I do not expect to be believed, as I can only relate what I myself
have experienced. I know that men and women of to-day must have
proofs, or what they are willing to accept as proofs, before they
will credit anything that purports to be of a spiritual tendency;--
something startling--some miracle of a stupendous nature, such as
according to prophecy they are all unfit to receive. Few will admit
the subtle influence and incontestable, though mysterious, authority
exercised upon their lives by higher intelligences than their own--
intelligences unseen, unknown, but felt. Yes! felt by the most
careless, the most cynical; in the uncomfortable prescience of
danger, the inner forebodings of guilt--the moral and mental torture
endured by those who fight a protracted battle to gain the hardly-
won victory in themselves of right over wrong--in the thousand and
one sudden appeals made without warning to that compass of a man's
life, Conscience--and in those brilliant and startling impulses of
generosity, bravery, and self-sacrifice which carry us on, heedless
of consequences, to the performance of great and noble deeds, whose
fame makes the whole world one resounding echo of glory--deeds that
we wonder at ourselves even in the performance of them--acts of
heroism in which mere life goes for nothing, and the Soul for a
brief space is pre-eminent, obeying blindly the guiding influence of
a something akin to itself, yet higher in the realms of Thought.

There are no proofs as to why such things should be; but that they
are, is indubitable. The miracles enacted now are silent ones, and
are worked in the heart and mind of man alone. Unbelief is nearly
supreme in the world to-day. Were an angel to descend from heaven in
the middle of a great square, the crowd would think he had got
himself up on pulleys and wires, and would try to discover his
apparatus. Were he, in wrath, to cast destruction upon them, and