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merited by their toil. by miracles, but by eternal, immutable laws, which are allpowerful to save, all-mighty to condemn, and which are not found in the glosses of men, but are written by His own Almighty hand, in all of nature that is spread out around them.

Teach them that God does not work

"Bid them look out upon the universe of worlds, which from your high place you can behold marshalled in their orbits through the endless realms of space; and reflect upon the countless numbers of living souls inhabiting them and destined for eternity, and ask themselves if it can be that for this earth, which is but a grain of sand on the shore of eternity's ocean- -His eternal laws can have been suspended?"

Yes, and we would add, go you, reader, some clear starlit night, and stand beneath the sky with nothing between you and God. Look out upon that amazing universe which throbs with life, and ask yourself,-what of the theology of so-called civilised man? Is this drop in that ocean of worlds the prey of an arch-fiend? Are its inhabitants the fore-doomed to an interminable hell? Are they bought with the death-agony of earth's holiest messenger, sent with his blood the price demanded by a Moloch?

to pay

Oh, falsehoods uttered before the throne of heaven and the Soul of love, by those who know Him not! Look out, I say, and gaze upon those eternal regions of space,—and behold His works:

"Regions of lucid matter taking forms,

Brushes of fire, hazy gleams,

Clusters and beds of worlds and bee-like swarms

Of suns, and starry streams,"

and return to ask yourself whether the Spirit of God is not there rather than in the vain dogmas of men, and whether He whose life breathes throughout the sublime scheme of that universe, cannot teach His laws and command them to be obeyed upon this tiny world, and by its offspring, man, till the "will of the Father is done," and the human race becomes redeemed at last, not by a miracle, but by the light of true knowledge, from evil, and error, and ignorance, for ever! In that era the attraction to physical life will cease to exist, and matter will become the instrument of man, and no longer form, even for an hour, his prison-house, or the illusion of his senses.

"It is so cheap to praise what all applaud,

To bend the supple knee and bow the head
Over the graves of the illustrious dead,
Extol the past in popular accord,
And with the lips confess that Christ is Lord!
If we have not the martyr-strength to tread
Their thorny paths, lead onward as they led,
Far in advance of ancient bounds, unawed,—
If, cowards in the present, we recoil

From grappling with the evils of our time,
Content with bygone, vanquished sins to moil,
Content but to commend those men sublime,—
Then we are nought but cumberers of the soil,
And parasites, and panderers to crime !"

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

S

I

CHAPTER XIV.

SPIRITUALISM AND REFORM.

WISH the closing chapter of this brief and very inadequate history of our modern seer to be devoted to a few thoughts upon spiritualism and reform.

Like all true and earnest spiritualists William Fletcher is a reformer. Like his seership, the love of progress, the indignation at wrong and oppression, and the fixed determination to labour at any cost for religious liberty, are born in him. He has penetrated into the unseen world, and has realised the future life of man, and stands forth as a witness to the truth which the blind cannot see, and the bigot will not believe. In every age there has arisen in behalf of some great change in the history of humanity, "the hour and the man," but the man has not been welcomed, and the hour has passed unrecognised as marked with the crisis of advance, until the great results achieved have pointed out, in after years, his true mission.

"As it hath been, so shall it be," and the modern medium cannot escape the ignorant persecution which, although it ensures victory for truth, has in the past poisoned a Socrates, imprisoned a Galileo, burnt a Huss and a Savonarola, hunted down a Lloyd Garrison in the streets of Boston, and in the darkest day the world ever saw, crucified between two thieves, and on a charge of blasphemy against God, the heaven-sent Saviour of men.

To testify to the existence of a spirit-world, to teach men what they are and whither they are tending, to see

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