LIFE HERE AND THERE MUST COHERE.

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they would have listened to what would have appealed to their inquisitive nature. Instead, he brought forward the Jewish materialistic notion that it was the physical body of Jesus that was seen after the resurrection, and his listeners rejected it as an absurdity, which it is. Had Paul followed his statement of the co-existence of these two bodies in Jesus, as well as in every human being, to its legitimate conclusion, he would have had less to say of the physical body and blood of Christ, and the church might not have sunk into the materialism of the Dark Ages.

Man is in a physical body, amid physical conditions, under nature's laws. When a priesthood tells him of his soul, and describes spirit existence in a heaven or a hell, no longer under nature's laws, he does one of two things: he accepts with docility the supernatural, the miraculous, and a condition wholly freed from the physical, or he openly or secretly doubts the truth of what he is taught. There is no sincere middle ground between blind submission and positive infidelity for those who are told that life after the death change is wholly supernatural-wholly outside of and beyond the laws. that govern the condition in which we now live. The only hypothesis that can suit an intelligent, unbiased, intuitive nature, in our age or in any other, must make life here and beyond coherent, consistent, and equally in accordance with natural law. These conditions being denied by ecclesiastical authority, we find that Anaxagoras, Socrates, the Greeks of Paul's time, Abelard, and our own scientists, were out of harmony with the churches of their time. They will not accept creeds which put human beings under a different regimen in

the body and out of the body. And so science and free thought have been at odds with priestcraft in all the ages.

But a better day is dawning. Midnight darkness has forever passed away. Glints of rosy light illume the edge of the sky. This dawning light will increase until the most intelligent as well as the most spiritual men will rejoice in a reasonable religion, which will bind the two worlds in one, because life there as well as here will be subject to the same great laws of infinite intelligence.

"Of law, there can no less be said than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men and all creatures whatever with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy."

RICHARD HOOKER.

CHAPTER II.

SOULS NOT DENATURALIZED BY DEATH.

A reasonable mind rejects what is unnatural, and adopts for its motto, "If true, then certainly rational."

ones.

In all ages of the world, men have been startled by strange occurrences, which seemed to contradict the regular on-goings of nature, and were therefore called supernatural. In this age, and in this alone, has the human mind begun to assume that these uncommon occurrences are just as accordant with nature as the everyday And so the acceptance of these strange incidents is beginning to be considered an evidence of uncommon intelligence and reason, rather than of superstition. He who can find a place for the rare, the hitherto uncommon, somewhere in nature's laws, gives better evidence of a well-ordered mind, than does he who blindly relegates such occurrences to the supernatural. He who allows his boat to drift beyond the reasonable and the credible is without rudder or compass, and his mind becomes ready to accept any absurd or even wicked doctrines. Let us keep our craft close to the sensible, the natural, and therefore the reasonable, and then we need not fear the rule of blind superstition.

All the religions of the world have been founded on events that were supposed at the time to be supernatural. On this account the philosopher, the reasoner of past ages, has regarded those early manifestations of supernal power with incredulity, and has paid more attention

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22

THE HORSE-SHOE OF PERSONS.

to the doctrines taught, than to the marvelous events on which they were founded.

The Greeks accepted the prophecies and the advice given at Delphi, because experience proved them true and useful. They thought, however, that the priests and sybils were endowed with supernatural power. Within the precincts of the temple the priests sat in a prescribed order, in the form of a horse-shoe, with the priestess in front of them, and then she prophesied. The priests supposed her power to be supernatural.

On

In our own day, persons sit in a horse shoe, in a prescribed order, opening towards a person, whose eyes and ears become sensitive to what ordinary individuals do not see and hear, or who tells the truth, unknown to the persons present, of past and future events. But this is not deemed supernatural in any sense of the word. the contrary, the whole proceeding is carefully adapted to the laws of nature. A line connecting the two ends of the horse-shoe of persons runs north and south, and the horse-shoe opens to the east, because the magnetic currents of the earth run north and south, and because the earth turns toward the east. The persons forming the horse-shoe are arranged in order of being positive and negative, because the magnetic battery formed by them is thus more effective. The person to be operated on is placed in the focus of the horse-shoe, because the magnetic currents developed by the battery are concentrated there. He or she is chosen for the position, because of being more susceptible than others to the action of these currents. The person sees or hears what others do not perceive, because the powerful magnetism quickens the senses of his spiritual body. It is also

probable that intelligences present, who once had physical bodies like our own, but are now clothed only by the spiritual body, which is composed, when well developed, of polarized atoms, produce impressions on the brain of this susceptible person by means of the magnetism so powerfully concentrated there. So, what seemed supernatural to the Greeks and Persians becomes to the psychist of our day wholly natural, and we get presumptive proof that disembodied spirits continue to live a reasonable and a natural life, because they are still subject to the laws of nature that govern the magnetic currents.

The Jewish religion was founded by Moses, who was made conversant as the reputed son of a princess with the esoteric lore of Egyptian priests. Circumstances placed him at the head of an enslaved race, whom he led out of bondage, and whose traditions he reduced to writing. Subject to trances, to visions, aware that writing was produced on tablets by no physical hand, seeing wonders wrought through his "magic staff," and multitudes cured of a venomous serpent's bite by looking at a brazen one that he raised in their sight, he believed that a supernatural power did all this through him, and this belief was shared by the ignorant tribes he ruled.

We now see persons entranced who describe the visions they see, we see writing produced by no physical hand, and the other deeds of Moses duplicated, it may

*Prof. Elliott Coues states the following: "In full view, a few inches from my face, I distinctly saw the pencil write of itself,' and finish the last word or two of a sentence which straggled over most of the slate. That I saw it, just as described, is simply true." -Religio Philosophical Journal of Feb. 27, 1892.