Well, madam, I am happy to say that I consider the = chapters very much improved indeed. The whole rel will of course require to be re-written; but once faiarize yourself with the right key, and you are safe. Let take the introduction, where I find most to object to — he style, that is. As for the scene, it will do; in fact, ather like it. You open with a young fellow a ruined andthrift, playing, so to speak, with the idea of suicide. u have described his state of mind very powerfully - too werfully. Truth is truth, but not always amusing, and ar aim should be to amuse. Your description is too long d too serious, madam. Consider the impatient temperaent of the modern reader, and abridge. Now look at ur opening page, beginning, 'It was the first of June,' , but which I should propose to re-write thus." And Everard began to read aloud from the MS. before m: 1 | 6 | 70, No. 19, Duke Street. Scene First or chambers handsomely furnished. Time 5 o'clock. rtain rises and discloses Tom'". "But I am not writing a play or a letter," objected the dy, half laughing. Mrs. Tandem Smith was making a wry face. "Well, Mr. Everard," she rejoined; "they say you understand these things. Frankly, the style you recommend I neither like nor approve, but I am afraid - I mean, I hope I shall easily acquire it." 66 You will find it a very useful exercise sometimes to take passages from the serious romance writers of past generations and translate them into flippant, modern-novel English. Thus - here is a description which would hang heavy nowadays: A western wind roared round the hall, driving wild clouds and stormy rain up from the remote ocean. All was tempest without the lattices-all deep peace within. She sat at the window watching the rack in heaven, the mist on earth; listening to certain notes of the gale that plained like restless spirits notes which, had she not been so young, so gay, so healthy, would have swept her trembling nerves like some anticipatory dirge; in this, her prime of existence and bloom, they but subdued vivacity to pensiveness.' "This would run better in a bantering veinthus : 'The brave northwester is dancing round the hall, polking with the rain for a partner. All the racket is outside "That is the very reason, madam. Patience, I beg. Curtain rises and discloses Tom, sunk in a reverie and arm-chair. "What shall I do? Shall I brave it out ad go to meet Bella in the park? Shall I take the mail ad bolt to Boulogne, or shall I pitch myself over Water-inside we are mum. I sit perched at the window, staro Bridge into the river?" "What's up?' mutters the reader. Very little, it is be feared, oh, my friends! As for Tom, he, his funds. nd in consequence his spirits, have sunk so low that he is eady to toss up with his last shilling whether or not he hall arise and commit himself, his debts, his misfortunes, and iniquities to old Father Thames, his arms.'' But that is burlesque," she exclaimed in dismay. "And why not?" rejoined Everard; "in burlesque here is safety. Always laugh at yourself first, is a good ule. Thus you get the start of the critical reader, and it s not worth his while to laugh at you." "But surely flippancy, in the particular situation, is out of place." "Of course your point of view is the loftier of the two - sublime, indeed. I don't deny it." "But there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous," said she with a smile. "And it is perhaps the most important characteristic of our age to have suppressed that step. Let us pass on. By the way, I notice that you never make topical allusions. You should mention the Duke of Edinburgh's wedding, the Czar, the Ashantees. It lights up the novel and brings it home to the reader." "But such nine days' wonders are over on the tenth, and these very allusions will then give my book as old-fashioned an air as an old photograph taken in the days of crinoline." No doubt, madam, that is true in the main, and applies to those who write for posterity. But as an empiric — a teacher of success, the results I labor to produce must be tangible and immediate. For these you will do well to recollect your previous disappointing experiences, and consent to be guided by me. the "We come now to a passage I highly commend. proposal in the railway carriage. But I think in the treatment there is room for improvement still. I would suggest that you make Hilda in this trying and exciting hour take note of as many trivial and prosaic little circumstances as possible. Put down that it was a first-class compartment, but second rate as usual. Mention the foot-warmer, miscalled, because it was stone cold, and that somebody had scratched Orlando Perkins on the window-pane with a diamond. They now approach a station; and here a gentleman, the sole companion of Hilda and Tom, jumps out, long before the train stops. Why will gentlemen always jump out before the train stops? Hilda is now tête-à-tête with her admirer. She loses her ticket. None of the rights of men so desirable as waistcoat-pockets. Tom gropes under the seat and picks it up. In doing so, he finds himself for a moment on his knees before Hilda, ing at this spectacle of confusion worse confounded — listening to the screeching of the gale that howls like a hundred cats at midnight. Were I an old maid, this must have sunk my spirits to zero at once. As it is, they only fall to temperate.' "Or take an old-fashioned declaration of love: Will you not give me this hand to guide me again into the paradise of my youth? Violante, it is in vain to wrestle with my self-to doubt, to reason, to be wisely fearful. I love I love you! I trust again in virtue and faith; I place my fate in your keeping.' "Which, for the matter-of-fact spirit of the age, you might render thus: I want to know if you won't take me in hand, dear? I've done my best to put you out of my head; but it's no earthly use none. I'm fond of you, Vio, and then the world does n't seem half such a wretched hole to me after all. It will be rather too hard lines if you send me away now.'" Mrs. Tandem Smith sighed, but promised attention and strict obedience to all directions. After a few words of encouragement on the one side, and acknowledgment on the other, she took leave, Everard himself escorting her to the door. When he returned I, supposing his morning's work to be over, was about to show myself, when the servant reappeared, saying, "Sir, Mr. Lamarionette waits." - "Still they come!" I uttered from my retreat; and Everard turned to receive the new arrival, a young gentleman whose errand I guessed at a glance he had such poetical hair, and a lofty, happy confidence which I could only envy. "Glad to see you, Mr. Lamarionette," said Everard, accosting him affably; "and pray, sir, how goes the wicked world with you?" "Well, sir. You have read my Romanesques,' and 'Chansons Watteau,'" he replied, with an airy gesture; "you ought to be able to tell me." "I told you before, sir, on the occasion of your last visit, that I thought your Romanesques' and Chansons Watteau' rather dry and brusque, and feared they would not take." "Take!" he repeated, in disgust. "And to be frank with you, sir, the leading impression they left on me was that yours is scarcely a poetical brain. Now I wonder what put it into your head to be a poet?" "Come, come, sir; can you deny that in the poetry of the period all the old conventional rules and trammels are frequently broken through? The diction is permitted to be colloquial, boldly prosaic, even rude and disjointed at times; soft language and melodious metre are utterly discarded, to the economizing of a vast amount of time and trouble." "Ah!" said the Professor, attentively; "so that is the way you go to work is it?" "Well, sometimes I dare say I could dash you off a hundred lines on the spot." "Do," returned Everard; "but not a hundred, please. A dozen will suffice for a sample." "Give me a theme," said he, running his hand through his hair. "Theme, sir; I should have thought anything would do - the table, your umbrella. Stay suppose you take that bee flying about the room." Lamarionette began to write with surprising ease and fluency. Very shortly he was ready with his exercise, and handed it to Everard, who read aloud as follows: TRAIN OF THOUGHT SUGGESTED BY A BEE. What was it went then presto past my ear, And whisked away till lost i' the empty space? Some winged machine. Put case, we call it Bee. Bee, wasp, hornet, or fly-why, where's the odds, All insect aeronauts, come you to that. What is the difference twixt bee and man? Was not our common sire a jelly-fish? So bee's my cousin 1,000,000 times removed. Conditions other, I had been born bee, Bagged, stinged, four-winged, six-legged, etcetera. (The hero of a lay once famous. "What's The jargon?" ask you — I, The jargon's Watts' Watts gives no why or wherefore. Smith, can you?) "And why not?" "Because a crust of eccentricity of this kind, sir, popular though it may have been, or is, would perhaps hardly be safe for you to take your stand upon without some slight foundation of originality and imagination -- a fund of ideas." “I'm half afraid I am not very strong in ideas just now," he remarked, with jocose candor. "Well, well, we must substitute something," said Everard, consolingly. “Adjectives are very useful in that way, and I should like you to study them; for a string of pretty, musical, nonsensical, compound epithets, believe me, have sustained many a poetical reputation when imagination and wit fell short. You will have to change your manner, sir, but, on the whole, save yourself trouble in the end; for here, at least, you may take any substratum however barren -a copy-book text, a doggrel verse- trick it out with forced metaphors, alliteration, archaic forms, and swinging metre, and you will be astonished to find how well it looks and sounds. Here is a sketch that will give you an idea of the style of thing. I have taken the barest framework possiblefour lines of a nursery rhyme, 'Twinkle, little Star.' But see how easily they may be expanded. To begin with, we will give it a fancy title: L'ETOILE DU NORD. The shimmering, shivering, trembling, twinkling starlet white, Full often I mervaille, starlit, in midnightly musings y'lost, Dazed in yon skyey depths, on the ocean of fantasy tossed; And, ah! would that I wist, bright herald, what eke thou mayst be, Thy name would I know and thy nature, and the spell thou art shining on me. Woe is me, thou art far from the watcher set high the well above, And alike unto thee are earth's pain and its pleasaunce, hate and its love, Its vice and its virtue, the slave and the tyrant, the traitor: true, Its laurel and cypress, the lotus and lilies, the roses and rue. "Shall I go on?" "Many thanks," said the poet, "but I think I need trouble you." 66 Well, sir, there you have a study in what I call the decorative style of poetry a highly popular style now days with certain conventional forms that are very ge erally admired; and I know of no style that offers greas facilities for imitation." Yes, yes," said Lamarionette; "it does excellently, dare say, for songs and sonnets and such bagatelles, ba will it help me to my desire? My present ambition, as explained to you at the first, is to attempt a more imper tant work- something of magnitude, something to last." "Exactly; but practise yourself well thus in the shorte pieces, and you will surely find your way to other very similar principles secrets to help you through with longer and serious works. However, in parting, take this from me, as a hint for your grand poem;" and he dre from his pocket a manuscript. "What!" said Lamarionette, somewhat taken aback by its length; "you seem to have written the whole play for me already." 66 Indeed, no sir; this is only a single speech that might occur anywhere in the poem. Take it home, and analyze it well. It is extensive, certainly, as speeches go; but re member, yours was to be a mammoth work, on a scale hitherto unattempted, unique in its proportions; and the name Behemoth, a Mystery."" "But will it not be a great labor?" he objected; "labor is rather uncongenial to me." "I am not surprised at your taking alarm," said the Professor, blandly, "for the science of Poetical Economy, though very simple, has only lately been reduced to method. I advise you to study it. Then, when you read Shakes peare, you will see him a mere abstract, an outline of what he might have been. Don't you understand? Take an illustration; Othello's dying message to the Venetian State-a few familiar lines, most unproductive capital in his hands, but capable of almost infinite multiplication by use of the proper means. Listen: Speak of me as I am, nothing extenuate; Richer than all his tribe-whose foot trod out Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees Set you down this, Enough, enough!" cried Lamarionette, to my inexsible relief." Pray say no more, but give me the s. I perfectly understand. Good morning to you." There," sighed Everard, as the door closed upon him; ou may appear. The last applicant has been disposed Not yet," said I, emerging from my hiding-place. One patient more, and by appointment, too." Everard fell into a brown study. "Yes," he resumed ast, reverting to our former conversation just as if he forgotten the interludes. "It is unfortunate that you =so sensitive, so alive to the blemishes and shortcomings see around you, and you have no despotic hobby to ry you on, blindfold and reckless, across country to ne goal or other. However, you shall have my best ade. You wish, I suppose, for pecuniary success?" Certainly." Then write a pamphlet with a title to catch the mil- How I went abroad on five francs a day.' I demurred, and confessed to more ambitious aims. Ah! you wish for notoriety. Then try personal satire - a libel in any form of fiction you please; but introduce al, well-known men and women, members of the aristoccy if possible, with every detail interesting or uninterting you can rake up; any back-stairs gossip about their rivate lives, habits, residence, dress, manners, virtues, ad vices; only disguising their names, but so flimsily hat there shall not be the slightest difficulty in identifying erybody." I exclaimed in indignation. The scurrilous was most pugnant to me. You are very particular," said Everard, with a twinkle of the eye; "but I was afraid that would hardly suit you. Could you manage a book of American humor? No? Then, frankly, I see but one chance for you yet. Become i critic." "A critic ! " "Yes. Then you can give play to your fastidious taste, free vent to your indignation against the successful undeserving, and derive profit from both. The trouble to a man of education and talent like yourself is fractional, the gratification immense, the pay liberal. Ambition, if you suffer from it, will be fully satisfied. You will help to rule the ruling power, public opinion, with a rod of iron. Nobody can afford to insult or despise you. I will give you a letter of introduction to the gentleman who edits the popular journal, The Asp." "Thanks, no," I replied, hastily. "I have an old-fashioned prejudice against vivisection." "Upon my word, then, my dear fellow, I must give you up," said the Professor. "I can only hope you may shortly come to a better state of mind, and meekly bow to the new glorious principle, the golden rule of the greatest incapacity of the greatest number holding sway, as elsewhere, 80 in the Fine Arts." A sadder and wiser man I left "The Laurels," dismissed as an Incurable by my old friend, the Professor of Success. MODERN SORCERY. HAD some one stood under the crystal dome of the first great Exhibition, and foretold that in a quarter of a century after that inauguration of the millennium of commonsense, England would incur the denunciations of the Hebrew prophets on a land of wizards and necromancers, and of those who "seek after familiar spirits," how merrily should we have laughed the absurd prediction to scorn! Not much more attention should we have paid to it even had we known that just three years before (in 1848), Miss Kate Fox, of Hydesville, State of New York, at the mature age of nine, had received monitions from the spirit world in the form of a hail-storm of raps on the walls and floors of her abode. It seemed, indeed, scarcely more likely that the juvenile "medium" should open a new dispensation for Europe and America, than that her contemporary little visionaries (or naughty little impostors, as the case may be) of La Salette should send half France on pious pilgrimage to the spot where they saw, or did not see, the Virgin. The lesson that great events may spring from small causes, and that the foolish things of the world not seldom confound the wise, is, however, by no means a new one for mankind, and we have now very plainly to reckon with Spiritualism as one of the prominent facts of the age. We will not take upon ourselves to guess how many disciples it may boast in America before these sheets pass to the press; a few millions, more or less, seem to count for little in the statements of its triumphant advocates; but here, in England, there are evidences enough of its flourishing condition. In nearly every company may be met at least one lady or gentleman who looks grave and uncomfortable when the subject is treated with levity; confesses to a conviction that there is "something in it;" and challenges disproof of miracles which she or he has actually beheld, heard, and handled. Not seldom are to be seen persons in a later stage of faith, easily recognizable by wild and vision-seeking eyes, and hands and feet in perpetual nervous agitation, who take no interest in other conversation, but eagerly pour out narratives, arguments, and appeals concerning Spiritualism whenever they can make an opportunity of introducing the subject. Even the pulpit is no longer free from spiritualistic interpretations of religious mysteries; and the periodical press, which long confined itself to such attacks and refutations as those by Lord Amberley in the Fortnightly Review, by an anonymous writer in the New Quarterly Magazine, and by a well-known physiologist in the Quarterly Review (October, 1871), has now opened its columns to two very remarkable papers in its defence, by Dr. Alfred Wallace (Fortnightly Review, May and June, 1874). This double essay, indeed, by the distinguished traveller and fellow-originator with Dr. Darwin of the "Doctrine of Natural Selection," may be justly said to mark an epoch in the progress of the movement, and we can scarcely do wrong in taking it as the first serious challenge to us from competent authority, to give to the marvels of Spiritualism a fair and full investigation. To many readers, indeed, we believe it has not unsuccessfully so appealed; causing them to hesitate as to whether they were justified in holding back any longer from inquiry, even while the process remains to them eminently distasteful. In view of such a dilemma it may be not inopportune to discuss briefly, not the Evidences of Spiritualism, but the preliminary question - Whether we are intellectually or morally bound to examine and weigh those evidences? Spiritualists, to do them justice, very candidly warn us that the task is no trivial one, to be performed in a hurry. They scoff indignantly at the notion that five unsuccessful séances (in one of which Di Vernon appeared as an historical character, and, in another, Socrates with a straight nose and a disinclination to speak Greek) were sufficient to warrant Lord Amberley in pronouncing Spiritualism an imposition; and they bid us admire men who, like Dr. Sexton, are prepared to spend fifteen years in inquiry before the "needful evidence" to convince them is vouchsafed.1 To sift and collate the mass of evidence already produced; to cross-examine the witnesses, and weigh the value of their individual testimony; finally, to institute the requisite actual experiments at séances innumerable, would be to exceed the labors of Hercules, and repeat the weariness of the Tichborne trial. It is not too much to insist that excellent reason should be shown for the devotion of so much time and toil to such an end; nor need we be alarmed at 1 Quarterly Review, May, 1874, p. 651. the adoption by Spiritualists of the tone of high moral indignation against indolent non-inquiries, natural to all persons who think they are advocating some important discovery. Few amongst us who have reached middle life regret that we did not obey the solicitations of early friends to devote the years of our prime to investigations of the "discoveries" of St. John Long, Spurzheim, and Reichenbach, - to testing the therapeutic agencies of tar-water, “tractors," and brandy and salt; or nicely studying the successive solutions triumphantly propounded of the problem of human flight and of perpetual motion. We have borne with tolerable equanimity to be called hasty and prejudiced in these matters; and we may now endure the taunt of Spiritualists that we display indifference to truths possibly indefinitely valuable to the human race. Some limits there must needs be to the duty of inquiring into everything proposed to us as a subject of investigation; and those limits we may perhaps in the present case find in the nature of the subject, the methods of the investigation to be pursued, and the results which follow in the contingency of such inquiries proving successful. The propensity which ethnologists attribute, especially to Turanian races, to seek after intercourse with inferior grades of spiritual existence, or (to give it the old name) the passion for Sorcery, is one which seems to flourish like the olive, the Phoenix of trees. Cut down, or burnt down, in one land or age, it springs up and branches forth afresh in the next; and while the main tendency of human thought seems constantly towards a stricter monotheism, a counter eddy of the current forever fills and re-fills the invisible world with legions of imps, ghosts, and lying spirits, meaner and more puerile than human nature in its basest condition. Fifty years ago such delusions seemed to have ebbed out, and the few writers who dealt with them, spoke of them as things of the past; and assured us that, save in some Tartar tent in the East, or Gypsy one in the West, magic and incantations would be heard no more. The future historian of the England of to-day may truly relate that such incantations were more common in London in 1874 than they were in Palestine when the Witch of Endor deluded Saul; or in Byzantium, when Santabaren restored his long-lost son to the arms of the Emperor Basil the Macedonian. What is the origin of this wide-spread and seemingly ineradicable propensity? Of course the answer which first suggests itself is, that it is the result of a most natural and blameless curiosity to learn the mysteries of that life into which we ourselves expect to pass through the gates of the tomb, and wherein it is our hope that the beloved ones who have left us have already entered. That in some cases this is the real spring of the desire, we will not question. But it is certain that the passion for Sorcery has far other springs beside, and that those who addict themselves to it most completely have neither ardent longings for immortality on their own account, nor common reverence for the dead. The special characteristic of the propensity, and of the practices to which it gives rise, is the absence of all the more delicate sentiments or spiritual aspirations of true human love, or true religion; and the presence, in their stead, of a brutal familiarity and irreverence as regards the dead, and of a gross materialism touching the experiences of communion, divine or human. In this respect superstitious Sacerdotalism and Sorcery have in all ages borne some strong features of resemblance, even while mutually denouncing one another. Each of them disregards really spiritual gifts as needful to qualify Priest or Medium for intercourse with the unseen world; and relies upon rites and incantations, rather than upon such liftings-up of the human soul in longing and prayer, as should draw (if anything might draw) the Divine aid from heaven and human love back from the grave. The Sacerdotalist forgets the truth that, not by the help of ecclesiastical machinery, but by spiritual worship, must the Father of Spirits be approached; and the Spiritualist forgets that not by his machinery of raps and alphabets, but indeed "spiritually," must "spiritual things" (such as immortality), be discerned. It was well said of late by a profound thinker, that "if our belief in a future life could be verified by the senses, heaven would cease to be a part our religion, and become a branch of our geography Spiritualism " is indeed a singular misnomer, or, rather it is a case of lucus a non lucendo, for there is no "spiritual ity" in the system at all. It is materialism, pure and sin ple, applied to a spiritual truth. No one who entertains natural reverence and awe f the dead, can contemplate the practices of spiritualists in their séances without pain and indignation, and only the example of unfeeling mediums and excited friends have prompted many tender natures to sanction or endur them. In the midnight silence and stillness of our chan bers, or in some calm evening solitude of hills and woods, it might be possible to bear the overwhelming emotions awe; the rush of unspeakable tenderness, which mas come upon us with the genuine conviction that the one who was "soul of our soul," has actually returned from the grave, and is near us once more, conveying to us his presence ever in silence would surely do), the ineffable sense of love triumphant over death; and ready to receive from us the passionate assurances of never forgotten regre and affection. Such a meeting of the spirits of the dead and the living would be among all life's solemn and affect ing incidents the most profound and touching; the one which would move us to the very foundations of our being and leave us evermore other men than we had been Nay, we may further conceive that, bending over the dying and speaking to them of the world into which they are about to enter, and where it is at least not impossible they may meet our long lost friend or parent, we might with faltering lips charge them to bear for us to the dead the message of unchanged fidelity. Such as these are forms of communion with the departed which involve no shock to our reverence, no sin against the holiness of buried affection. But what shall we say for the travesty and mockery thereof which goes on at every spiritualistic séance, amid the circumstances with which we are all too well acquainted; and as an alternate evening diversion to music, cards, or tea? In a drawing-room with gas raised or extinguished a score of times to suit the requirements of the medium, amid a circle of pleasantly excited ladies and gentlemen dabbling with alphabets, and slates, and planchettes, and ready to catch up every straw of “evidence" to be published or gossiped about on the morrow; in such a scene as this, and with the aid of a psychagogue, who can scarcely pronounce three commonplace sentences without betraying his ignorance or his vulgarity, we are told that wives ask to communicate with their dead hus bands; parents are made to "feel" a lost child in their arms; and sons listen to words professedly spoken to them by their mother's souls. We do not need to be told that the communications thus made are utterly unworthy of the majesty of death, and are patently calculated rather to convince and entertain the audience by verifiable allusions to names and places, than to convey what-if it were truly the departed soul which had returned - would inevitably be the heartwrung utterances of supreme love. Strange is it indeed that persons not otherwise devoid of tender and reverent feeling, when caught by the passion for this sorcery, permit themselves and the company they may happen to join, to find the entertainment of an evening in practice so revolting. Shall we give to it the name which it deserves, and say that the act of evoking the dead in such a manner, and for such a purpose, is sacrilege? exoner We have spoken of the objects and method of spiritualistic inquiry. Its results even more emphatically ate any man of sound and reverent mind from engaging in the task of its investigation. Dr. Wallace asks us to "look rather at the results produced by the evidence, than to the evidence itself," and we are thankful to accept his challenge. Never, we venture to say, may the principle of judging a tree by its fruits be more fairly applied. The 1 Charles Sumner has just been brought back from the grave, and proves to have very quickly acquired that disregard of adverbs which is common among the weaker brethren in America - and also, perhaps, among American mediums. He is reported to have said: "Oh, my friends, that you would ponder well that sacred injunction from spirit life, Lay up treasures in heaven. You need not be told how to do this, you must act unselfish." nd and obvious result of Spiritualism is to afford us more (real or fictitious) revelation of the state of deted souls, added to those which we possessed before. sus consider it a little carefully, and observe what it lly reveals. The pictures of a future world which men have drawn different lands and ages, all possess at least one claim our interest. They afford us not indeed the faintest lines of that Undiscovered Country beyond the bourne death, but they reveal with unimpeachable, because intentional sincerity, the innermost desires and fears living men. On that "cloud" which receives every parting soul out of our sight, the magic-lantern of fancy sts its bright or gloomy imagery, and we need but watch ephantasms as they pass to know the hidden slides of e brain which produced them. The luscious gardens d Houris anticipated by the Moslem; the eternal repose Nirvana sighed for by the Buddhist; the alternate warre and wassail of Walhalla, for which the Norseman nged as the climax of glory and felicity, convey to us at glance a livelier conception of the sensuality, the indonce, and the fierceness of the respective races than could à acquired by elaborate studies of their manners and orality. In a similar way other characteristics are reealed by the terrors of Future Punishment, which the vely Greek imagined to himself as the endless hopeless abors of an Ixion or a Sisyphus; the dignified Egyptian, degradation to a bestial form; and the grim-souled Teuon of the Dark Ages, as eternal torture in a fiery cave. Whatever has constituted man's highest pleasure on earth, hat he has hoped to find again in heaven, and whatever he mas most dreaded, that he has imagined as forming the retibution of guilt hereafter. From this point of view the Christian idea of a serene empyrean, wherein saints and archangels forever cast their crowns before the great White Throne, and worship the thrice Holy One who sitteth thereon - affords singular evidence of the spiritual altitude to which those souls had attained to whom such an Apocalypse opened the supremest vision of beatitude. The attitude of Adoration of sublime ecstatic rapture in the presence of perfect Holiness and Goodness, is assuredly the loftiest of which we have any conception, and to desire to enjoy and prolong it forever can only genuinely pertain to a soul in which the love of Divine goodness is already the ruling passion. Wider thought and calmer reflection may teach that not alone on such mountain peaks of emotion, but on the plains of sacred service, should the faithful son of God desire to spend his immortality. But the modern American poet who has taken on himself to sneer at the notion of angels "loafing about the Throne," has given curious evidence of his incompetence to understand what sublime passion it was which inspired that wondrous vision of Patmos. Accepting then the Heaven and Hell of each creed as a natural test of the characteristic sentiments of its disciples, we turn somewhat inquisitively to discover what sort of a future existence the new faith of Spiritualism proposes to give us. Of course it affords every facility for such an inquiry; for, while other religions teach primarily concerning God, and secondly, and with much more reserve, about the life after death; Spiritualism teaches first, and at great length, about the future life, and frankly confesses that it has no light to throw on the problems of theology. What then, we ask, has Spiritualism told us respecting the state of the dead, or rather (as a skeptic must inwardly pose the question), What do its narratives betray concerning the ideals of existence which Spiritualists have created out of the depth of their own consciousness? Do they prove an advance upon those of earlier creeds; or, on the contrary, do they mark a singular and deplorable retrogression towards the materialistic, the carnal, and the vulgar? Of course such an inquiry would be met at the outset by a Spiritualist with the vehement assertion that it was not he who devised what the spirits say of themselves, but the spirits who have lifted the veil of their own existence, for whose ignoble details he is in no way responsible. As, however, every Pagan and Buddhist, Mahometan and Par see would say as much on his own behalf, and maintain that Elysium and Nirvana, Paradise and Gorotman, had each been revealed by such "mediums " as Orpheus and Buddha, Mahomet and Zoroaster, we must be content to pass by this argument and treat the phase of immortality discovered (or invented) by Mr. Hume and his friends, as no less significant of the moral ideals of Spiritualists and the general level of their aspirations. Let it be granted cordially that there is nothing in the spiritualistic Hades akin to the "Hell of the Red Hot Iron," the "Hell of the Little Child," the "Hell of the Burning Bonnet," and the "Hell of the Boiling Kettle," set forth with such ghastly circumstantiality in these latter days in Dr. Furness' Books for the Young, and in older times by numberless Calvinistic and Catholic divines. Theodore Parker went, indeed, so far as to say that "there was, at all events, one good service which the Spiritualists had done, they had knocked the bottom out of Hell." Considering that the peculiarity of that terrible pit has been generally understood to be that it is "bottomless," the achievement would seem rather difficult; but in any case we may candidly agree that on this side no exception need be taken against the spiritualist doctrine, save that perchance it fails to afford indication of any sense of how profound must be the mental anguish through which it is possible for a soul, stained with vice and cruelty, to recover its purity and peace. Spiritualist remorse seems almost as colorless as spiritualist beatitude is vulgar and inane. On the other hand, when we ask to be informed (beyond the testimony of sweet smiles and assurances of felicity) of the nature of the happiness of virtuous departed souls, we are confronted with narratives much more nearly realizing our notion of humiliating penance and helplessness than of glory and freedom; of Purgatory rather than of Paradise. The dead, it seems, according to Spiritualism, have not (even after vast intervals of time), advanced one step nearer to the knowledge of those diviner truths for which the soul of man hungers, than they possessed while on earth. The Hope of Immortality is bound up, in religious minds, with the faith that though no actual vision can ever be vouchsafed of the all-pervading Spirit, yet that some sense beyond any which earthly life affords, of the presence and love of the Father, will come to the soul when it has gone "home to God," and that Doubt will surely be left behind among the cerements of the grave: But Spiritualists cheerfully tell us such hopes are quite as delusive as those of the material crowns and harps of the New Jerusalem. "Nothing," says Dr. Wallace, " is more common than for religious people at séances to ask questions about God and Christ. In reply they never get more than opinions, or more frequently the statement that they, the spirits, have no more actual knowledge than they had on earth" (p. 805). There are indeed, Dr. Wallace assures us, Catholic and Protestant, Mahometan and Hindoo spirits, proving that the "mind with its myriad beliefs is not suddenly changed at death," nor, seemingly, for ages afterwards. Thus from our estimate of the spiritualist state of future felicity, we are called on to make, at starting, the enormous deduction of everything resembling religious progress. The Spiritualist is perfectly content with an ideal heaven wherein he will remain in just as much doubt or error as he happens to have entertained upon earth. Further, as regards his personal and social affections Does he at least image to himself that he will be nearer and more able to protect and bless his dear ones after death? Or that he will pass freely hither and thither, doing service like a guardian angel to mankind, strengthening the weak, comforting the mourner, and awakening the conscience of the wicked? There is (so far as we have followed the literature of Spiritualism), no warrant for such a picture of beneficent activity. Good spirits, as well as bad- the souls of Plato and Fénelon, as well as those of the silliest and wickedest "twaddler " (as Dr. Wallace honestly describes many spirits, habitués of séances), have seemingly spent all the centuries since their demise in waiting to be called up by some woman or child, precisely as if they were lackeys ready to answer the down-stairs' bell. In many cases we are |