women have had the beauty of "unselfishness," and "amiability" dinned into their ears for so long that there is no depth of degradation, or of abnegation of true womanhood to which they will not descend for the sake of being so considered by those whose interest it is to keep them where they virtually endorse the vices of others by their own lack of self-justice. While we must grope along until we understand the wickedness of this, and until we outgrow that weakness, let us be ready for, and equal to the hour which shall give us the laurels of the victor. And why not laurels? Has it not been uttered by the mouth of inspired prophecy that the "last shall be first," and that "the stone rejected by the builders shall yet be the head of the corner?" It rests with us, individually, to represent that truthfulness, and faithful adherence to the justice due to womanhood which shall yet crown her with rejoicing.