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