LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
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ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE : 
 
 A TREATISE ON 
 
 ORGANIC AND INORGANIC MATTER : THE FINITE AND 
 THE INFINITE : TRANSIENT AND ETERNAL LIFE. 
 
 / 
 
 By WARREN CHASE. 
 
 Author of '" Life Line of the Lone One,'" "Fugitive Wife," "American Crisis," 
 and "Gist of Spiritualism." 
 
 41 
 
 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And cometh from afar ; 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But, trailing clouds of glory, do we come 
 From God, who is our home." 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 COLBY & RICH, PUBLISHERS, 
 
 Corner Bosworth and Province Sts. 
 
 1886. 
 
.C5 
 
 / 
 
 COPYRIGHTKD BY WARREN ClIASE, 188G. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In presenting this little work to the public, I do 
 not claim any discovery, for I am aware that other 
 speakers and writers have given to the public in vari- 
 ous fragmentary utterances most, if not all, of the 
 views expressed herein; but T do it more to leave 
 my testimony in a permanent form, since my lect- 
 ures, not having been written, and seldom reported, 
 are rarely to be seen in print ; and as I am nearly 
 through my earthly pilgrimage, I leave this a legacy 
 of belief to my many friends. 
 
 Wakren Chase. 
 
 C3) 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 As I need no introduction to ray audiences, as a 
 speaker, so this brochure will need no introduction, 
 but pass on its own merits into, or through, the minds 
 of those who read it : — 
 
 "Countless chords of heavenly music 
 
 Struck ere earthly time began, 
 Vibrate in immortal concord 
 
 To the answering soul of man ; 
 Countless rays of heavenly glory 
 
 Shine through spirit, pent in clay, 
 On the wise men at their labors, 
 
 On the children at their play. 
 Man has gazed on heavenly secrets, 
 
 Sunned himself in heavenly glow, 
 Seen in glory, heard the music, — 
 
 We are wiser than we know." 
 
 Charles Mackay. 
 
 (*) 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 I shall start this treatise with a somewhat bold, 
 and old, but incontrovertible assumption, which I 
 accept as an axiom, viz., that whatever has one end 
 must, necessarily, have two, whether measured in 
 space or time, distance or duration. I shall adhere 
 strictly to this as law throughout this treatise, and if 
 I cannot find evidence sufficient to establish a belief 
 in eternal life, with this law in full force, shall sur- 
 render the point, and still retain the demonstrated 
 and fully established fact of the spiritual life, as a 
 continuation of this life after the soul casts off the 
 body. Certainly, proof of spiritual life is not more 
 proof of its eternal duration than is the fact of this 
 life proof in itself that we shall live always here. 
 
 My rule of measure, which determines ends from 
 beginnings in all things, is certainly absolute and 
 universal in all organic objects within the scope of 
 scientific experiment and philosophic observation on 
 our earth, and is apparent beyond it from the changes 
 in planets also. The vegetable and animal kingdoms 
 
 (5) 
 
G ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 each evidently revolves in its own sphere, and on its 
 own axis, and in each every form that is burn dies; 
 every organization is disorganized sooner or later, 
 and though some forms vastly outlive and out- 
 measure us, yet none outlive our capacity to deter- 
 mine their ending; even the granite, the quartz, and 
 the diamond must follow the law that produced them, 
 and sooner or later the particles will be separated. 
 Cohesion cannot forever bind any two or more parti- 
 cles of gross matter into a form ; repulsion and segre- 
 gation are as certain and absolute as attraction and 
 aggregation. 
 
 If, then, this law holds good in each and every 
 form of matter in the three kingdoms below, — or 
 inferior to man, and is equally apparent in, and more 
 rapid in, the physical and ponderable form of man, 
 also, — what argument, evidence, or reason have we 
 here that a spiritual or elemental body is started 
 into form and being here, and in this shell, that 
 was, or is, dependent on it for existence? It sets 
 aside the law of its own creation, and that which 
 governs all other forms, and its shell, and, defy- 
 ing time and decay, but not change, holds on to, 
 and sets up, eternal life from that point ; or, rather, 
 a life with but one end, — for it could not be eternal 
 if it had one end; even if it was like the old symbol 
 of eternity, the snake, with its tail in its mouth, for- 
 ever swallowing itself, and yet endless. I confess my 
 inability to see the evidence from analogy, or to find 
 it in testimony, that the spirit life, which grows out 
 of this, if it starts here, is to continue forever after 
 without being renewed and started again. 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 7 
 
 To me any theory or belief seems inconsistent and 
 unreliable, however desirable, which teaches that the 
 spirit or soul of man is made up from refined parti- 
 cles of matter from the earth, and cast in the human 
 mold of form, and, when taken out of the mold, is 
 perfect ; or, being imperfect, becomes so, and is ever 
 after indestructible, if not unchangeable. How a 
 soul can be refined soil, or plant, or animal, and be 
 no longer subject to the law that refined it, and ever 
 governed both the forms and particles of which it 
 was made, I cannot understand; but I can under- 
 stand how the ignorant, bigoted, superstitious, and, 
 often wicked, religious teachers would promise 
 anything for their favorites and friends, and threaten 
 any torments for enemies, and thus establish beliefs 
 and creeds. The monarchy of Heaven and the 
 tyranny of hell were little less inconsistent than the 
 theory of unchangeable and endless life after death, 
 — a never-ending song, and a never-ending Sabbath 
 (of course, with preaching) ; but the time has come 
 when rational minds must have some better evidence 
 than Bible authority or creed doctrine. Faith and 
 belief will not answer longer. We cannot accept the 
 belief of a stupid dunce as evidence of its own truth, 
 even if he assert that he has had his heart changed 
 from nature to grace, and yet such, instead of philos- 
 ophy, has been mainly the evidence not only of eter- 
 nal life but of any life after death, as presented by 
 the zealous Christians. Persons who, from their own 
 vain imaginings, drag in a miracle to intercept 
 natural law, and change the order of nature to 
 secure their desires, are not worthy of notice, and, of 
 
8 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 course, are born to be deceived by their own false 
 delusions. Those who hang a hope of immortality 
 on the love of life and dread of death will find the 
 hope hanging on a slender thread, as likely to be 
 clipped as it is in the animal kingdom, which shows 
 equally strong love of life. To satisfy the reasoning 
 mind, some more substantial and reliable evidence 
 must be furnished; and I am not entirely satisfied 
 with the testimony of spirits, for it seems often vague, 
 unsettled, and speculative, and, to a great extent, 
 like the beliefs of those who live here. Sound phi- 
 losophy seems almost as rare with those spirits who 
 communicate through mediums as with our public 
 teachers, and we seldom get new principles or theories 
 from them through mediums until they have been 
 announced by some normal speaker or writer; but 
 after such announcement in one place, they are often 
 taken up by mediums far from the place, and who 
 never saw or heard of them, and then, to many, seem 
 original. A truth having been born into expression 
 somewhere, it is, no doubt, accessible to many spirits, 
 and by them carried far and wide, and given out in 
 many new places. But I am also satisfied that many 
 ideas given by normal speakers are from the spirit 
 world when we do not recognize that as the source, 
 and no doubt they often originate there, for it is evi- 
 dent that a large amount of impression and inspira- 
 tion is received from spirits, and not credited. 
 
 I will not take up every argument in favor of 
 immortality, and show the fallacy of each; but since 
 belief and desire are the Christian's basis and foun- 
 dation of nearly all, and these being NO reliable evi- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 9 
 
 dence, I dispense with the whole of them at once. 
 Claims of promise, by word of God and Bible author- 
 ity, I do not consider worthy notice in a treatise of 
 this kind, as they have no claims upon the stand- 
 ard of reason, nor hardly upon that of common 
 sense. 
 
 Having cleared away and dispensed with the com- 
 mon arguments for immortality, I may as well state 
 here that I believe in the eternal existence of every 
 human being, and, of course, that includes the past 
 as well as the future of conscious or unconscious 
 individualized existence. I believe in it from evi- 
 dences not embraced in the above, and in no wise con- 
 flicting with the axiom laid down at the start, and 
 which I will endeavor to set forth as clearly as my 
 control of language will allow. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 The universe consists of two distinct ingredients, 
 which I call Essence and Substance, or Mind and 
 Matter. The qualities, properties, and actions of 
 each are distinct from the other, and yet they are 
 blended throughout the universe. One originates 
 motive, will-force, the other action-forms. Essence 
 is simple, perfect, unchangeable, absolute, infinite, 
 positive, masculine, is Law and God, and never in- 
 creased or decreased in quantity, or changed in qual- 
 ity. Its highest manifestation in our world is in 
 intelligence, which is ever exhibited in finite degree, 
 and in accordance with the peculiar structure of the 
 organic form through which it is exhibited in person 
 to person. It may not be improper to term Essence 
 law, since law is God, and God is law, and not love, 
 as is so frequently asserted. 
 
 Substance is the covering of every germ of being, 
 and the organic matter of every form ; its very name 
 denotes its inferiority, — sub, inferior or under, stance. 
 It, too, is never increased or decreased in quantity, 
 or in its simples changed in quality, but in combina- 
 tion and forms forever changing. In the simple cell 
 that starts each organic being, essence is the germ, and 
 substance is the covering, shell, globe, or globule ; 
 and the same is true of worlds as of these minute 
 
 (10) 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 11 
 
 globules with life in them. All germs of existence 
 are of the Divine Essence, and clothed upon, or draw- 
 around them substance, — thus making forms, all of 
 which change and decay. Substance is, of itself, 
 inert ; essence, never. Matter never exhibits inertia 
 to us, because it is forever and everywhere connected 
 with and impelled by, essence, or God, as the strongly 
 religious and slightly intellectual world more prop- 
 erly say. All material which combines in forms of 
 organic life is substance, and negative, and is every- 
 where and forever kept in motion ; consequently, no 
 form is of eternal duration, and no particle of sub- 
 stance forever in the same place, or same connec- 
 tion. All forms of outer being are ephemeral ; all 
 combinations of substance temporary ; and hence all 
 beings and things are changing and changeable, and 
 no form eternal, whilst every 'particle, and simple 
 part of every form, is eternal. Quantity and quality 
 of essence and substance have never changed, and 
 never can, neither can one ever supply the place of 
 the other. Substance never becomes essence, essence 
 never becomes substance. 
 
 In the gradations of matter, one kingdom feeds and 
 supplies the forms of another, — mineral the vegetable, 
 vegetable the animal, animal the human, human the 
 spiritual ; but in the volitions of soul or essence, one 
 kingdom does not supply another, but each revolves 
 in its own orbit, bringing out motion in the mineral, 
 life in the vegetable, sensation in the animal, intel- 
 ligence in the human, and harmony in the spirit- 
 ual. Manifestations that are highest in one kingdom 
 appear as lower in the next, which adds its own 
 
12 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 peculiar feature, — thus life reappears in the animal, 
 but does not come from the vegetable, and sensation 
 reappears in the human, but does not come from the 
 animal to the human. I use the terms high and low 
 in this treatise as they are used in ordinary conver- 
 sation, not because they exist in the absolute, but 
 only in the relative. High and low are only the 
 discrete or distinct degrees by which one condition is 
 marked to designate it from another. What we call 
 high and low might as well be reversed, and be as 
 appropriate terms to respective conditions, as pro- 
 gression is only change. A horse with his four feet 
 is perfect to the horse ; a man, with only two, is im- 
 perfect ; and so of each form of existence, which, to 
 itself, is highest. To the infinite there is no high or 
 low, good or bad; hence, of course, what we call 
 progression is only change. There is no general law 
 by which to distinguish high from low, certainly not 
 by length or duration of form, or, if so, rocks and 
 trees have superiority over animals and man in the 
 aggregate. It is not yet certain what is the general 
 duration of spirit forms, since we have but recently 
 ascertained for a certainty that such really exist, and 
 are a continuation of human life and form in bodies 
 composed of sensation which seems to enter but 
 slightly into the composition of their bodies, if it is 
 to be found at all in them, but which is a part of the 
 universe of substance as much as that which com- 
 poses these bodies.' Experiments have not yet been 
 successful in establishing the nature and composition 
 of the materials that compose spirit bodies, but no 
 doubt will be in time ; but there is certainly no proba- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 13 
 
 bility that any discovery will be made that will prove 
 these materials are not subject to the general law of 
 change of partners as particles of matter, and conse- 
 quent aggregation and segregation, or life and death 
 of forms, to which law essence is not subject, and 
 consequently when a tree dies its soul does not die, 
 — its form dies ; the life which was wkh that form 
 is as real after as before its death, and is not even 
 changed, only the shell that for a time surrounded it 
 has dropped off, while the real tree, so far as life is 
 concerned, remains as permanent as before its death, 
 and before it had the covering of earthy matter. The 
 soul germs of all organic bodies exist forever, and 
 before and after the forms are put on and off. They 
 are never seen, for only substance, and that only in 
 combination, is visible as a form. Reduced to its 
 simples, substance is out of the reach of mortals, if 
 not of spiritual vision. Substances cohere and pro- 
 duce all the varieties of compound forms. Essences 
 are individual sovereignties ; the essence of a tree is 
 forever a tree; the essence of a horse is forever a 
 horse ; the essence of a man is forever a man, — each 
 absolute or eternal, whether clothed upon by form in 
 matter or not. All germs of being are of and in God, 
 a part of the Divine Mind of the universe, which, in 
 part and whole, is eternal and unchangeable. Every 
 human being is eternally human ; never sinks below 
 or rises above its grade or sphere of being ; but may 
 sink or float on, or in, its kingdom, and rise to the 
 top or sink to the bottom of its kingdom, but can 
 never be an animal nor a winged angel, but may be 
 an angel without wings, for such are human, as the 
 
14 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 term embraces all forms that were within its physio- 
 logical law. No human soul germ ever was or ever 
 will be any other than a human soul germ, sometimes 
 with, and sometimes without, a material form or 
 clothing in substance, and sometimes with an imper- 
 fect, and sometimes with a perfect, one ; and ever 
 with corresponding faculties, powers, expressions, and 
 sufferings or enjoyments, — all of which pertain to, 
 and are uttered in and through, the form. Essential 
 existence is eternal existence, and is the divine life 
 that was and is, and is to be forever the same perfect, 
 pure, holy, and unchangeable " yesterday, today, and 
 forever " the same. Man is individualized in essence, 
 hence is immortal ; he involuntarily and unconsci- 
 ously secretes and combines substance in form, which 
 is forever the human form, and could be no other 
 with or without will, because such is the form of the 
 essence, — soul germ. 
 
 Immortality and identity of being exist only in 
 essence and germ, never in substance or material 
 compound. The one essential — a divine property, 
 life, of the soul — remains intact through all changes 
 of clothing and variations of combination which 
 make up the complicated and ever-changing matter 
 that robes the soul germ during its eternal life ; for, 
 as it is divine, it partakes of the divine perfection. 
 Immortalit}^ of essence exists equally in the animal 
 and vegetable kingdoms as in the human, and. each 
 is, and must, be robed in material forms upon its own 
 plane of being. Plants must forever be plants if 
 they have forms, and horses must ever be horses if 
 the soul germ have a form, and each form must live 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 15 
 
 upon, and in, its own element and aliment; and as 
 horses, cattle, and swine would be greatly out of 
 place in the elegant parlors of man and woman on 
 earth, so they would be much more out of place in 
 the still more elegant homes of the spirit life to which 
 man is so appropriately fitted both in form and feel- 
 ing. That the spirit world has trees and plants, and 
 flowers, and birds, and beasts, is evident from the 
 testimony of nearly all spirits that communicate to 
 us from that life ; but their forms, evidently, are 
 indigenous to the sphere, as are some animals to 
 the different periods, climates, and localities of our 
 world. Some germs may go from this life and be 
 reclothed there, but a majority do not go from the 
 stables, styes, and kennels of this sphere with con- 
 tinued, conscious identity and individuality as man 
 does from his palaces, kennels, and huts. Indeed, it 
 is doubtful whether any animal has conscious individ- 
 uality at all, as consciousness is a quality dependent 
 on peculiarity of form and material as well as on soul 
 germ, and is transient even in the highest condition 
 attainable by man, so far as we yet know. Consci- 
 ousness is not essential to existence more in man or 
 beast than in trees, and is ever incidental. Memory 
 is a power of reflection, or reproduction, weak in 
 some men, strong in others, and the same in animals, 
 and never subject to the will, but capable of cultiva- 
 tion in both man and beast. It exists only in the 
 higher orders of animals and in man, and in man it 
 is a failing institution by which he is ever dropping 
 the past, and recalling it few or many times, and at 
 last getting out of reach of each event entirely, as the 
 
16 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 accumulations become too numerous between the 
 occurrence and the present. We drag some events, 
 by memory, over a vast amount of rubbish, and 
 recall them often, and many times, but lose them at 
 last, and it is well we do, else our load would encum- 
 ber us more than the pack of Bunyan's fabled pil- 
 grim. That memory fails to recall events of the past 
 centuries is not evidence that we had no conscious 
 existence, and no full or complete forms in those 
 remote ages of anterior existence both of ourselves 
 and our world. The souls of things keep no record 
 of time or events. Records are kept on, and in, the 
 forms as scars are on the body, and not on the spirit 
 of mortals ; so memory is on the form, and pertains 
 to it. Our spirit life would carry no record of this 
 were it not begun here with this and the spirit body 
 already formed, and written upon in this life. As 
 the soul germ, or mind, brought no body to this 
 planet, or cycle of life, it brings no scrip of memory- 
 record from another or anterior life ; but I put no 
 dependence on any such transient and ephemeral 
 evidences of existence, or non-existence. If there is 
 a spark of the Divine in us, it must partake of the 
 Divine nature and being itself; so much of God must 
 be so far perfect and unchangeable ; and as God 
 works in the universe to ultimate ends from begin- 
 nings of forms, so this spark, or soul germ, must 
 work, from its God-like nature, though unconsciously, 
 to the end of creating and ultimating a form, — a 
 human form, — and as it possesses this inherent 
 power, and ever did, it must have been forever work- 
 ing out forms in the ever-changing matter of the uni- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 17 
 
 verse, each and all of which must have been like our 
 present bodies, of short duration, while the soul, or 
 mind, was eternal, unchangeable, and eternally the 
 same both in nature, power, and action. 
 
 But at this stage of our search after eternal life 
 many questions naturally arise in the mind, and must 
 be met by some reasonable solution, or our theory is 
 like a ship on the ocean without compass or beacon- 
 light. What and where were we, each one, a thou- 
 sand years ago ? To a Christian, I would reply, by 
 asking : What, and where, was God before the begin- 
 ning, spoken of in the first chapter of Genesis? But 
 to a skeptic and inquirer I would suggest that, as all 
 matter is eternal, we might have had forms in some 
 of the older worlds of the universe, and from them 
 emigrated to this new one to seek our fortunes in 
 the spheres that surround this crusted globe, enter- 
 ing first in the crust. The lethean stream through 
 which we passed on our journey here having washed 
 off our old bodies, with every speck of the memory- 
 record, the soul germ begins its form here anew, and 
 picks up its items slowly for a new library of events 
 to fill up the shelves of memory, and ultimately to be 
 again destroyed, perhaps not for millions of centuries, 
 or may be within one century. Where I shall be 
 one thousand 3-ears hence is as unsettled and uncer- 
 tain as where I was one thousand years ago, so both 
 are really speculative ; yet facts and philosophy fur- 
 nish good grounds for a life of an immortality, at 
 least better than any the Christian has yet fur- 
 nished. 
 
 It has long been known that the germs of all 
 
18 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 organic forms in our world are single and simple 
 cells, or "hollow globes," or containing protoplasm 
 and life force that we cannot detect with the eye; 
 the soul germ which works out and develops the 
 form, provided suitable material is at hand, and 
 within reach of its powers of attraction, if not, the 
 form is an abortion, and the cell destroyed, while the 
 essence remains in its perfection awaiting another 
 covering of substance, or matter, in which to ulti- 
 mate its form, whether of plant, beast, or man. Each 
 kingdom of beings ultimates and revolves in its own 
 sphere ; plants, rooted in earth, and ultimated in 
 atmosphere, revolve therein, and fulfill their mission 
 and reach perfection in, and on, our earth, and lose 
 identity to us with dissolution of form, but never to 
 God ; hence, all plants that exist exist forever. 
 Animals evidently follow the same law, for both 
 show powers of reaching into an elemental or 
 spiritual life. Religious aspiration and intelli- 
 gent reflection arc entirely wanting in both these 
 kingdoms, while in man they are universal attri- 
 butes of the race, and 3'et man is supposed to go on 
 without it. Man does not ultimate, ripen, or decay 
 in this sphere, even though his earthly shell does, 
 and breaks only to let the real man out and into his 
 sphere of real life to ripen and perfect. 
 
 Man is evidently only in the gestation state of his 
 real life while in earthy substance or an earthy body, 
 and is newly born at death; and a great majority 
 from our country, at this time, are prematurely born, 
 greatly to their disadvantage, except in cases where 
 this life is so perverted from its true purpose as to 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 19 
 
 render it almost or entirely useless to the soul, which, 
 is not unfrequently the case. The necessity of plant- 
 ing souls here to germinate and start a spiritual body 
 is the same as for planting seed in the ground, or 
 birds in the egg, before starting to flutter and fly; 
 but the spiritual body that clothes the essence, or 
 mind — the soul germ — is also substance, or mat- 
 ter, ephemeral and changeable, as is most conclu- 
 sively established by the testimony that those who 
 enter that life from an infancy or feebleness here, 
 change, grow, strengthen, and increase in form and 
 powers there. In its appropriate place, the physical 
 body starts, and, if not obstructed, Alls out its meas- 
 ure and growth on earth and in air, and in it, as a 
 womb or chrysalis shell, the spirit starts and fills out 
 its manhood or womanhood in the 'sphere of ether 
 and element that surrounds this globe, and ends its 
 career there as the earthly body does here ; but the 
 mind or soul germ is there, as here, independent of 
 the form, perfect, unchangeable, eternal, it being a 
 part — finite part — of the Infinite Divine mind of 
 the universe. Each soul germ of us may have, nay, 
 must have, lived through countless worlds, and sys- 
 tems of worlds, and may or may not be now on its 
 first and last pilgrimage to this little planet and its 
 spiritual spheres of discreted degrees, and when 
 ripened in the outer circle of earth's spiritual atmos- 
 phere will as willingly lay off its body, and passing 
 the lethean river that divides this planet and its 
 inhabitants from the next, begin a new form, and 
 enter organic existence on the next, or on some one 
 of the numberless worlds, and run its career through 
 
20 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 tin 4 circles and cycles of that, and thus on and on 
 through the endless extent of worlds and time. 
 
 Such, I conceive, to be eternal life, and by this 
 theory — for it is nothing else — it can be seen at 
 once that the essence of man is not progressive, but 
 perfect, as part of God, if we choose to call essence 
 God. Progression is only temporary, — a relative 
 growth and development of form and manifestation 
 of powers in it ; but to God, and soul essence, is only 
 outward change of no vital importance to either, as 
 it produces no change in either, or on the destiny 
 of the essence of any soul incased in form of sub- 
 stance. 
 
 Many will object to this theory, because they are 
 to lose in the lethean river of transition the mem- 
 ory pictures collected in the life and experiences of 
 each stage ; but we cannot accommodate a theory to 
 the likes or dislikes, or whims of feeling, in one or 
 many. No doubt, the law is such as to give us the 
 greatest amount of enjoyment in the long race that 
 we are capable of, and that the Infinite Divine, or 
 Divine mind, has perfection in all its parts, including 
 man. 
 
 There is an ancient philosophy of immortality 
 somewhat resembling this, said to have been taught 
 by, if not starting from, Pythagoras, a very wise 
 philosopher of ancient Greece, and also by Kreeshna, 
 of the Hindoos; but it taught that what we call 
 death is the return of essence to its unconscious 
 condition in the Divine mind, but we have abundance 
 of proof, both by testimony and scientific fact and 
 philosophical deductions that it is not so. That the 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 21 
 
 spirit life as a, or the, real life of man is now fully 
 established, but that the spirit spheres that now sur- 
 round this earth, and may contain all the spirits that 
 ever lived on it, are to remain permanent, and catch 
 every spirit as it bursts its shell of clay, and that 
 they are to remain the same when our earth has 
 melted away in electric light and heat is simply 
 absurd. It is true there is room enough in the belt 
 of ether around our planet for a vastly greater num- 
 ber of spirits than have yet entered it from earth ; 
 but time would fill and overstock it if the race ran 
 on as it is now running, increasing, and sending 
 over there the spirit germs, unless many should 
 prove, as some able writers assert, to be abortions, 
 and never appear there. Equally absurd is the idea 
 that spirits are manufactured on our earth, finished 
 up, varnished, and labeled in the spirit sphere around 
 it, and then sent off missionarying among the planets 
 and fixed stars to relate the story how Jesus was 
 crucified, and saved man by his death from his totally 
 depraved nature, which otherwise would have kept 
 these very souls in confinement and misery forever. 
 This earth is not a place where immortal spirits are 
 manufactured for a roaming existence through infi- 
 nite extent to meet and visit other spirits made up 
 on other worlds, and thus singly, or in pairs, or fami- 
 lies, or tribes, go trailing through the infinite heav- 
 ens, like Indians in the forests of our country before 
 European discovery reached it. 
 
 The generally received theory of the origin of man 
 among Christians is that two persons, male and 
 female, start the organic existence of each human 
 
22 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 being, while God, at some period not defined, but at 
 or soon after the commencement of the body, puts a 
 new soul into it which had no existence before, yet 
 never ceases to exist after, but leaves the body at its 
 death, and enters upon an unchangeable state of exist- 
 ence for eternity, in misery or happiness, according as 
 it had been successful or unsuccessful in overcoming 
 its totally depraved nature, in which it was made, 
 and with which it was clothed in the body as the 
 result of the sinful act of parents, — some say of the 
 first pair, and first act of the kind, — and some lay it 
 to the act that started the body, with its depraved 
 nature. A large portion, however, believe that the 
 Devil is the author and creator of the wicked souls, 
 which are the tares sown by him, as it is said in the 
 Scriptures, and that a large part of the souls are his 
 offspring, and, consequently, wicked as the bodies 
 are, and inherit endless misery as a reward for being 
 born, over which event they had no control. All vari- 
 eties of these Christian theories teach that man has 
 no voluntary action or choice in entering upon this 
 existence, yet is made accountable and responsible 
 for not altering his depraved nature. Whether these 
 souls are made up out of nothing, as our world is 
 said to have been, or are sparks of God, thus lessen- 
 ing his being so much each time, we are not informed. 
 Of all the theories of soul and soul-life, ancient and 
 modern, none is more ridiculous, unreasonable, and 
 absurd than the general belief of Christians. Bodies 
 made up of earthly matter die, dissolve, and are 
 scattered, and then are to be collected, resurrected, 
 and live forever, even though the same particles have 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 23 
 
 lived and died in scores of different bodies ; yet God 
 can do as he pleases, and make the same particle of 
 matter fill a score of places in as many bodies at the 
 same time, and these renovated bodies are to be 
 deathless, and not subject to such losses as operate 
 on them before death, and are to live somewhere that 
 is now nowhere, in a heaven of joy or hell of misery 
 forever and ever. Souls that God made, of which 
 He is father, are a part of them, to return to Him in 
 or out of these bodies, and enjoy bliss forever, and 
 another part are given to His enemy, and tormented 
 by that enemy forever for not doing, or for doing, as 
 they were obliged to do in this life by an inexorable 
 fate. Souls that are both something and nothing at 
 the same time, and somewhere and nowhere at the 
 same time, children of both God and the Devil, one 
 furnishing the nature and the body, and the other 
 the soul or germ, or each furnishing both; so on 
 through an almost endless range of absurdities runs 
 Christianity with its six hundred sectarian headings. 
 
 If this theory of immortality is not more rational 
 and consistent than any one taught by Christians, as 
 a doctrine, it must share their fate, and disappear in 
 a more intelligent age. 
 
 If the essence of the universe is not particled in 
 forms of eternal durability, then all forms of being 
 in their soul germs are blended and lost in the uni- 
 versal Godhead, or Divine Mind ; but if the Divine 
 essence contains an infinite variety of never-ending, 
 never-changing, never-varying germs of form, which 
 are ever seeking conditions and working out organic 
 coverings in substance, and ever suffering and enjoy- 
 
24 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 ing in each according to its condition and relation to 
 other objects, then we have the secret and key to all 
 the manifestations we witness in our ever-changing 
 and ever-varying world, and the kingdoms of beings 
 about it. 
 
 Forms, center, circumference, diameter, location, 
 time, and all such terms, apply to all individualities 
 in substance, and the same in essence, in whole or in 
 part, but no form can be detected by us, except in 
 substance. Yet germs of form abound everywhere, 
 and are ever ready to concentrate and cohere parti- 
 cles when material is in reach, — for plant in its 
 sphere, beast in its sphere, or man in his. Man does 
 not vary from the law, and would not escape from 
 the earth, and would end in death were he not by 
 nature a spiritual being, beginning his form of soul 
 and soul life here as soon and as effectually as he 
 does his body and its life. He revolves in his sphere, 
 which is a spiritual or elemental one, and the beast 
 does in his, which may be a sensual and sensuous 
 one. Man never is satisfied with this life ; feed him 
 to satiety, he is hungry still; quench his thirst, and 
 still it burns into his being's core ; give him power, 
 and lie wants more ; give him riches, and he is more 
 and more afraid of poverty, and craves and craves 
 forever something he has not. This is not his 
 sphere. Animals can be fed to satiety, and content ; 
 man cannot. His restless spirit hungers and thirsts 
 for the aliment it cannot reach on earth or in gross 
 matter; but only in the spiritual world, where lie is 
 at home, or can reach a home of content, and can 
 be satisfied. Love is an element of this world, and 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 25 
 
 aliment of the spirit and spirit world, and so deranged 
 in this life as to seldom satisfy the human demand. 
 Most of those who require and need it fail to get it, 
 and most of those who have it bestow it so badly 
 and improperly as to do about as much injury as 
 good with it. In our restless, turbulent world, love 
 seems to create nearly as much misery as happiness, 
 yet even here we could not dispense with it ; but in 
 our real life it will act as important part as air does 
 here, feeding the system with a necessary ingredient 
 of life. In the rudest and coarsest condition of earth 
 life, man is so near the animal as to show little signs 
 of his kinship with spirit life ; yet in every stage is 
 the germ of spirit, or soul germ, working out an ele- 
 mental form to have a form for its true and real life 
 in the spiritual spheres. 
 
 There are among Christian believers in immortality 
 the most vague and indefinite ideas of spirit life, 
 with scarcely a ray of consistency. Few of them 
 have any definite idea of form and substance in the 
 soul or spirit, and none that I ever met with have 
 any locality for heaven or hell. What souls are, 
 and where they live, is only to be believed in, not to 
 be carried farther, as that would be too inquisitive 
 for God's goodness, and He would be angry at us, as 
 infidels, for using our intellects to know the particu- 
 lars ; but, as skeptics or Spiritualists, we are bound 
 to have a consistent belief, and know all we can of 
 particulars. A. J. Davis has given a very rational 
 and consistent theory of body, soul, and spirit, which 
 I somewhat reverse in description by starting with 
 mind, or essence, which corresponds to his theory of 
 
26 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 spirit, and spirit form which corresponds to his soul 
 or elemental form, spirit body, us most Spiritualists 
 call it, and earthly body, on which we, of course, all 
 agree, except, perhaps, that I believe it to be the 
 effect of the soul germ, or essence, which was in 
 itself as complete before as after, and as perfect, and 
 which, lodged in the congenial soil, at once began to 
 surround itself with a body of substance. I do not 
 agree with other writers on the point of origin. I 
 cannot conceive of the streams of being rising so far 
 above their fountains as to have spirit life or forms 
 arise from, or flow out of, this earthly life as mate- 
 rial eliminated and refined from minerals, by passing 
 through plants, animals, and man's body till fine 
 enough for souls, and, lastly, for spirit essence, and 
 of course at last to make gods ; if this is true of the 
 body, it cannot be of the immortal part. To me it 
 seems far more reasonable that God, or essence, is 
 perfect and complete, and does not grow out of 
 earthy matter, nor can I more clearly see how the 
 soul germ, or essence, of man, which is the Divine in 
 him, could be eliminated from refined matter. Mat- 
 ter in combination could by no process of refinement 
 rise above its simples, or be more pure than when in 
 its primary condition. All the refinement it could 
 attain would be to fall back to its original condition 
 of simple and inert matter, in which condition each 
 particle would still contain essence in its pure and 
 germinating condition, ever reaching out its feelers 
 of attraction for other particles to join it, and build 
 a form in combinations of substance in some one of 
 the infinite variety of forms that forever people the 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 27 
 
 universe, the essence of no one of which ever dies or 
 is ever lost, or ever leaves its orbit to take on a 
 different form from the one of the kingdom to which 
 it belongs, bat which may vary and range in its own 
 kingdom sufficiently to be from the same germ, wheat 
 or dust, oats or barley, maize or smut, horse or mule, 
 duck or goose, Indian or Negro, Caucasian or Malay, 
 but never to rise over its kingdom, and be in one age 
 a horse and next a man, or first a tree aud then a 
 horse, as this involves the crossing of a line that for- 
 ever separates forms of being. Each kingdom 
 revolves in its own orbit in essence as in substance, 
 and hence man is man forever, and beast beast, and 
 plant, plant through all the eternal round of endless 
 changes that pertain to being. 
 
 The great point of discovery is to establish the 
 boundaries of kingdoms and the orbits in which they 
 revolve, and to settle the question of transitions. 
 Science has placed in our hands some well-established 
 facts in the species below, if not in ours. Worms to 
 butterflies, tadpoles to frogs, wigglers to mosquitoes, 
 ants with wings, and a host of other facts, all go to 
 show that man may cast his shell, or skin, and soar 
 away to his real life, as the articulata so often do, 
 and that this may only be the "ante-natal tomb 
 where " spirits " dream of the life to come," since 
 it has been ascertained that the simple elements of 
 matter may cohere and form bodies as remote from 
 our physical senses as the ethereal particles are. 
 Hence it is no longer a mystery how we may live on 
 when death takes the body; nor is it strange that 
 the spirit world should be a sphere in which forms 
 
28 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 grow, ripen, and decay, subject to the laws of ele- 
 mental life which certainly may as well supply the 
 growth of forms, and waste of forms, as those which 
 govern physical lii'e and growth here. But if we 
 would fix a bound to growth and decay, and estab- 
 lish a fixed condition from which there was no 
 change through eternity, we must certainly introduce 
 a miracle, or a new law, not yet known to mortals, 
 and most especially wonderful if it could keep the 
 joints of an organic being like man lubricated with 
 oil forever, and establish in his form a perpetual 
 motion that should run forever without supply or 
 waste. Such law is not yet known to operate in any 
 sphere except the miraculous and fabulous sphere of 
 the Christian's imaginary heaven and hell. 
 
 If the spirit world of our and other globes were 
 eliminated and refined particles from the solid por- 
 tions, and entered into the fixed and unchangeable 
 bodies of spirits or souls, however slow the process, 
 the whole amount of material would ultimately be 
 made up into souls, and the process stop for want of 
 material, if from no other cause ; and, indeed, if the 
 process had been going on through all past time it 
 would have used it all up long before this period, and 
 creation would have stopped, unless the Infinite 
 Mind could make new material out of nothing to 
 supply the place of that made up into souls. Any 
 process of exhaustion of the material must, of neces- 
 sity, unless it stop, use up any given or limited quan- 
 tity, as we know the globes to be ; hence that theory 
 is fallacious, or self-destroying. If, on the other 
 hand, the souls, after passing a long period in the 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 29 
 
 refined state, and enjoying mostly a range of ele- 
 mental being, are to be set back into fluids, liquids, 
 solids, and, finally, disintegrated particles of matter 
 appear again for another visit in .the elysian cham- 
 bers of a new celestial heaven, and thus go round 
 and round in this endless chain of conscious and 
 unconscious being, the theory at least is consist- 
 ent, if at first repulsive, to the finer feelings of 
 a sensitive person. We do not crave an existence 
 again in rocks and trees, if we have been there, nor 
 do we want to go back to saurians or monkeys, if 
 we came from them, — Which we do not believe, but 
 we have no objection to going back to God our Father. 
 We can accept the theory that our bodies, which are 
 of vegetable and animal origin, should return, if we 
 escape, intact, as souls, and are not dragged back 
 with them ; and when we have exhausted man and 
 womanhood, we can consent to begin again in child- 
 hood, only let us always be working out and devel- 
 oping human forms, if in a world of substance. To 
 me the theory seems rational and simple, that each 
 grade of matter, and each kingdom of beings, con- 
 tinues in itself, material never in any sense decreas- 
 ing or increasing in quantity or quality, combina- 
 tions forever doing it, and returning each cast off 
 particle to its own kingdom, whether a soul germ of 
 human form or a particle of the body, or a soul germ 
 of animal or plant. Yet, I cannot see why a germ of 
 plant may not range its kingdom from the crypto- 
 gamous mosses and ferns to the pine, the apple, or 
 the peach ; nor why the animal germ may not range 
 its kingdom, from the toad to the elephant, from the 
 
30 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 wren to the eagle, or from the rabbit to the horse; nor 
 why human soul germs may not be born under such 
 widely different circumstances, and with such widely 
 different surroundings as to develop a Negro or 
 Malay, a red or white man or woman, a base scoundrel 
 or a bright, intelligent, virtuous man or woman. 
 I do not see why souls may not range the whole 
 kingdom of human forms, and be in germ, or essence, 
 the same, and always perfect, — as parts of a Divine 
 Mind, which is perfect in the aggregate, as each part 
 in itself must be, of the same nature. 
 
 Perhaps the most difficult point to establish in this 
 theory is the individuality and identity of each 
 human germ of soul and body, whether in or out of 
 a form of substance. Without this we should, of 
 course, be lost and swallowed up in the Divine vor- 
 tex of being, and have no chance of individual rec- 
 ognition. In whatever combination you find matter 
 or substance, it is in particles, and these are never 
 destroyed by any combination, analysis, or separa- 
 tion ; and, if these particles have specific forms, and 
 never lose or change them, why may not the same 
 be true of mind, or essence, as of substance, and why 
 may not these germs be the real germs that never 
 lose their form or capacity to develop such in outer 
 expression ? To me it seems both rational and con- 
 sistent that it should be so. By this theory I can 
 surmount all the obstacles to immortality of soul or 
 mind. Yet some will think it nearly equal to anni- 
 hilation to forget the past in each succeeding stage 
 of being; but to a comprehensive mind there is little 
 of the earth life worth remembering for a very long 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 31 
 
 time. We easily forget the tops, and dolls, and toys 
 of childhood, and the feelings we once had for and 
 toward them, as we ripen in years ; and certainly 
 there is nothing in our business or social relations of 
 life here that bears a stronger or more lasting resem- 
 blance in relation to our spiritual future than the 
 toys of childhood to ripe man and womanhood ; even 
 our earth is of not much more account in the uni- 
 verse and range of eternity than the new top of the 
 boy of five or six years' experience in this life is to 
 him. Even in the little time we stay here our 
 feelings entirely change, often so that we sometimes 
 hate intensely the very object or person we a few 
 years before loved intensely. Not only do our feel- 
 ings change, but we also grow cold, neglectful, and 
 forget the most lovely and delightful partners of our 
 earlier years. Some people think somehow they are 
 to be made to love eternally, and know forever the 
 objects that are at the time the objects of love and 
 knowledge ; but if they wait ten or ten thousand 
 years, the love has changed, and the objects are 
 passed by in neglect. Why, then, should death put 
 a stop to these changes, and fix forever the objects 
 that are dear to us, or surround us at that time, and 
 leave all forgotten objects, and the feelings we had 
 for them, entirely and forever out? Or will death 
 renew all our earlier loves and recollections, and 
 keep them before us forever ? Or will it only bring 
 up the loved, and lovely objects, and leave out the 
 hate and hateful ? To me it seems we must be con- 
 sistent in our theories to sustain them. Truly, we 
 carry forward memories to the spirit life, because 
 
82 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 this is a part of it; but we have brought none here 
 with the essence of our being as it entered the cell 
 to form this body, because it was stripped of its sub- 
 stantial form on which it had recorded them, lost the 
 tables of stone on which the commands were written, 
 and hence brought no Bible with it from the world 
 it inhabited before, washed off all the stains in the 
 lethean river through which it walked on its journey 
 to the earth. 
 
 Edward Beecher, and other writers of some celeb- 
 rity, talk about "new-created minds," as if some 
 power was creating minds out of nothing, as it is said 
 to have created our world, at the beginning of time, 
 out of nothing ; but such folly of expression in our 
 intellectual age is unworthy of notice. Such bundles 
 of folly, absurdity, and nonsense as Mr. Beecher's 
 Conflict of Ages is worth only its weight for paper 
 rags in an age of reason and intellect. 
 
 Theological writers often speak of the conscious- 
 ness of the mind. The mind has no consciousness of 
 itself. Consciousness is a faculty of the organization, 
 and may be opened and shut almost as readily as the 
 eyes, and has no effect on existence, or even on life. 
 We are as really alive when asleep as when awake, and 
 yet consciousness has no cognizance of this material 
 life or action at the time. In fact, we are really uncon- 
 scious about one-third of our lives, and yet the ma- 
 chinery runs as well in one state as the other; but the 
 mind does not sleep, nor are its powers or functions 
 diminished. We can rest upon the fact that individ- 
 ual existence does not depend upon consciousness or 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 33 
 
 memory of past events, as we can surely live without 
 either. 
 
 Nearly every intelligent person will admit the 
 Divine origin of the essence, or soul, of each human 
 being, and claim a parentage in God for all men ; but 
 most persons are content to assert their belief, and 
 give no theory or law by which it can be so. They 
 usually leave the whole subject shrouded in mystery 
 about as absurd as the line of descent from David to 
 Joseph, by which the New-Testament writers proved 
 that Jesus was of the seed of David, when Joseph was 
 not his father ; but the Scripture must be fulfilled, 
 and so it was, even though a mystery to us. I am 
 not content to stop with a belief unless I can show 
 at least a reasonable argument for it ; hence I put 
 out these propositions: The essence of each human 
 being is in, and of, the Divine and Infinite and uni- 
 versal Mind, and must be, like it, eternal, perfect, and 
 unchangeable. 
 
 Christians who admit the Divine origin of the soul 
 must hang on one of these three positions if they 
 attempt an explanation : 1st. The soul germ, being 
 of Divine origin, may be made up, de novo, for each 
 being out of nothing by the will and power of God. 
 2nd. It may be made up for each being out of raw 
 material already existing, in which case it must be 
 composed of parts, or particles. 3rd. It may be a 
 unit which has eternally existed in the Divine Mind, 
 and is not changed by entering into the organic form 
 of a human being. The first of these involves an 
 impossibility as well as absurdity, and is, therefore, 
 rejected at once; for it is a well-settled fact that 
 
34 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 nothing can never become something, even by Divine 
 power, nor can something ever be reduced to noth- 
 ing by any power; so we will dismiss the idea of 
 "new-made" minds or souls from material which 
 did not before exist. Next comes a more consistent 
 and possible proposition : that the soul germ, or 
 essence, of each human being is made up and consti- 
 tuted of parts or particles, as is the first simple cell 
 from which starts the body of each human being, and 
 that these particles are in, and of, the Divine essence, 
 pure and perfect forever, but only having individ- 
 uality, consciousness, and accountability when com- 
 bined and clothed upon by an earthly or spiritual 
 body. I cannot refute this theory; it is not only 
 possible but plausible, and may be true ; but, if so, we 
 lose our eternal life, and the axiom which I started 
 with cuts off both body and soul, and even soul germ, 
 of each form, and we fall back in particles into the 
 great vortex of Divine essence, perhaps each, or a 
 part, of the particles to be again united in some other 
 soul, or never more to be clothed with a material 
 garment. But whether so or not, it is equally an 
 end to us and to individuality forever. Persons who 
 cannot, or will not, reason upon such subjects may 
 accept the first absurdity, and may as well append 
 eternal life to it as not, for it could not be more 
 ridiculous by increasing the quantity of absurdities 
 when the quality is the same. Persons who accept 
 the second cannot append the eternal life without 
 bringing in a miracle, and, by a stretch of Divine 
 power, reversing a law of nature, set up a continual 
 existence in opposition to all other facts and experi- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 35 
 
 ences and an axiom in philosophy. I cannot do this, 
 and hence, if I accept the first proposition, I must 
 lose the entity and identity of each human being 
 at some period of time. I do, at least in my feel- 
 ings, most cordially accept, and willingly believe in, 
 the third proposition, — that each soul germ of a 
 human or spiritual being is a single and simple parti- 
 cle of the Divine Mind, and, consequently, indivisi- 
 ble, indestructible, unchangeable, and eternally a 
 human or spiritual 'soul germ, — ever active, and by 
 inherent, unconscious, involuntary powers is forever 
 working out, or reaching after, a form of matter in 
 substance, and will ever have one when material is 
 within reach to compose it, — ever has, and ever will, 
 periodically live in some outward garment in human 
 form, if not shut out from material which, in the uni- 
 verse, is abundant. Hence, I see no reason why each 
 soul germ may not have had millions of bodies, and 
 have millions more, and, in fact, let its eternal life 
 run through the ephemeral forms forever and ever, 
 dropping each for a new start, as the cycles of time 
 carry it through each world and planet, with its sur- 
 rounding spiritual spheres. 
 
 If all germs of being have their individual and 
 eternal existence in the Divine Essence, and are 
 unchangeable particles of the Infinite, with the ever- 
 failing and ephemeral outer forms of matter con- 
 stantly dressing and undressing the soul germ, which 
 works and lives and enjoys existence, be true, then, 
 surely, we have a consistent and clear explanation of 
 ephemeral and eternal life ; and even though we may 
 dislike to lose consciousness and memory of events, 
 
36 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 now fresh and strong, yet we have experience enough 
 in both to enable us to be so used to it as to bear up 
 under the inexorable fate that gives us eternal life, 
 and changes our locality and partners, surroundings, 
 and attractions. 
 
 Incident to this belief arises the question of Divine 
 consciousness, motive, will, design, etc. These may 
 all be full, complete, perfect in the Infinite Divine 
 Mind, and yet not in its parts ; no one organ of the 
 human body or brain has either of these faculties of 
 itself, nor has the soul germ ; yet, with suitable and 
 perfect conditions of form and parts, each shows 
 itself in us. Yet I cannot see the law which gives 
 voluntary and absolute power to the Divine Mind. 
 I cannot better illustrate my position on this point 
 than by a conversation I once had with a D. D., at 
 the head of one of our colleges. He accused me of 
 fatalism, because I did not believe God could do all 
 or anything whether possible in itself or not; said he 
 was not a fatalist, and believed God could, and did, 
 do as He wished, etc. ; but upon my asking him if 
 he believed God could annihilate Himself, and all 
 existence, he answered: "NO," and, of course, at 
 once became a fatalist with me. So must most rea- 
 soned who follow this subject, and will at last admit 
 that God is Law, and Law is God. All we can know 
 of God is by discovering and knowing the laws of our 
 own and other existences. We never had a word of 
 communication from God, except in these laws, and, 
 indeed, it would be more ridiculous for God to talk 
 to or communicate with a finite being, if it were pos- 
 sible, than for a man to talk to his toes or the hairs 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 37 
 
 of his head. But still further is this from fact than 
 ridiculousness could make it. It is impossible ; for 
 essence can only communicate to essence in its own 
 language, — finite to finite, and Infinite to Infinite. 
 Trees communicate to trees, as they propagate only 
 vegetable in vegetable ; so is their language,— beast 
 to beast, and man with man. We set up no schools 
 for dogs or horses, although we do break and train 
 them ; yet they do not progress into education, nor 
 talk, think, reflect, reason, and argue with us ; and 
 man has even less capacity to correspond with Deity, 
 or to get language to and from the Divine Mind. 
 Fables and human assumption prove nothing, as 
 they are not evidence at all. I shall not bring in 
 any person's opinion to support my theory, if there 
 be any; for, although such is the common custom of 
 writers, to me the opinions or beliefs of others are 
 not authority, nor shall I fill up my book with the 
 texts of Bible or other books, for these are no author- 
 ity to me ; hence, I have only to place my views, 
 opinions, and conclusions before the reader, and leave 
 others free to do the same, and each reader to use his 
 own reason and judgment on them, and accept or 
 reject as seemeth right and proper; but I shall 
 greatly need Scripture, and other texts and extracts, 
 to fill out as large a volume as most authors would 
 make to set forth even half the theory I shall put 
 out in this. My subject, also, utterly precludes 
 scientific demonstration by chemical or other experi- 
 ments, and comes rather to the reader as a metaphys- 
 ical or philosophical treatise. What A, B, or C said 
 or believed on this subject must be sought elsewhere, 
 
38 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 and if others have, or have had, opinions like these, 
 I am not aware of it at this time of writing; nor 
 have I borrowed anything from them, unless it be by 
 impression from spirits, to which I am aware of some 
 susceptibility at times. But these views have long 
 been entertained in parts or as a whole, and satisfy 
 my mind on some questions that before were trouble- 
 some to me. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Divine essence manifests its superior power 
 and sphere in all its earthly evolutions and revolu- 
 tions. It is the aspiration of nature in our world, 
 and in the rocks or mineral kingdom exhibits 
 motion as its effect and evidence of its presence; 
 but cohesion and gravitation are its highest proper- 
 ties in such forms and garments, putting particles 
 together, and into compact forms. When the loosened 
 mold of earth enables another material element (life) 
 to enter into the forms, and constitute a part of the 
 structure, or clothing, of the essence or Divine motive- 
 power of germination and growth, then and there the 
 essence exhibits its aspiration, and puts out feelers for 
 a higher sphere, evidently trying, unconsciously, to 
 carry the forms of plant and tree away from the rock 
 and soil, for it counteracts gravitation, and draws, or 
 rolls, the particles up from the earth, and stretches 
 them out in strange and fantastic forms, exhibiting 
 wild freaks, and making havoc with the law of grav- 
 ity on which the student is made to place much 
 reliance in his early studies. But the effort of 
 essence in the vegetable kingdom to get away from 
 the earth in living forms is evidently a failure, as it 
 can only point out, but must retain its rooted anchor- 
 age in the earth, or, losing it, life departs from the 
 
 (39) 
 
40 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 form, and the balance of materials falls back, subject 
 to the same law as the rocks and soil. 
 
 The next kingdom makes one step more toward 
 the spiritual life to which the essence is ever point- 
 ing, as the finite force of man points to the Infinite 
 God, and to which it is ever drawing its forms by 
 unconscious actions on individual organizations, 
 which, in the forms, show signs of progression. The 
 animal, taking in another ingredient, or more than 
 one, additional to those of plants (sensation), is able 
 to cut loose from anchorage, and sometimes from solid 
 earth, and roam on the surface, in the liquids, and 
 above in the fluid air, still holding fast individuality 
 and life, which the tree loses if taken from the soil. 
 This is one more step, but still something is yet 
 wanting to get a form away from the earth, and retain 
 a substantial structure in which the Divine essence 
 can exhibit more powers, and greater joy and hap- 
 piness, than is commensurate with our earthly ex- 
 istence. It may fail to do this in the animals and 
 also in the plants. At least one more ingredi- 
 ent is necessary in the form to secure the growth 
 of a body that can cut loose entirely from the soil 
 and earthy matter, and soar away independent of 
 earth, water, and air, and still retain the forms and 
 identity. This step is reached in man, adding, at 
 least, one more ingredient to the structure, spiritual- 
 ity, though very weak in some forms, yet evidently 
 to be found in some degree of power in all human 
 forms. When this human form, structure, and com- 
 position is reached, this essence is able to ultimate 
 and eliminate a spiritual body, and go off with it 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 41 
 
 from the earth, and dwell in it in a more ethereal 
 realm where greater powers are unfolded and enjoyed 
 than can be on, or in, the earthy matter, like the 
 little insect, which casts its skin off in the water, 
 opens its new wings, and rises into air, to fly and 
 sing, and sometimes sting us, as an exhibition of its 
 higher and superior powers to those it had in the 
 water. Is this an evidence that these spiritual forms 
 are to exist eternally, and pass from realm to realm 
 when our earth has finished its course, and having 
 wrought out its mission as a globe, is dissolved and 
 recombined with other matter? To me it is not; and 
 it would take more than priests' word or pretended 
 gods' word to satisfy me of such a change and rever- 
 sion of the great law of nature, by which all forms 
 are combined and dissolved, — at least all whose exist- 
 ence is within the reach of our experiments. I can per- 
 ceive the permanency of essence in all forms, and the 
 escape of germs intact, perfect, and complete, as each 
 and every grade of form drops off and leaves the soul 
 germ to start again, and again repeat its outer exist- 
 ence in a new form of the same type as the last. If 
 each distinct kingdom of being repeats only in its 
 own grade of forms and existences, then surely man 
 did not spring from the animal; and as the animal 
 did not, and does not, spring from the vegetable, 
 nor the vegetable from the mineral, yet each is a 
 base for the other in part, I see no more reason 
 for supposing man sprung from the animal. I do 
 not think it would be more a disgrace to have our 
 origin in a monkey or a saurian than in a lump of 
 mud or heap of dirt, as the Bible teaches ; but I look 
 
42 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 for the authority in nature and correspondence. The 
 vegetable and animal kingdoms start at about the 
 same era in the geologic period of history. The ani- 
 mal does not wait for the development of the vege- 
 table, and rise from its apex; why, then, should man 
 wait for, and rise from, the apex of the animal? In 
 truth, he does not, although he is evidently of much 
 later origin here, and waited long for conditions to 
 fit the earth for his reception, and when he came it 
 was in rude specimens of form, — very coarse in text- 
 ure, uncouth in appearance, and various in com- 
 plexion ; several species yet extant show the variety 
 of origin, and different dates of inception of race. I 
 have not found evidence that one kingdom arises out 
 of the other in any of those belonging to our earth. 
 
 Next arises the question of distinction between the 
 animal and human. If the human is not a distinct 
 kingdom, my hopes, theory, and all the glowing 
 expectations of the future may fail, for we may fol- 
 low our ancestors, and return to the mold in which 
 we were originally cast. It certainly is the order of 
 nature to "fire and fall back." All nature, as all 
 planets, moves in orbits, and returns to each point. 
 There are no straight lines in astronomy; all are 
 circles and parts of circles, curves and arcs. Eternity 
 was represented by the ancients as a hoop, or snake, 
 with its tail in its mouth, swallowing itself, and con- 
 stantly running out and through itself, and hence 
 always complete. Such is man, and beast, and plant. 
 L>y man I mean man in his true life and sphere, the 
 spiritual. If man was only an overgrown (mentally) 
 animal, he might revolve in this life and sphere as 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 43 
 
 the horse and dog may; but since we are sure he 
 is a spiritual being, and has a life after and out of 
 this and his earth body, we are also sure he consti- 
 tutes a distinct kingdom of creation, and has his axis 
 and polarity in the spiritual life as the beast has in this, 
 where he lives and dies, turns and returns, and, appar- 
 ently, fills the measure of his capacity. It required 
 the scientific facts of Spiritualism to establish beyond 
 a doubt the real and true sphere of the human race. 
 Theology, which presented only a multitude of ficti- 
 tious heavens, hells, purgatories, sleeps, dreams, resur- 
 rections, somewhere and nowhere for a future life, 
 could give us no base for supplies of evidence for 
 supporting our claims to a separate kingdom for our 
 race. Its dreamy fables, and six hundred doctrines, 
 had all they could attend to in keeping down reason, 
 bewildering intellect, competing with each other, 
 and playing upon the passions of the ignorant and 
 stupid. The highest honor a man could have, in the 
 midst of these sects, before the facts of Spiritualism, 
 was to be an infidel, as that denoted one whose 
 intellect was superior to his passions and prejudices, 
 one who would not be swayed by interest against 
 reason. Most of this class of persons, who have 
 had a chance to examine the facts of Spiritualism, 
 have become convinced of its truth, and will also 
 look over the grounds herein presented, and, if well 
 established, can also accept them ; but I have no 
 expectation or hope of reaching minds who cannot, 
 or will not, reason; nor those whose feelings and 
 prejudices are too strong for the judgment to be made 
 up against them. I can only set forth my views and 
 
44 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 conclusions, and leave the rest to time. To me there 
 seems to be evidence to establish the conclusions 
 herein set forth, that the sphere of essence is perfect, 
 infinite, unchangeable in its particled germs of being; 
 active, positive, masculine, and paternal to all forms 
 of being ; while substance, or matter, is equally eter- 
 nal and unchangeable in quantity or quality ; but 
 negative, feminine, and maternal, forming the womb 
 and furnishing the forms of every organic being, and 
 the material and aliment for every changing form of 
 existence ; the essence running through every change 
 of form unchanged, and every form always and for- 
 ever changing, the essence taking on and casting off 
 particles of matter constantly, the same in the spirit 
 world as in this. 
 
 To me each globe or world seems to have a cycle 
 in time, and many circles, or strata, of existences 
 on, or in, the time of its cycle, revolving each king- 
 dom in itself the soul germs not confined in duration 
 to the globe, but each during a period sufficient to 
 fill out its time and development of form in its 
 respective kingdom, dressing itself up in material 
 clothing temporarily, and often repeatedly, — each 
 holding only by memory what it has imprinted on 
 its form. Animals at each transition, losing the en- 
 tire form, may have in each life no recollection of the 
 past, and human beings may lose all memory of 
 a past life when the form is entirely lost that carried 
 the pictures collected in and on it. We know our 
 earthy bodies fall back to earth, with all the ponder- 
 able matter pertaining to them ; every particle of the 
 solids and liquids, if not fluids, that composed them. 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 45 
 
 We also know that the imponderable spirit form of 
 elemental or attenuated matter continues its exist- 
 ence as an organic being, independent of the earthy 
 shell, and that the material of which it is composed 
 is also subject to the law of aggregation and segrega- 
 tion, and it seems to be only a little finer material 
 than that which our senses and instruments take 
 cognizance of. 
 
 Existence without memory of the past is quite 
 unsatisfactory to many persons, and yet we have it. 
 "We brought no record from God, or any previous 
 life, to this, and it seems as precious as if it were 
 loaded with a bundle of former experiences mixed 
 and entangled with joys and sorrows such as we 
 accumulate here. Should we go to another planet, 
 and develop forms and lives there, of what use would 
 such a bundle of memories as this earth life furnishes 
 be to us ? And if we have more pleasant, and larger 
 and longer experiences in our spirit homes, we would 
 hardly wish it hanging in a picture before us as we 
 have it in a life like this. I do not know but we 
 may be able in our ripened spiritual life to recall 
 and remember the past life, or a part of it, — at 
 least sufficient to satisfy us that we are immortal. 
 Possibly this gestation stage of being is not the one 
 sufficiently unfolded to enable our powers to extend 
 backward, and clasp in conscious memory the exist- 
 ence which we possess and inherit from our divine 
 nature, and the capacity of our soul essence, and yet 
 it may be wilhin the reach of us in a more advanced 
 stage of being. In this life we possess many powers 
 that are utterly unknown to the unborn child, and 
 
46 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 why may there not be some correspondence to this 
 in the next birth, — the birth of the spirit into its 
 full life ? The sphere of spirits that communicate 
 with us from the other life is mostly that of our 
 friends, who have but recently entered upon that 
 life, and of course know but little about it, and even 
 when some ancient or far-advanced philosopher has 
 given us his name and date, we have generally found 
 he has either been only represented by one near us 
 in capacity and condition, or has so far left his 
 advanced condition as to adapt his words and senti- 
 ments and truths to us as a nurse does to a child, or 
 a teacher to his pupil; and hence we do not get the 
 wisdom of the advanced spheres, even if their inhab- 
 itants approach us in the special intercourse of the 
 present time. We do not think of presenting philos- 
 ophy to infants, even if they are precocious. It is 
 not warrantable to crowd even the advanced and 
 premature children in our life, nor is it profitable to 
 us to be instructed in the wisdom of a higher life 
 when that wisdom is not in any way useful or profit- 
 able in this life, or as a fitting education or discipline 
 for the next. I cannot see any possible use (if use 
 is a law of nature) for us to retain in this brief and 
 troublesome stage of being the pleasant and varied 
 memories of a previous life. To me it seems better 
 to count this, the opening of a new progressive life, 
 so far as our feelings can reach and take cognizance 
 of existence; but if the intellect and reason can 
 reach the past and happy ages we have been through, 
 and couple them with the future by this short coup- 
 ling-link of earth life, it would be no injury, as the 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 47 
 
 feelings would not thereby be so enlisted as to 
 make us unreconciled to this. The germinal state of 
 any life has little of the real life or real powers that 
 pertain to that life in its unfolded condition. We 
 may come into possession of powers and capacities 
 (and I believe we shall) that, in this life, are not 
 dreamed of, or even heard of, and that may not be 
 known even to our spirit friends who now commu- 
 nicate to us from the border of the great celestial 
 sphere. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 GOD — FATALITY — IS WHATEVER IS BIGHT? 
 
 Of God I need not say much in addition to what 
 I have set forth in the foregoing chapter ; yet some 
 readers may infer from my statements that, if each 
 soul germ works unconsciously, such is the case with 
 the Infinite, or Divine Mind, and that organization 
 alone brings consciousness. Essence in the aggre- 
 gate is God and Law. It is forever clothed upon 
 and embodied in the material universe, and hence is 
 never without that opposite and combined relation 
 which forever gives it consciousness, intelligence, 
 design, and will, or voluntary action, such as we have 
 in a finite and feeble degree when in full and perfect 
 health of body and mind. No incidents of nature 
 are especially ordered, nor are, or can be, any laws 
 or orders of nature changed ; yet God forever acts 
 " both to will and to do of His own good pleasure." 
 Unchangeable both in power and being, and un- 
 changeable because perfect, and perfect because 
 unchangeable. Center is at every point alike of 
 infinite extent, and circumference is nowhere and 
 never, either in time or space. God-essence works 
 from an infinite number and variety of centers, each 
 in itself unconsciously, as the action of each organ in 
 the human brain, yet acts in the whole with a perfect 
 
 (48) 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 49 
 
 consciousness. Every finite power of the perfect 
 human organism is infinite in God. Only the perfect 
 man is a miniature God in germ of intelligence, 
 and that not in this life, but the spiritual, and not in 
 earthy and gestation form, but in the spiritual state 
 or higher life. There is no discord, no inharmony, 
 no opposition, no evil or enemy to God in the whole 
 vast universe, nor can there be, as it would be a sore 
 on the Divine form, like a cancer on the human body. 
 The " soul of things " feels none of our wranglings, 
 wars, or discords of human action. Nor does God 
 feel the jar that rends the earth's crust in the partial 
 or general irruptions of earthquakes, volcanoes, or 
 geologic upheavals. No jar of tumbling mountains 
 or struggling nations disturbs the harmony or order 
 of God, or His perfect and harmonious laws. The 
 maddened fury of rivers or man is the same to this 
 Infinite Essence. A crash of worlds would no more 
 disturb the harmony of the Infinite than a crash of 
 insects disturbs the revolutions of our planet. Even 
 Milton's fabled war in Heaven was never heard of 
 by the God in the universe, nor was the crumbling of 
 stones and darkening of the sun at the crucifixion of 
 Jesus ; and even had they taken place, they would 
 have been as harmless and insignificant as the stir of 
 an insect among the planets. All these old fabled 
 stories serve to mark "the twilight of the soul." 
 They are the toys of a religious childhood, the baby- 
 rays of our infancy. Men and women even in this 
 earth life as effectually outgrow such stories as fill the 
 Holy Bibles of all the early nations as they outgrow 
 tops and kites, whistles and marbles. 
 
50 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 God! What is God? Everybody who can talk 
 
 talks about (rod ; and everybody has some idea of 
 God; but we cannot expect "grapes from thorns, nor 
 figs from thistles," nor can we put a quart of water 
 in a gill cup. Capacity determines the qualities of 
 such ideas as are common to all human minds. God 
 is God to every mind, and that is about all we can 
 say for each one's idea of his or her God. It is well 
 it is so, for an idea of God is one of the distinguishing 
 features of our common humanity, and, of course, the 
 idea must be in variety to accommodate itself to the 
 great variety of capacities in the multitude of human 
 minds. How could an Esquimaux receive the Uni- 
 tarian idea of God, or a Samoyde the Calvinist's 
 creed ? How would Parker or Emerson be appreci- 
 ated in the interior of Africa ? or Beechcr among the 
 Arabs? Let each have a God after his own capa- 
 city. A toy God for childhood, an imaginary God 
 for the unfolding of the youthful mind, and Law, or 
 Essence, for the ripened age of intellect, which is 
 now breaking upon us in the philosophy of Spiritual- 
 ism. Jehovah for the Jews, and Christ for the Chris- 
 tians, Brahma for the Hindoos, and Manitou for the 
 Indians ; a Serpent for the Egyptians, and Jupiter 
 for the Greeks, — and a hundred others, ranging from 
 a Lamb to the great Grand Man of the Swedenbor- 
 gians. With the change of two words in Pope's 
 sentence, the ideas to me seem a fair description: 
 "All are but parts of one stupendous whole, whose 
 Body" Substance is, and Essence the Soul; the 
 never-changing, never-varying "soul of things," or 
 essence of all forms. 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 51 
 
 Fatality ! Are we, or are we not, fixed in fate, and 
 bound fast by decrees antecedent to our earthly exist- 
 ence, which reach to, and control, our every act and 
 thought? I will not seize the arguments nor the 
 evidence of the Calvinist to prove that we are ; for, 
 so far as that is Bible evidence, it is not to me author- 
 ity, and proves nothing. The evidence drawn in to 
 support fatality and total depravity, from the history 
 and experience of man, is like the evidence of the 
 senses brought in to support the Bible story of our 
 earth being flat. Fatality and depravity are coupled 
 together in the Calvinistic creeds ; pre-knowledge be- 
 comes decree, and decree becomes fate, and leaves 
 no free will, and, of course, destroys responsibility 
 and accountability in such beings as much as in 
 plants and animals. Such a doctrine could never 
 have succeeded except in the contrast with the 
 broader and more arbitrary one of Catholicism. Creed 
 after creed among the warring partizans arises on the 
 absurdities of each other, and incorporates almost as 
 great, and sometimes greater, in itself. The philoso- 
 phy of fate and free will is natural and simple as the 
 cause of day and night in the earth's motions, and 
 needs none of the God's-word authority or creed 
 absurdities to sustain or explain it. Each particle of 
 the Divine Essence is governed by immutable laws, 
 subject in the whole to absolute and infinite con- 
 trol, and works out its destiny, unfolds its form, and 
 ultimates in a form by those laws over which, and 
 in which, it lives, moves, and has its being, for it has 
 no will or choice of existence in the act or result. 
 Such is the soul germ of each being and organization, 
 
52 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 part of, and subject to, the fatality of Divine law, 
 government, and control ; hence, always perfect, har- 
 monious, pure, active, self-existent, and possessing 
 inherent powers of unfoldment, or, rather, embodi- 
 ment of forms in matter, for which, and the charac- 
 ter of which, it is never accountable, as it always 
 uses the best material at hand, or in its reach. So 
 each human form is combined and organized, matured, 
 and developed: it reaches by degrees to will-power 
 and intelligence, and as they act, and only as they 
 act, is the individual accountable or responsible for 
 the result, and that to itself. Will is never free but 
 as it acts in and by intelligence, makes the person 
 responsible for results; remove intelligence, as in 
 cases of idiocy and insanity, and the responsibility 
 ceases. Will is the executive officer of the intelli- 
 gence, and not the motive power of a human being. 
 Fatality rules in the essence of all beings; in the sub- 
 stance and forms are to be found incidents, accidents, 
 abortions, and perfections, voluntary and involuntary 
 action, accountability and unaccountability, harmony 
 and inharmony, right and wrong, good and evil, God 
 and Devil, — these all belong to material forms. Will is 
 never free, as it is an executive, with a power behind 
 it; intelligence is always free, when it is developed 
 to voluntary action, or sends the will out to execute 
 its decrees, — then, and never before, is accountable, 
 and only accountable to itself or other intelligences 
 for its dealings with them. There is no accountabil- 
 ity of man to God, for there is no voluntary act of 
 the essence or soul germ within us. A large and 
 worthy class of Christians have centrally summed up 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 53 
 
 from their word of God and their own feelings, based 
 on it, these three items : first, man's " deep, innate 
 depravity as an individual; second, his subjection to 
 the power of depraved social organizations, called the 
 world; third, his subjection to the power of unseen, 
 malignant spirits, who are controlled by Satan." 
 Such, in part or whole, can be little else than absurd 
 nonsense to clear, reasoning minds, especially if we 
 accept their conclusions that man is to be held 
 accountable, and rewarded or punished after all this, 
 for his accepting or rejecting truths he cannot com- 
 prehend or understand, and take joy or misery as an 
 eternal and unchangeable lot. Satan, of course, is a 
 fabled personage, and the malignant spirits are mostly 
 in earth forms, and ever have been mainly in the 
 churches, from and by which they have ever wrung 
 the breasts of martyrs for advancing new truths, and 
 a majority of the depraved organizations of society 
 have ever been religious, of which the Christian has 
 had its full share, and the deep, innate depravity 
 of man is a fiction which priests have used to get 
 control of the ignorant masses. 
 
 Whenever a soul germ has found in its reach mate- 
 rials suitable in quantity and quality for a good, 
 healthy form, intelligence has been the result, and 
 free agency — as it is improperly termed — is the 
 consequence, and accountability follows of course; 
 and when it has failed to reach, in quantity or qual- 
 it} 7 , sufficient material for such, it made an imperfect 
 form, and an idiot, or semi-intelligent person came 
 forth. Accountability accordingly failed, and so of 
 free agency. Nature is always pure and perfect, and 
 
64 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 never depraved, neither totally or partially. The 
 extraordinary and supernatural efforts to restore it 
 are, consequently, useless, and all religious changes 
 of heart have left the victims with the same nature, 
 disposition, and tendencies which in had organiza- 
 tions with education and surroundings corresponding, 
 are no doubt " prone to evil as the sparks to lly up- 
 ward," but not from any inherent quality, as it is 
 always the result of these three conditions of the 
 person, all of which are external and ephemeral, viz., 
 organization, education, and surroundings. Intellect 
 has power over some circumstances, and shapes them 
 to ends, but is itself dependent on superior powers, 
 lodged in fate, or immutable laws, which give or 
 withhold it without any voluntary action. These 
 laws penetrate through matter as the blood through 
 the living body, and execute themselves without the 
 least regard to what we call right or wrong. Calvin- 
 ism and Calvin teaches that the new-born infant 
 is "a seed of sin," and "abominable to God," and 
 yet even in this enlightened age Calvinism holds up 
 its sectarian head in our own country as high as 
 any, and tops out several colleges with its " abomin- 
 able " doctrine. I am glad they father it over on 
 God in the doctrine of pre-ordination, and thus 
 relieve us. This Calvinistic authority, with the 
 Synod of Dort at its back, declares that we are all 
 "conceived in sin," hence, of course, no regenerated 
 persons ever beget or bring forth any children, nor 
 can they spring from God, but must all come from 
 sinners and the unregenerate. If any are regener- 
 ated from sin, they cannot, of course, have sinful 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 55 
 
 acts in conceiving or begetting children ; but as even 
 the clerg}~nien's sons are as bad, wild, rude, and 
 wicked as any, no wonder these wise teachers make 
 for thein no exceptions, but put all into the general 
 law of wicked conception. But why do not the 
 regenerate stop this greatest of all sins in bringing 
 these wicked and depraved beings into existence? 
 If their doctrines be true, the greatest sin in our 
 world is to start one of these wicked souls for its 
 eternal misery. They also go so far as to assert that 
 we cannot think a good thought of ourselves, nor do 
 any but wicked deeds, except by the grace of God 
 acting on or in us. This is fatalism with a ven- 
 geance, and a most diabolical one ! In summing up 
 the depravity of human nature, and the fatality 
 involved in it, the Christian represents the effects 
 of our nature as "a glowing furnace constantly 
 emitting flames and sparks, a fountain sending out 
 polluted streams, a seed-plant of sin," etc.; "a stain 
 or infection pervading all the powers of the soul." 
 
 The most astonishing fact connected with these 
 wicked and absurd doctrines which thus implicate 
 God, and disgrace man, is that they find intelligent 
 beings to believe them, and have them preached; but 
 the doctrine itself furnishes the teachers from those 
 who accept and apply it, and try to prove it true in 
 themselves, and do carry it forward often in their 
 children by stamping it on them at conception and 
 in gestation. This species of Christian fatalism is in 
 itself sufficiently terrible to frighten all timid minds 
 back from examining the facts of a real fatalism 
 which exists in the essence of all things, and its 
 
56 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 purity and destiny. In the outer forms of organic 
 Life fatality is not the law universally, for where 
 intellect is developed, it, being a centerstanoc, to an 
 extent controls circumstances and changes relations 
 by its action. Of course, interior to it, and remote 
 from our senses, is the essence working outward, and 
 subject to the immutable laws of destiny, and though 
 you may put your house up two stories or three 
 stories higher, it is so accordingly ; yet, before it was 
 built, fate decided it should disappear entirely, and 
 leave no story. Yet the hight was determined and 
 decided by intellect at the time. But some fatalists 
 ask if the intellect could decide any otherwise than 
 as it does. It seems so ; yet it does not, and that is 
 the only argument to prove that it cannot do differ- 
 ent from what it does. 
 
 The Calvinist text is that we cannot think a good 
 thought, or do a good act, or have a good motive, 
 except by the grace and especial act of God ; being 
 bound fast in a fatal necessity to evil by our de- 
 praved nature, which ive cannot change. This phi- 
 losophy teaches that the essence of every human 
 being, of and in God forever, and always like its 
 parent, and bound in a fatal necessity to work out 
 harmony and ultimate happiness in every circle and 
 cycle of being through which it revolves, and find 
 for its body a complete ripening and development 
 before it casts it off, and always, and in every form, 
 receive full pay and reward for all its sufferings, 
 whatever they may be, in some stages of its growth; 
 that an earthly abortion is no abortion of the soul, 
 and a broken and miserable life here has its end 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 57 
 
 secure in fate for joy in the spiritual world; that 
 fatalism is on the side of purity, and not depravity, 
 and is of the essence of being, and not the form ; is 
 the divine motive of man's existence, and not man's 
 intellectual motive of action, — the former being 
 always right, and the latter sometimes wrong. I 
 have to alter another sentence of Pope to express his 
 sentiment and mine, with my use of terms, viz., 
 " Binding nature fast in fate, left free " human intel- 
 ligence. It is not the will that is left in freedom, for 
 the will is blind, and only goes as it is sent to strike 
 the blow; but it is intellect sitting in judgment, and it 
 alone is accountable. Insane persons have will, and 
 many act in, and by, will whom we never hold 
 accountable to the law, but whoso acteth in the 
 judgment of intellect is held accountable for his 
 action, "with malice aforethought," — a prepense is 
 the legal term. In our jurisprudence, which is far in 
 advance of our religion, we never hold the will to 
 account, but we do the intellect, and when the court 
 can be satisfied that an intellectual decision did not 
 precede the will, and act of the will, it releases the 
 culprit from the penalty of the law. It is not always 
 easy for superficial minds to distinguish between the 
 will and the intelligence, but there is as much differ- 
 ence as between the judge and the sheriff. Fatality 
 in no wise conflicts with the action or decisions of 
 the judgment, for it is anterior to and remote from 
 it, and carries it round in its orbit as the earth 
 carries the moon, while it leaves it to revolve in its 
 own orbit, and on its own axis. The Divine Mind 
 holds the whole as the sun holds the solar system, 
 
58 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 and, while it governs all, leaves each planet free in 
 its motions and short journeys. So man is as much 
 subject to the Divine government as planets to the 
 sun, and as free. Each human soul has its own body, 
 motions, and atmospheric belts, and passes through 
 its changes for itself. We cannot escape conse- 
 quences nor accountability by this theory, as we are 
 taught that we may by Christian creeds. 
 
 The Calvinist, while actually throwing all respon- 
 sibility for depravity and sin on God, still, with a 
 reckless Christian inconsistency, shifts the horrible 
 consequences over upon man, and tortures him eter- 
 nally for God's own work in giving him the depraved 
 nature in the fatal decree. But God had "power over 
 the clay," and made the vessel to dishonor, and we 
 have nothing to do but bear it, or await His grace to 
 save a few, of which we stand poor chance to be a 
 part, — or, at least, I do, for I certainly would not 
 choose to be saved by such a God, in such a way, and 
 with such company, and am thankful the doctrine is 
 not true, but, instead, that Servetus was Calvin's 
 judge in the spirit world, and not the partial God. 
 If Servetus could forgive him, God would not arrest 
 or reverse the decision, as He had no interest in the 
 affair between them. As the martyr's stake was the 
 only effective argument Calvin could find here against 
 Servetus's stronger reason and rationalism, it was 
 powerless and out of his reach when both were in 
 the spirit world, and such is true of the persecutors 
 and persecuted of our time and country. 
 
 A friend asks me why I use the masculine pro- 
 noun for God, when I use one at all, and I reply : 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 59 
 
 £rst, because it is a custom that I have no good rea- 
 son for changing; second, if we use the terms posi- 
 tive and negative, it is customary to apply the mas- 
 culine to the positive; and as I have no good reason, 
 except custom, and no good reason for changing it, I 
 rest it here, while I acknowledge no superiority in 
 masculine over feminine in our or any race or world. 
 It is a defect in our language that we have no suit- 
 able term without gender to apply to God, and hence 
 the very word itself implies the masculine, and, of 
 course, is pronounced in that gender, if at all, and 
 most especially in a country where so many believe 
 God was personified and incarnated in a man whom 
 they call the Christ, the Lamb, the Messiah, etc., — 
 all of which are in the masculine, the Lamb being 
 from the Aries of the Zodiac, and never applied to 
 Mary the Mother, which was from Virgo, also of 
 mythological and astronomical history. I do not 
 think the worshipers of Christ, as God, need com- 
 plain, since it is admitted his mother was a woman, 
 and, of course, he was an obedient and dutiful child ; 
 and some of them say his wife, or bride, is the church, 
 of which we have rather a poor opinion from the 
 specimens we meet with generally, and, from the num- 
 ber of churches coming from him, I suppose he must 
 be a polygamist. I think we had better let it go in 
 the masculine at present, except where we can use 
 the plural, and put in Father and Mother, Brother 
 and Sister, Husband and Wife, and I certainly have 
 no objection to such terms for God. 
 
 To return to, and once more state, the doctrine of 
 fatality. Fatality, preordination, and decree are a 
 
GO ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 pari of, and absolute in, God, who is Law, Essence, 
 Motive Power, and purpose] and contains all past 
 and future events at the same time, as time has no 
 record on the unchangeable, but only on us and 
 changeable objects of substance, which have forms 
 and measure in space, as well as time. But fatality 
 and perfection are both lacking in the changing 
 forms of our own and other lives on earth, and yet it is 
 often said a person who is born to be hanged cannot 
 be drowned, for if drowned, of course, he or she was 
 born to be drowned ; but the decisions of the court 
 may determine the mode of death for a culprit, and 
 after we know, we declare that was the fate, and it 
 could not be changed, but we never set up this fatal- 
 ism till the act is secured lest it be changed. Even 
 this free action of intellect is exceedingly limited, for 
 we often determine and resolve to get rich, or fat, or 
 well, and fail, because we cannot control enough of 
 circumstances to accomplish it. Wicked acts, and 
 oppressive tyrannies, and corrupt institutions, are the 
 effect of man's free agency, and proof enough that 
 he has power in his intellect to resist at least the 
 laws of nature to his own injury, or even physical 
 destruction ; but this free agency never reaches in 
 motive or effect the essence of his being, and never 
 corrupts or impairs the soul germ, or interior spirit, 
 which is the divine part of man, and lives in its own 
 fatality beyond the reach of free agency, and, conse- 
 quently, beyond the reach of injury from a false or 
 corrupt decision, or action, or motive. Free agency, 
 or semi-voluntary action, is the law of finite intelli- 
 gences, hence the blunders and entanglements of 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 61 
 
 social, political, moral, religious, and sexual life. 
 Responsibility and accountability hanging partially 
 to it makes the effects fall .on us with double force, 
 and we become doubly entangled by our efforts to 
 set up legal, moral, and religious standards, and force 
 all to observe and feel their value and importance, 
 when many are so organized that the standard is 
 entirely out of their reach, they being either too 
 short or too long for the Procrustean bedstead. This 
 free will, or free agency, would at first seem to be a 
 curse to man, and might be mistaken for the embodi- 
 ment of the Satanic rebellion of Milton's fables; but, 
 after all, like the knowledge obtained by Adam and 
 Eve in eating the fruit, it proves to be at last a bless- 
 ing, for we could hardly have conceived a worse con- 
 dition than the race would have been in (if there had 
 been any race) if Adam had not partaken of the tree 
 that opened his eyes to good and evil. This old 
 fable, no doubt, personifies and implies free agency, 
 or a voluntary action of the finite intelligence, with- 
 out which there would have been no volition in the 
 human world more than among trees or animals, and, 
 of course, no accountability or moral responsibility. 
 I think we would prefer to keep the knowledge 
 obtained by the fabled fall, even though it some- 
 times makes us ashamed. Sin, shame, knowledge, 
 free agency, responsibility, and accountability seem 
 to be near akin, and to come into the catalogue of 
 human events and experiences at about the same 
 period in Jewish history, which is not, however, reli- 
 able for any historic statement about the race or its 
 creation. Certainly, if man is not a free agent, he 
 
62 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 cannot he a sinner, as the sinfulness of an act implies 
 a reflective and voluntary action, with knowledge 
 that it is wrong. That there is some degree of sin- 
 fulness, and some degree of accountability, and a full 
 degree of responsibility in man in our state of society, 
 and in Christian countries, I think all must admit, 
 and this in itself admits so much of free agency, and 
 relaxes so much of fatality as to comprise these, all 
 of which are confined to the outward organic form 
 of earthly or spiritual body. Summing up the sub- 
 ject, it may be stated as follows : Fatality is in the 
 Infinite, free agency in the finite. The Infinite com- 
 prehends and controls the finite as a whole, and as 
 the ocean does its drops of water, while individual 
 intelligences revolve by their own central power and 
 act voluntarily to the extent of their own capacity, 
 which is exceedingly limited; man alone of earthly 
 beings, coming within the scope of intelligent organ- 
 ization and free agency or accountability. It is said 
 by some that an agent is not free. To an extent 
 this is true, and yet he could not be an agent with- 
 out some degree of freedom, — freedom at least to 
 obey or disobey orders and instructions which most 
 agents certainly have the power to do, at least intel- 
 ligent ones have. Agency is consistent only with a 
 certain degree of freedom, and not without it ; such 
 is man's free agency. It is limited in the outlines, 
 and not in the filling up, in the warp and not in the 
 woof. God stretches the warp and man puts in the 
 woof. Essence is the warp of life, substance the 
 woof, and the free agency is in striping the web in 
 filling it up. Existence is folded in the endless warp 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 63 
 
 around the beam of particled Deity, and the lines 
 cannot be broken as the shuttle of will is sent in its 
 filling-mission ; it stripes with white and black, good 
 and ill, love and hate, joy and grief; and when 
 directed by intelligence, consistently and in accord- 
 ance with nature's laws, makes a harmonious and 
 beautiful life-web of this stage of being. Take an- 
 other illustration : a boy is sent to school by his par- 
 ents ; he keeps on his way till out of sight ; then, 
 finding he is a free agent, he goes to the grocery instead 
 of the school-house ; there men feed him with liquor ; 
 he starts back, falls in the mud, reaches home, and gets 
 a whipping or a fever. Was he, or was he not, free to 
 act independent of the parents, or what power con- 
 trolled him ? Was it not his imperfect intellect that 
 made the blunder? Was it free agency to whip him, 
 and to give him liquor ? I would hold the lines of 
 accountability tightly over all, and make the account- 
 ability not to a Christian a Christian law, a Chris- 
 tian creed, or a Christian God, but to the law of 
 Nature, obedience to which would bring harmony, 
 peace, and love among the race. No arbitrary 
 standard set up by a person, a society, or a nation 
 can be the standard of moral or religious account- 
 ability. If each individual sets up his own for him- 
 self alone the variety would not be as intolerable 
 as the forced regulations of sectarian bigotry, but 
 even this would not answer with our inherited 
 depravity and perverted educations. As we discuss 
 Nature's laws, and set them up for the standard of 
 moral law and religious action, we get the truest 
 standard of harmony. 
 
G4 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 I ought, perhaps, to ask pardon for using the old 
 Jewish fables to explain principles, but, like modern 
 novels, and in almost the same ratio, they are 
 tw founded on facts." When Adam was only a machine, 
 and exercised no judgment, and did no voluntary act 
 but as he was bid, he had no sin, and showed no free 
 agency; but the first act arising from freedom and 
 his judgment was the sinful one by the story, and 
 yet to the race the greatest blessing that had or could 
 come to it, and especially if it, and it alone, " brought 
 death into the world," for of all curses none, it seems 
 to me, would be greater than to live on this little 
 globe forever, and be simple machines obeying orders. 
 Total depravity and total free agency are absurd 
 assumptions that cannot be sustained in the justice 
 of God or the experience of man ; but the partial 
 depravity and partial free agency of man is apparent 
 to all, and consistent both with the justice of God 
 and experience of man. The almost universally- 
 received doctrine (among Christians) of total deprav- 
 ity has led its ablest defenders into labyrinths of 
 absurdity from which Edward Beecher tries in vain 
 to extricate them in his Conflict of Ages, and a few 
 bolstering sermons. Such is equally true of the advo- 
 cates of absolute free agency, or absolute fatality; 
 neither is correct as absolute. We are finite and 
 limited ; depravity is limited ; free agency is limited ; 
 fatalism is limited; and man is limited in all his 
 powers, except only that the soul germ, or divine 
 essence, is eternal in duration and with eternal inher- 
 ent powers of organizing forms. 
 
 The depravity which modern Christian writers 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 65 
 
 attribute to nature, I attribute to our sectarian Chris- 
 tianity. Nation warring upon nation, sect upon 
 sect, individual upon individual, and the whole upon 
 nature, with the abominable and inconsistent and 
 cruel doctrine of total depravity and infant damna- 
 tion, which is a consistent part of it, has produced 
 more than any other cause the wicked and corrupt 
 state of society which we have around us. 
 
 Among the blundering absurdities of our common 
 Christian teachers is the doctrine that we all enter 
 this state of existence fresh from the hand of God 
 (at least if born in wedlock), on an even plane of 
 total depravity, accountability, and moral responsi- 
 bility, and hence are all alike to be charged and 
 credited with what we are in life, when the fact is 
 that none are born moral, virtuous, religious or even 
 Christian, some vile, wicked, thieves, drunkards, lib- 
 ertines, and some with a more religious germ, and 
 that not Christian, nor capable of being developed 
 into it, or any idolatrous devotion ; and all these are 
 inherited from parents, and forced upon us by cir- 
 cumstances over which we had no control, as they 
 preceded birth and voluntary action, and whether 
 called good or bad, were derived especially from the 
 parents, and the circumstances that surrounded the 
 mother during gestation. But a glaring absurdity, 
 that any simpleton can see, is the statement that 
 we are all the children of God, who is perfect, and 
 we totally depraved, and yet free agents ; and it is 
 equally absurd to fix any standard as the one govern- 
 ing all human actions, for we are organized in such 
 variety that some persons are in their nature and vol- 
 
G6 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 untary action as harmless as doves and pure as 
 angels, while others are incarnate demons from their 
 earliest voluntary action ; and neither is really nor 
 especially in the least attributable to nature, but to 
 the parents and circumstances that controlled the 
 mother from conception to birth, and the surround- 
 ings afterward. Nature covers the whole ground of 
 variety, as she does the great variety of plants and 
 animals, and would have variety in harmony, order, 
 and beauty. 
 
 Edward Beecher says the doctrine of endless future 
 punishment will never be entirely abandoned. What 
 a short-sighted mortal not to see that it is already 
 abandoned by nearly all educated and intelligent per- 
 sons ; and must, in a few centuries, by all human 
 beings on our planet and in the spheres, be abandoned 
 as a relic of barbarism applied to God in the ignor- 
 ance of man. That doctrine, and all others, which 
 have no other or better foundation or authority than 
 the Bible, will melt away before science as the frost 
 before a bright sun in the spring-time. Nothing 
 which reason does not authorize and establish on her 
 authority, can withstand the advance of science, and 
 the two alone and together must, and will, make up 
 the philosophy for the future in every department of 
 intellectual action. In such an arrangement the 
 sifting of our theology will throw out nearly all the 
 articles of belief and faith in popular Christian^. 
 We may certainly look for an age of reason, and a rea- 
 sonable and consistent explanation of the phenomena 
 of life, death, and immortality, before many years 
 to prevail. 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 67 
 
 Intellect is a condition of physical development in 
 finite beings; so is responsibility and accountability; 
 and so is free agency, conscientiousness, and consci- 
 ousness both of being and accountability in the 
 moral nature of man ; and as we are not born with 
 any of these qualities, of course, it would be unjust 
 in any power setting us into life here to hold us 
 accountable, or condemn us, for sins of others or our- 
 selves, even if we did, or could, commit them. We 
 are certainly entitled to a fair start in this life, and 
 if fate had doomed us to endless misery before we 
 were born, or entangled us in depravity from which 
 only a miracle could save us, it would be useless to 
 call God just, or good, or wise, to reasoning beings. 
 To me it seems consistent and reasonable that every 
 human being is born with an ultimate destiny, and 
 can feel security for absolute happiness, and a full 
 measure of joy, harmony and love in some stage of 
 each existence. Immutable laws work out their ends 
 in all existence, but free agency in intelligences is 
 one of the laws that works with the rest from its 
 introduction in our organic forms. Intelligence plans 
 and executes, succeeds or fails, in conformity with 
 its ability to control and place things and circum- 
 stances by its agent the will. If we admit, that God 
 said to man "Thou shalt not kill" as an imperative 
 command, He should have so made him that he could 
 not, or would not, kill, then it would have been 
 obeyed, and man saved. 
 
 Is whatever is bight? In considering this 
 question, much, or all, will depend on the use of terms. 
 It is doubtful whether there is any absolute standard 
 
G8 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 of right and wrong, that is, one which is not changed 
 by circumstances, and even reversed by the judgment 
 of man. Murder is generally culled wrong, but there 
 are circumstances under which it is approved, both in 
 wholesale and detail, by the judgment of most men. 
 So of all lesser crimes, as they are called. Chris- 
 tianity has at some stage, and under some circum- 
 stances, sanctioned or sanctified nearly every crime, 
 and, I believe, the Jewish God is charged with them 
 all in detail in the Bible as ordering most of them to 
 be committed by man. If we were to take the judg- 
 ment of men and authority of church, we should fail 
 as we would in selecting a holy day for a Sabbath, 
 where we should find some claiming each till all 
 were sacred days. By this rule, all acts of man may 
 be right and sanctified in turn, and on each deed of 
 life, that, more than any authority of church, would 
 be cited as an evidence of depravity, if not total. 
 Still, as we use words to name and qualify things, 
 acts, and events, and they are all in great variety, so 
 must the words be that represent them, and although 
 we change the term we apply to all under different 
 circumstances, and call the same both right and 
 wrong, yet we need both terms. That which is 
 wrong today, under certain circumstances, is not 
 right at the same time and under the same circum- 
 stances. It is not both right and wrong, although by 
 some standards may be held to be one, and by other 
 standards the other conscientiously held to be. How, 
 then, can we say "whatever is is right"? To me it is 
 wrong to hang a man by the neck till dead, even by 
 order of judge and jury ; to others it is right, although 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 69 
 
 both terms apply to it, and the act is not absolutely 
 either of itself; yet it is absurd to say it is right, and 
 I must yield my conscience to it; and it is equally 
 unjust to force my opponents to consent to my defini- 
 tion of the act. We see, then, that there are two terms 
 that convey a meaning which places an act directly 
 opposite in relation to our consciences, and the same 
 act in opposite relations to the same conscience under 
 changed circumstances. For instance : a rape, out- 
 side of marriage is, by nearly all civilized people and 
 Christians, called wrong, and, in the worst sense, is 
 so to me ; and yet, in marriage, it is called right by 
 a majority of the same people, though to me as heinous 
 in as out of marriage, being everywhere a crime and 
 sign of depravity, and yet many people really and 
 honestly believe it right soon as the parties are mar- 
 ried, and even the law takes its shield of defence from 
 the victim in such cases. But there are still other 
 causes for reverses in the qualifying term to the same 
 act. We all say it is wrong to steal the property of 
 another and convert it to our use ; but most of us 
 will say it is right for a man to steal food to save his 
 wife and children from starving, if he can get it thus, 
 and cannot get it otherwise. Using, then, these dis- 
 tinguishing terms to express the quality of an action 
 as it appears to us respectively under the circum- 
 stances, by and in which it was at the time produced, 
 we certainly have need of both, and could not con- 
 sistently use one of them for all phases under which 
 the act could appear. • I am, therefore, compelled to 
 answer the question that, according to our use of 
 terms, and in the sphere of intelligent action, and 
 
TO ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 what there is of free agency, all acts are not to me 
 right. Whatever is is, but is not always right, and 
 the same act is not always right or wrong even to the 
 same person. But while we view this in the sphere 
 of Unite and intelligent beings, we can also take a 
 larger view of the universe, and go outside of these 
 and all qualifying adjectives that are necessary to 
 define the relative corresponding quality of acts to us 
 either moralty or physically. To us, darkness is as 
 real as light, and cold as real as heat, but we can 
 realize that these are only negative and relative quali- 
 ties to us at times and in places. To the Infinite, 
 and even to us in a new position or condition, they 
 disappear, and are not either real or apparent. Such 
 is equally true morall} 7 as well as physically both of 
 condition and our vision and relation to the acts and 
 our present condition. What is wrong now, morally, 
 may, at a future time, be right, or lose all its quali- 
 ties of right or wrong entirely. No acts under all 
 changes in us, and all relations of us to them, can be 
 either wholly right or wrong forever. Nor is it prob- 
 able that any one act will remain on the face of time 
 more permanently than a dark day, or cold night, or 
 cloudy sky. Even now acts that stand back in his- 
 tory are often changed from bad to good, or from 
 right to wrong, according as we view them from new 
 standpoints, and under changed circumstances. We 
 cannot admit that God the Infinite can realize the 
 existence of what is dark to us, or of what is cold to 
 us, nor can we conceive any corresponding conditions 
 to the perfection of the Divine Mind. Why should 
 the moral darkness or religious coldness have a more 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 71 
 
 permanent, or extended, or durable existence ? Right 
 and wrong, or cold and heat, are neither convertible 
 terms, nor at all appropriate to infinite powers. They 
 have no meaning or existence beyond the finite use 
 made of them by finite beings, and even in that use 
 are mainly applicable to their rudi mental state of 
 being. Moral standards of right and wrong appro- 
 priately exist within the sphere of finite accountabil- 
 it}~ and partial free agency, but do not extend beyond 
 it or to the realm of essences. To the Infinite there 
 is no right or wrong; such terms have no meaning; 
 but the fact only exists in whatever is is, and with- 
 out quality to infinity. There can be no evil, or 
 opposite, positive or relative, to infinite perfection, 
 else it were not perfect : for to be perfect and infinite 
 implies no opposition and no deteriorating, or oppos- 
 ing force or power, and hence man cannot sin against 
 God. 
 
 The absurd idea of a Devil originated in the sphere 
 where darkness and cold had demonstrative existence, 
 and could be personified and represented. Finite 
 beings see and feel evil and wrong, moral and phys- 
 ical. They realize darkness and coldness (absence of 
 light and heat), are partially free agents, and account- 
 able, while God — Essence and the inner soul germ 
 of being — has no realization of such conditions, for 
 to it they are not. Fatalism, perfection, and eternal 
 action are its attributes forever. Discords, variety, 
 change, good and evil (which are only relative to 
 each other) exist in the outer sphere of substance 
 and forms, but never in the inner, or essence. The 
 terrible conflict between eminent Christians, which 
 
72 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 lias been going on since the Reformation, and has 
 crazed or bewildered so many able minds, lias almost 
 invariably arisen from admitting false premises to 
 start with, and acknowledging the fatal, foolish error 
 of the positive nature of evil and its opposing rela- 
 tion to God, with the depravity of man appended to 
 his existence as innate, and either total or partial. If 
 they had started right, the conflict could not have 
 occurred, nor the evil to them have resulted. This 
 has arisen in most cases from taking the Bible for a 
 guide, or a standard of truth, when it was as fallible 
 in morals, in ethics, in metaphysical truths as in geol- 
 ogy and chronology, and entirely unreliable in all. 
 An abandonment of this basis of falsehood, and an 
 escape from these muddy and murky waters of super- 
 stition and sectarianism, will give us a clear percep- 
 tion through the eye of reason of these great truths 
 of pre-existence and future life, of the endless rounds 
 and cycles of being, and the lethean pools in which 
 we wash off all the useless rubbish accumulated in 
 each preceding life or world, — or, perhaps, lose it only 
 as we pass the deeper stream between the cycles that 
 include many worlds and lives. 
 
 Much of our Christian theology has its origin in 
 the fables and follies of other books than the Bible, 
 and are so woven in with it as to be inextricable by 
 any but the best of scholars, and few of such are 
 willing to expose what they know to the ignorant 
 and prejudiced multitude of worshipers. There is 
 little doubt that their idea of the Trinity in the (rod- 
 head had its origin in India, as worshiped in the three- 
 headed God of the Hindoos, and the origin of Devil, 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 73 
 
 no doubt, was in Persia, and from the Zoroastrian 
 theoiy of the Zend Avesta, and good and evil powers 
 personified in Ormuzd and Ahriman, and their per- 
 petual wars and conflicts of day and night, or light 
 and darkness. 
 
 I cannot see how a strict sense of justice can any- 
 more exclude the Devil from his place, or from a de- 
 sire to rule, than it does his adversary; nor can I see 
 how it is right or proper for God and his servants to 
 secure and convert the children of the Devil, and 
 induce them to desert, than it is for the Devil and 
 his servants to do the same thing by catching God's 
 servants. According to the Christian theory both 
 are pursuing something like the trade of Negro-steal- 
 ing in Africa, in which the poor victims are made 
 into a sort of chattel-servants, and kept so, unless 
 they desert, or become fugitives. There is, indeed, a 
 curious use made of the terms right and wrong when 
 applied to one or the other of these great imaginary 
 personages. We are taught to call every act of God 
 right, even though the same in man, or the Devil, is 
 the most superlatively wrong of all the acts in the cal- 
 endar. The indiscriminate murder of men, women, 
 and children, said to be ordered by God, in the Old 
 Testament, we are taught to say was right ; but if 
 ordered by any other authority it would be heinously 
 wrong. Most persons would condemn as wrong, in 
 man or Devil, the act which is said to have brought 
 Jesus into our world; but, in the Holy Ghost, it was 
 right, and would be again, and a thousand times re- 
 peated if we needed any more Saviours of men not 
 already saved. Perhaps such a personage in our 
 
74 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 day might escape crucifixion, but lie could not per- 
 secution. If, as individuals, we fix in our minds each 
 a Standard of right and wrong, I do not know why 
 we should not try the acts of God by it, the same as 
 those of man, if He actually did, or ordered, acts as 
 man does. I could not call an act right in God which 
 I would condemn in man as wrong, when the effect 
 was the same on the objects. I should call acts of a 
 parent wrong such as God is said to have often per- 
 formed to the children of men ; and to me it would 
 be equally criminal in God, as a parent, if it were 
 true as stated in the Bible. Eternal punishment 
 could never, by any standard of right which I have, 
 be justified, because it can work no benefit to those 
 involved in it, nor to those who escape it ; and to me 
 it is, therefore, wrong in God to inflict it as it would 
 be in man. Neither does Edward Beecher's theory of 
 a pre-existence relieve God from the injustice and 
 wrong ; for if we come here, and suffer, and suffer on 
 eternally, and with totally depraved natures, and yet 
 do not know for what or where, when and how, we 
 have sinned, so as to deserve "of all evils the essence 
 and force," I can see no plea of justification by that 
 more than without it ; for, if the victim has no knowl- 
 edge of the crime for which he is punished, it is cer- 
 tainly unjust and wrong to him, and the only defence 
 left is a warning to others for the safety of the inno- 
 cent, and as no such result can accrue, there is left 
 nothing but wrong, without even palliating justifica- 
 tion. 
 
 I can Bee no consistency in the sentence "what- 
 ever is is right" when used by, or applied to, us as 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 75 
 
 finite intelligences. Infinite Essence, which is Law, 
 may have but one cause of action, one standard of 
 judgment, and one motive and object, and that may 
 be qualified with one term ; but we subvert, and per- 
 vert, and invert, overturn and underturn, and play 
 all the varieties we can, and need a variety of words 
 to qualify our actions, among which none are more 
 appropriate than right and wrong. It seems to me 
 that no act can, at all times and under all circum- 
 stances, be termed wrong or right, and yet some 
 are appropriately termed wrong and some right at 
 all times under the variety of circumstances. 
 
 Children, under some circumstances, are born with 
 so strong a propensity to steal as to be almost, or 
 quite, irresistible. In such, and to such, the act is not 
 wrong; no conscience condemns it in them, and to a 
 rational mind no criminality can attach to such per- 
 son ; indeed, to such person it is right. When two 
 entire strangers meet on the battle-field in opposing 
 armies, each tries to kill the other, and the success- 
 ful one feels that he has done no wrong, and usually 
 feels that he has done right, and has an approving 
 conscience. Yet if they had met elsewhere, and 
 under other circumstances, and he had slain the 
 stranger, both his own conscience and the public 
 would have condemned it, and called it wrong. Yet 
 to the Divine Mind there can be no difference and 
 no justification in the military array, or clash of arms. 
 Infinite intelligence can have no interest in our wars 
 and conflicts, not even in our theological controver- 
 sies and sectarian wrangles. Infinity has no stand- 
 ard of right and wrong ; but most of the miseries of 
 
76 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 our world, arising from persecution and vindictive 
 punishment, have arisen from persons setting up as 
 
 Divine authority moral and religious standards of 
 their own, and fixing arbitrary systems of right and 
 wrong, to which they would bring all the various 
 consciences of man, lengthening and shortening to 
 the measure which is often a cruelty and severity 
 that crushes out life. Well-educated divines, of high 
 standing in the church, often assert that God has, at 
 great self-denial, devised a system merciful to the 
 fallen sinners of our race, and that He deeply grieves 
 at the sins [wrongs] of mortals. Such a degraded 
 idea of God cannot for a moment have a place in my 
 mind, as applied to the author and parent of our exist- 
 ence and of infinite power and wisdom. Infinity cannot 
 grieve, nor can IT make self-sacrifices or sacrifices of 
 any kind. The wide space between us, as finite beings, 
 and Infinity, must be such us to forever preclude 
 any of the qualities which belong to us ever affecting 
 Deity. The very term, perfection, passes the object 
 possessing it beyond grief and self-sacrifice, and every 
 quality that can in the least disturb harmony and joy. 
 How such narrow and ridiculous ideas of Deity can 
 still be entertained by intelligent minds in our day is 
 to me almost unaccountable, except on the basis of 
 their own theory of depravity, by which we can sup- 
 pose they do not believe them, but teach them to the 
 ignorant to retain power and influence, which they 
 might lose by elevating the common standard of 
 knowledge and reason. Eat not of the tree of knowl- 
 edge — use not your carnal reason — has long been 
 the command of the Church. 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 77 
 
 Infinite Essence is eternal, and eternally the same, 
 filling all time and space, and comprehending all acts 
 and events; and all essential existences are forever 
 the same in quality, character, and attributes, being 
 part of the Divine Mind, with its perfections, etc. 
 To God, therefore, there is no wrong, because no 
 opposing power, no worrying experiences, no conflict 
 within or without the Essence that ever can influ- 
 ence or affect it in whole or in parts. In man, the 
 interior soul germ, or essence, sits enthroned, calm 
 and supreme, over all changes and conflicts of this 
 and every outward organic existence, sure of its eter- 
 nal inheritance and inherent powers ; forever right, 
 because forever in harmony with its parent, God, and 
 forever obedient to Divine law. Therefore, in the 
 sphere and realm of essence, where all is perfection, 
 harmony, law, and order, without change, variation 
 "or shadow of turning," there is no wrong, no blame, 
 no sin, no depravity. From that realm we drop down 
 into the outer world where all is change, conflict, 
 variation, right, wrong, either, neither, light, dark- 
 ness, cold, heat, both of body and spirit. In all the 
 realm of our outer organic forms there are the conflicts 
 and contacts of change, aggregation and segregation, 
 life, death, and still to us an immortality in the soul 
 essence in its individual existence, — an eternal pur- 
 pose, which its inherent powers and never-changing 
 activity is forever carrying out, and which is to build 
 u in matter house for mind " organic in the sphere of 
 substance a limited temple in which the various 
 powers can be expressed in the union of the mascu- 
 line essence with the feminine substance, — the very 
 
78 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 prefix, 9tt&, expressing its inferiority, — producing that 
 never-ending affinity winch we call creation, but which 
 is only the union and action of essence and substance. 
 Here is the sphere of right and wrong, good and evil; 
 here the realm of free agency and accountability, and 
 here man makes his creeds, Bets up his dogmatic and 
 arbitrary authority of morals, religion, and politics, 
 and forces by combinations individuals into subjec- 
 tion to power by the force of circumstances wholly 
 or partially controlled by the free agency of intellect. 
 Motives, often right when acts are wrong, and motives 
 often wrong when acts are right, and often both 
 wrong or both right when tried by nature, — the only 
 standard of infallibility in our sphere of existence. I 
 cannot say polygamy was wrong to the wise Solomon, 
 or to Brighara Young. I can only say it is wrong 
 to me. I cannot say it is wrong in the Shakers to 
 entirely separate the sexes. I can only say it is 
 wrong to me. I cannot say cannibalism is wrong to 
 the Feejee. I can only say it is wrong to me; and so 
 is the sexual tyranny and abuse of woman by man in 
 the best society of our own or any country. To each 
 and all of us there is a standard of right and wrong, 
 and we can each see it, but we all look through our 
 own organizations and our educated consciences, and 
 hence the variety of interpretations of what is right or 
 wrong. The cannibal, born and educated in his own 
 belief, is no more accountable for eating human flesh 
 than the ox for eating grass, or the thief or drunkard 
 for the effects of the overmastering appetite or pro- 
 pensity with which he was born. The Ethiopian 
 cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots; 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 79 
 
 but man can be educated into, or out of, such habits 
 as nature, reason, or experience teach him are de- 
 structive or injurious to him or his race. As soon as 
 any being rises to a scale of intelligent and rational 
 action and accountability, he or she must have a (not 
 the) standard of right and wrong, and both must be 
 apparent and consistent to his or her capacity and 
 development. Without it there certainly would be 
 no accountability, and, I doubt, if there could possi- 
 bly be intelligent action. All acts are not right; all 
 acts are not wrong; all are not either right or wrong, 
 but fall between both extremes. There is no uniform 
 human standard of right and wrong ; never can be ; 
 and the Divine standard is ever beyond human reach, 
 and perfect in itself. Our acts are never judged by 
 the Divine standard ; and, as we are not accountable 
 to God, are never tried by it, but as we are account- 
 able to ourselves and our race, we are tried by the con- 
 sciousness within, and the statutes without, ourselves. 
 Scars on the body are healed in this world ; scars on 
 the spirit are only healed in the next ; and the latter 
 are the sins against the Holy Ghost, spoken of in Scrip- 
 ture (if it had any consistent meaning), and are not 
 forgiven here or in the spirit world, but may be cured 
 in time, as wounds are here on the body. Right and 
 wrong apply to body and spirit ; are both physical and 
 spiritual in application and effect; both are epheme- 
 ral, and their effect transitory. There is no eter- 
 nal right or wrong acts or effects, and no universal 
 standard by which any one act is forever right or 
 wrong, for it is subject to " variableness and shadow 
 of turning." It is not safe or expedient to fix a 
 
80 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 standard of right and wrong for the acts of others 
 than ourselves, neither as individuals or communities, 
 for we cannot know the motives nor the conscience 
 of the actors: but it is right and proper to establish 
 statutory and legal enactments for protection of the 
 weak against the strong, both for the weak in arm 
 and the weak in intellect, and to keep these enact- 
 ments before the whole people, and, of course, en- 
 force them upon offenders as well as we can for the 
 good of the violator and the safety of the innocent. 
 Yet, by any such enactments, innocent persons must 
 often suffer and be wronged both in the violation 
 and execution of the law. It may not be proper to 
 call it law, for legislatures never make laws ; they 
 enact statutes, and sometimes discover laws and 
 enact them into statutes; when they do this they 
 have, so far, statutes that are in harmony with 
 nature. 
 
 Self-protection and self-preservation are, of course, 
 right even if they sometimes require a wrong to an- 
 other. The exact locality of the imaginary line 
 between right and wrong is like the equator, uncer- 
 tain, and never really ascertained ; but there is no 
 difficulty in determining the difference between the 
 frigid and torrid zone ; so there is no difficulty in 
 deciding by our standards what is externally right 
 and what is externally wrong in our judgment or 
 our feelings, as we decide the heat or cold. A man 
 raised in the torrid zone, and carried to Greenland, 
 would call it cold, when the one raised there, and 
 accustomed to that climate, would not perceive it 
 cold at all. We ought to be wise enough to know 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 81 
 
 our moral and religious standards are as different as 
 those by which we judge of temperature, and we are 
 no more to be condemned for the one than the other. 
 The legal accountability of persons to known and 
 acknowledged statutes of the government is a well 
 and fully-established fact, and to me seems right. 
 But the moral accountability of any person to any 
 standard, except the conscience within, is not well 
 established, and I cannot recognize any other for 
 myself, and would not force mine on others. There 
 are strange, and to us, with our present limited 
 knowledge, mysterious laws working in us, and shap- 
 ing us to ends and distances without our voluntary 
 action, or even knowledge. For instance : it is a 
 well-established fact that children born of a woman 
 in her second marriage, after the death of her first 
 husband, as often partake of the character and habits 
 of the first as the second husband, and yet our sci- 
 ence has no rational explanation to dispose of the 
 fact. This, and many such facts, the laws for which 
 are unknown, must affect vitally the rule of account- 
 ability, and may establish at last the assertion that 
 the sins of the fathers are visited on the children in 
 several generations, and even scattered so as to affect 
 psychologically other children than their own. In 
 the above case, there can be no particles left by the 
 first man that form part of the bodies of the succeed- 
 ing man's children ; but there may be, and no doubt 
 are, particles, elemental, left with the woman that 
 go into and help to make up the spirit bodies of 
 the children born at later periods from other fathers. 
 We may find that the elements that make up the 
 
82 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 s]>i ritual body are gathered from more sources than 
 those which make up the physical, and are secreted 
 differently, retained longer in the female, and im- 
 parted by equally natural law to form the real child, 
 or spirit form. It is also well established thatia man 
 will carry forward characteristics of a former and 
 deceased wife, and give them to the children of a 
 second or third wife. All those, and many more, 
 such facts must be taken into account when we set 
 up standards of right and wrong, and hold persons 
 accountable to them. There can be little doubt of 
 the correctness of Robert Owen's theory, that our 
 characters are formed for us, and not by us ; but to 
 me this would only modify and not destroy account- 
 ability. It would only bring the moral standard 
 within the line of circumference of each conscience, 
 and under the jurisdiction of intelligent free agency. 
 A Feejee to his conscience ; a Turk to his ; an Indian 
 to his ; an African to his ; a Hindoo to his ; a Catho- 
 lic Christian to his; and a Materialist to his, — each 
 to his own standard, both of free agency and consci- 
 ence. If Adam, in the fable, did not know good 
 from evil, he could not be accountable for evil, of 
 course, and Eve certainly could not be blamed for 
 yielding to the allurements of the serpent, if they 
 overpowered her feelings, and she had no knowledge 
 of consequences, and especially as no command was 
 given her not to eat the fruit. Individuals knowing no 
 wrong can do none, and no standard outside of the 
 person can decide for such person what is right or 
 wrong ; but each intelligent person has a conscien- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 83 
 
 tious standard within, and by it must make a distinc- 
 tion between acts that determine some to be right 
 and others wrong, or opposite in quality. Right and 
 wrong, good and evil, are relative. Existence, per- 
 fection, and harmony are absolute and positive in the 
 Divine Essence where the whole and its parts are 
 forever the same. In its sphere all is right, and 
 all the same perfection, — our Congregational and 
 Episcopal convention resolutions and declarations of 
 faith to the contrary notwithstanding. Where there 
 is no language of words to represent conditions, of 
 course there can never be right and wrong, and in 
 the essence of the universe there is only perpetual 
 harmony, order, and law. 
 
 The finite standards of mortals, set up by tyrants, 
 either as individuals, governments, or churches, to 
 regulate the morals of human beings, have ever 
 been nearly or quite as destructive as preservative of 
 harmony, order, happiness, and human prosperity. 
 Such institutions are, therefore, morally wrong. 
 
 If the Divine Mind had created man with full 
 powers of free agency, and at the same time so consti- 
 tuted him that lie could commit a sin involving end- 
 less misery, and even with a complete knowledge 
 (which he never has had) of the terrible conse- 
 quences of the sin, and man ever did commit the sin 
 and suffer the penalty, there is not even a possibility 
 of rescuing God from the consequences and responsi- 
 bility, nor from having done a wrong action. For 
 certainly in man such act, with the knowledge and 
 power, would be wrong, and, of course, must also be 
 
84 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 in God by man's judgment. I cannot screen God 
 from any law of justice, or of right and wrong, by 
 which I try myself or my fellow-beings, so long as I 
 bring his acts within the scope of human powers, 
 capacities, and principles. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 DISCRETED DEGREES AND DISTINCTIVE ELEMENTS 
 IN ORGANIC FORMS. — SEXUALITY. 
 
 The simple and Omnipotent Essence filling all 
 space, and blending in every form of being with the 
 various and ever-varying exhibitions of substance, 
 also in infinite space, produces the many discreted 
 degrees of finite intelligence always in accordance 
 with the peculiar combination of ingredients com- 
 posing the form, in the same manner as the mixture 
 of colors in painting produces the tints and shades. 
 
 Distinct degrees exist in the essence germs of all 
 forms, each permanent and eternal. The soul germ 
 of a human being will never develop a frog or horse, 
 if it cannot a man, and the essence germ of a dog 
 will never ultimate a human being. Every kingdom 
 works ever in its own world, but different species 
 may, to a limited extent, hybridize even though 
 science proves that two species cannot propagate 
 in the hybrid, but must go or come to one side 
 of the line, carrying the hybrid in. What distinct- 
 ive features in the spirit bodies pertain to the differ- 
 ent human species I cannot yet say. Whether the 
 Kegro and Indian keep distinct features in their spirit 
 forms permanently through that life, we have not 
 
 (85) 
 
86 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 yet had fully established by the testimony of the few 
 who have visited us from that country. If the dis- 
 tinct degrees existed only in the outer forms of being, 
 we might find human soul germs in animals, and be 
 guilty of murder in taking their lives as much as 
 in taking the life of a fellow-being at its birth. Yet 
 the degree that distinguishes the human from the ani- 
 mal may not establish a principle by which there 
 could be a similar one between the different human 
 species. Indeed, there may be no distinction be- 
 tween the soul germ of one species and another of 
 our race, and hence justice would require the same 
 great and fundamental principles of honor and jus- 
 tice to be exercised over each division of the race, 
 even if weaker, especially by the stronger over the 
 weaker in arm or intellect. A distinct degree in 
 form may distinguish permanently a soul germ of 
 man from that of an animal and not of an Indian 
 from a Negro or Caucasian ; for under various and 
 changed circumstances one can be made to possess 
 all the qualities and characteristics of the other 
 species, and this can be carried to a very great ex- 
 tent ; but with no surrounding circumstances can 
 any species of animals be made human, or any human 
 be reduced fully to animal. There is an evident dif- 
 ference between the soul germs of the individuals of 
 the different kingdoms, and, for aught I know, may be 
 between some species or races of men and animals. 
 
 A question arises here in regard to sexuality. Is 
 it not a permanent distinction of the soul germ, or 
 essence? From such evidence as we now possess it 
 seems not to be a distinction in the essence. Physi- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 87 
 
 ology gives sufficient evidence to induce in some 
 minds the belief that it is only a physical condition of 
 development. Mentally and spiritually each sex may 
 represent the other, and some persons believe we 
 have no sexual distinction in the spirit life ; but there 
 is plenty of evidence of the sexuality in that life as 
 distinct as in this, and also in the gestation that pre- 
 cedes this, except in the first stages of that state and 
 in the soul germ, where it cannot be detected if it 
 exists. Some men are distinctly feminine, and some 
 women masculine, in every essential quality of char- 
 acter, and could easily pass through life as members 
 of the sex to which they do not belong, if sufficiently 
 cautious, and some fall physically between both sexes, 
 — sexual abortions. It seems to be almost or quite 
 certain that circumstances, partially under our con- 
 trol, determine the sex of offspring ; and, no doubt, 
 when we know more of the laws of generation, and 
 depend more on generation than on regeneration for 
 goodness and salvation, we may entirely control the 
 sex of the child in and after conception. But it is 
 not probable (nor, if my theory be correct, possible,) 
 that human beings can be produced from the germs 
 of animal life, nor in any but the human mold. I am 
 aware that persons with acute feelings and obtuse 
 intellect will shudder at a theory that peoples infi- 
 nite space and eternal time with unconscious soul 
 germs, ever seeking, by involuntary inherent uncon- 
 scious action, embodiment in matter a "home for 
 mind," and forever finding it, and living on and on, 
 round and round, through circles and cycles of im- 
 mense duration and countless numbers. This the- 
 
88 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 ory, when compared to the narrow system of Christi- 
 anity, is like modern astronomy compared to the 
 ancient, and startles the thinker and feeler in much 
 the same manner as that system did when first 
 broached. I claim for this theory little, if any, origi- 
 nality. It has been set forth, at least in fragments 
 and parts, perhaps the whole of it, and I only put it 
 together in my feeble and imperfect way. When 
 we understand the laws of generation, and observe 
 them in our race, even as well as stock-breeders do 
 in those of animals, we shall soon see the fallacy of the 
 doctrine of depravity, original sin, and Adam's fall. 
 "When we learn that with the soul germs of Divine 
 Essence, pure and perfect, every form of human 
 being is started, and that we furnish the material for 
 both body and spirit forms, and train the form in its 
 physical and spiritual growth as we dc a plant in the 
 garden or green-house, we shall then know that 
 society is to a great degree responsible for the con- 
 duct and character of its individuals, and mainly for 
 the acts of its criminal victims. The most deplorable 
 picture which our nation and civilization presents is 
 the reckless manner in which our laws of marriage, 
 and social standard of morals, peoples our country 
 with victims of lust, depravity, dissipation, supersti- 
 tion, selfishness, revenge, and every vice that is so 
 prevalent in our cities and large towns. Could the 
 veil be lifted that hides the real life of our public, 
 popular men and women, and especially the profes- 
 sional, and most especially the clergy, from outer 
 observation, and the knowledge of character with the 
 knowledge of persons as they are in the other life, 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 89 
 
 how astonished would the more honest and deceived 
 masses be ? No pen can write, no tongue can tell, 
 what a nauseous mass of corruption is often hidden 
 under the outer garb of popularity and clerical sanc- 
 tity. After many years of study, observation, and 
 research, with extraordinary means and facilities for 
 gaining knowledge of the real and true social state 
 in our country, I am constantly awakened and 
 startled by new discoveries revealing degrees of 
 social depravity that more and more strengthen the 
 doctrine of its totality, and justify the Christian 
 consciousness on which it has been mainly based, 
 with Bible testimony, and might give its advocates 
 a strong position were it not a fact that their regen- 
 erated souls and exempted saints are as bad as others, 
 and that we can find the cause in the wicked, deceit- 
 ful, false, and corrupting institutions of our Chris- 
 tian country. As well might we attribute the foot- 
 rot in sheep to total depravity in the nature of sheep 
 as to attribute scrofula in the body, or lust in the 
 passions of a human being, to depravity, and as well 
 pray God to remove the disease from the sheep as 
 from our children while we feed ourselves and them 
 on pork, whiskey, tobacco, and other scrofulous and 
 lust-supplying substances. Some writer says : " There 
 is no use talking about religion with no flour in the 
 house," so there is no use talking about purity of 
 the affections with a mouth full of tobacco and the 
 stomach full of swine's flesh and fat, preserved in 
 poison-whiskey. While we will use it, and marry 
 our most vicious, dissolute, corrupt, vulgar, wicked, 
 profane, and dissipated men and women for fathers 
 
90 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 and mothers of the next generation, how can we 
 expect any but a depraved race? If God does it, no 
 human breeder of stock docs as badly. Certainly, in 
 society, as it now is, especially in the large cities, 
 this class does a large share of the breeding; in the 
 better and more moral families there are generally 
 far less children born, and more of those born die in 
 infancy. Is there, or is there not, any remedy? 
 Christianity has none, or has applied none ; neither 
 has the State as yet found a remedy. Neither can it 
 while we admit the doctrine of natural total deprav- 
 ity, and the God-creation of all children when born 
 with corrupt and depraved natures inherited from 
 Adam. If God is the parent of all children, and 
 author of all existence, what right has man to estab- 
 lish any rules, except such as God has given and set 
 up for the regulation and propagation of the race ? 
 Of course, none ; and hence the Church sets up and 
 establishes her law of marriage as God-given and 
 ordained by Him, and the State enacts it ; and the 
 corruptions follow, because it is unnatural, and an 
 abuse of nature to put woman into the power of man, 
 and bind her by law or religion to such corrupt and 
 lustful bodies and souls as we are constantly breed- 
 ing in our diseased condition of sexuality, and under 
 authority of Church and State. 
 
 Summing up, and setting forward this subject, we 
 it that the Divine Essence in human soul germs 
 lias, from all eternity, in the midst of an infinite 
 number of worlds, been unconsciously collecting, 
 developing, ripening, and abandoning organic human 
 forms, each of which has been more or less varied in 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 91 
 
 material, quality, quantity, and structure, by sur- 
 rounding circumstances at its organic formation, 
 which has ever, and in each, varied the quantity and 
 degree of intelligence, free agency, and moral account- 
 ability, all of which are the qualities of essence and 
 substance combined in an organic human form, — 
 coming with it and ceasing with it, to be renewed 
 again in the next ; shutting us up and opening us 
 by the same law and uniformity that we are shut 
 and opened in by sleep and wakefulness which we 
 soon learn not to dread as annihilation. In sleep we 
 are not accountable, intelligent, or conscious ; and 
 it is as virtually annihilation as is the space the 
 soul germ walks over between two worlds, or two 
 organic bodies. In this theory we can see the neces- 
 sity of properly surrounding every soul germ that 
 enters and commences a form in our world, and of 
 properly nursing and providing for its perfect and 
 harmonious development of a good body and spirit 
 form, that its career of life here and with our earth 
 may be a pleasant and profitable one to itself and all 
 it associates with. 
 
 It is not more strange or inconsistent that essence 
 should be particled in soul germs than that matter 
 such as we can deal with chemically should be par- 
 ticled. The particles of iron are different from those 
 of gold, and the one cannot be changed to the other 
 even in form. Those of light are different from the 
 electric particles, etc. There are constitutional and 
 absolute differences in the forms of the simple parti- 
 cles in these and other cases, and no chemical disso- 
 lution and recombination can change them. They 
 
92 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 are permanent, the flat particle in gold giving it the 
 greatest maleability of any metal, and the globular 
 
 particle of iron enabling ns to work fine wire threads, 
 etc. Why may not essence be *as well and as per- 
 manently particled in germs of being, some of which 
 forever make up the human form, and some the ani- 
 mal, and some the vegetable, and those particles not 
 only make up the form, but the quality thus and so 
 formed in so far as specific powers are concerned for 
 each kingdom? When once we enter into and en- 
 gage in experiments and speculation in this interior 
 realm of being, we may find as great a field for dis- 
 covery and theory as in that of outer and ponderable 
 matter. If we could once lift off the great fiat stone 
 of superstition and bigotry, and search in the spirit 
 world of forms as we do in chemistry, there is no 
 counting the treasures that would be found awaiting 
 us in these rich mines of essence and substance. 
 
 Love is undoubtedly particled material substance, 
 which enters into the combination and formation of 
 the human form and spirit body, and if sexual passion 
 is to be attributed to it, it also enters into the forma- 
 tion of our other bodies and those of animals, if not 
 of plants. The sexual passion may be an element 
 separate and of somewhat similar, and somewhat dis- 
 similar, nature from love, and yet be often drawn in 
 and blended with the element of love. It is cer- 
 tain that there are many ways in which love shows 
 its strongest powers without a sign of the sex- 
 ual feeling, — as in a mother's love for her child, 
 which is, perhaps, the strongest expression of love 
 we find on earth ; but the love of some males and 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 93 
 
 females, who have had no sexual relations, is perhaps 
 sometimes as strong, if not stronger, and such is sel- 
 dom strengthened, but often weakened, by more inti- 
 mate sexual union. Sometimes the new element (if 
 it be one), or the new and extended expression of 
 love in sexual passion after marriage, centralizes and 
 often destroys the first pure and strong courtship, 
 love of each sex, and quite often of the female. 
 There are strong grounds for asserting that sexual 
 passion exists in, or is produced by, another and 
 grosser element than pure love. Certainly the love 
 of God, of which Christians talk so much, if it have 
 any existence at all (which I sometimes doubt) has 
 not manifested this passion in its earthly parentage, 
 and also the love for God, where females love Jesus 
 through the beautiful pictures of Him in the Catho- 
 lic churches, or the ideal pictures in other churches, 
 and where the church is called the bride or wife of 
 Jesus : sometimes, at least in low and sensual organi- 
 zations, such may bring in the sexual passion in feel- 
 ing, if not language. There are plenty of cases of 
 love without a single sign or emotion of passion of 
 this nature, and such prove that love can and does 
 exist without the thought of sexuality, and often 
 sexuality exists without any passion, if not without 
 love. The peculiar manifestation of sexual passion 
 in animals, and especially in the female, and to some 
 extent also in our race in that sex, would go to show 
 that it was not the effect of love, but of some element 
 more fluctuating and partially periodical in some 
 organizations where love is strong and permanent, or 
 where it is almost wanting. In some the passion is 
 
04 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 very strong, and love can scarcely be detected; in oth- 
 ers, love is very strong all the time, and this passion 
 entirely wanting, or only periodical and slight. Fur- 
 ther inquiry and experiment may satisfy ns of the 
 existence of two distinct elements producing these 
 manifestations, and in some persons, or cases, or sea- 
 sons, blended in producing the effects we witness of 
 mutual love and sexual passion, and in others the 
 one and not the other, even though sexuality and 
 proper physical relations exist for both at the time. 
 The infinite region and infinite variety of substance 
 no doubt includes many elements which are only 
 recognized by us in their effects which we witness, 
 and which are often attributed to wrong causes. It 
 is, indeed, a serious question how far the element of 
 love is subject to the intellect or free agency of the 
 mind. We are, by our pious and God-loving Chris- 
 tians, held to be accountable for not loving God and 
 the church, even though we find no love in us, and 
 cannot get any from those around us. Of course, if 
 we are without the element, we cannot give it, and 
 if we have it, it is doubtful if we can give it by any 
 voluntary action of the intellect, with the will for an 
 executive officer. Superficial minds that know noth- 
 ing about philosophy prate about free love, and also 
 about God being Love, in which case, of course, 
 Love is God, and would be free in whole and in part 
 in defiance of all human power; but Love is not 
 God, nor more free than electricity or other elements, 
 nor more subject to the will or intellect of man. 
 Both are subject to laws, and so far as we can con- 
 trol the laws we control the elements subject to them 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 95 
 
 respectively. When men understand that both love 
 and the sexual passion are elements, or an element, 
 and that they and their effects are subject to laws, as 
 electricity and other elements, we shall better know 
 how to establish rules to regulate it. If the mater- 
 nal and paternal attachments are the effects of love, 
 it is certainly found in animals ; and if the attach- 
 ment we call love of God is to be attributed to the 
 same element, there might be some corresponding 
 feature in animals ; and yet we find none, and attrib- 
 ute the cause to the organic structure in the lack of 
 religious organs in the brain. But this theory puts 
 it in the essence, or soul germ, where there exists a 
 fundamental and eternal distinction, making of them 
 separate kingdoms. Yet, as lime and other ingre- 
 dients of a ponderable nature are found in common 
 as parts of the forms in both kingdoms, so may love 
 and lust be, and yet they may be so ethereal and 
 subtle as to compose a part of the spiritual bodies of 
 human beings as well as to be manifest in the outer 
 forms of both kingdoms. Society will some day be 
 able to regulate its institutions so as to avoid the 
 terrible calamities arising from our miserable system 
 of propagation under the almost universally-forced 
 relation of maternity in marriage, and the usually 
 accidental cases out of marriage. It seems strange 
 that we cannot treat the subject of love, marriage, 
 parentage, and sexual intercourse scientifically as 
 we would any other subject, and by that means 
 secure the necessary knowledge fur improving the 
 race in each succeeding generation. At present, 
 society is debased, increased, and degraded by the 
 
OG ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 tyranny and bondage of social organizations rather 
 than improved, especially in our large cities, where de- 
 pravity much more prevails. There is no subject on 
 which the people are so ignorant, which is important 
 in life, as the propagation of the race, and sexual 
 relations of life. Marriage usually unites two young 
 persons, one or both utterly and entirely ignorant of all 
 that pertains to their sexual passions, and, of course, 
 utterly disqualified to become parents, and in their 
 new relation to secure health, harmony, and happi- 
 ness. Why not educate them scientifically on the mari- 
 tal relations, and the use and abuse of themselves, as 
 on diet, disease, respiration, etc. ? A breeder of ani- 
 mals would be called a poor and foolish speculator who 
 would breed constantly only from diseased animals, 
 and more especially if he paired and mated simply on 
 the sexual attraction which draws many men and wo- 
 men into marriage. But the rule of breeding animals 
 will not in all respects apply to the distinctive human 
 kingdom, which is a spiritual one, and has laws espe- 
 cially pertaining to itself ; } r et, so far as the laws of or- 
 ganic corporal growth and physiological life are con- 
 cerned, there are many laws common to both, which 
 might be with good effect applied to the human as suc- 
 cessfully as to animals, and yet need not disturb or in- 
 trude on the permanent dual sexual relations of true 
 marriage, which we believe is natural. Of all the 
 evils which each generation transmits to its successor, 
 no one is more deplorable than the system of promis- 
 cuous breeding which is mostly covered by legalized 
 marriage, which every pair, however ignorant, are 
 permitted to carry on as they please, without the 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 97 
 
 least regard to qualification in themselves for par 
 ents, or ability to support and educate offspring, 
 resulting in the introduction of soul germs into 
 forms, often under most unsuitable conditions, and, 
 in Christian society, ascribing the evils that ensue 
 to God, while the parents, by voluntary action, often 
 unwise and inconsistent, started the organic forms 
 upon their career of growth. As there is room 
 enough, and time enough, for all germs, each is en- 
 titled to the best conditions. A true system of 
 anthropology, applied practically to human life and 
 society, would be a great blessing, and its effects 
 felt beneficially ; but we can never have such until 
 we deal with the real and simple elements of the 
 body and spirit form, and discover the laws that 
 can control them both in the love relations and pas- 
 sions of the sexes, and especially in the propagation 
 of the race. Arbitrary laws that unite two of opposite 
 sex, without regard to their fitness for parentage, and 
 yet so bound as to make them parents, can never 
 reform the race. How far nature establishes a single 
 and exclusive sexual and passional attraction as a 
 basis of the marriage relations, I have no scientific 
 or philosophical evidence to enable me to decide; 
 but I am sure that in the male sex at least, so far as 
 history and observation can testify, exclusiveness has 
 been the exception and not the rule in the passions of 
 married and unmarried parties. And if we take the 
 love relations independent of sexual passion, exclusive- 
 ness is again the exception in females. Society does 
 not so much object to variety in love if the sexual is 
 confined by marriage, even though the latter disease 
 
98 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 or degrade the offspring. It is plain to all who study 
 society as it is that our marriage laws, as they now 
 are, hind together more who are not congenial, and 
 would part, were it not for the law and public opin- 
 ion, than of those who are congenial, and would not 
 part. It is also certain that if free, and left to them- 
 selves, those who are exclusive, congenial, and do 
 not wish to part, would still remain united, and be 
 the ones, if not the only ones, who really ought to 
 live together, and if otherwise adapted to it, raise 
 their share of the children. I am sure that law does 
 not make people love each other, even though it can 
 make them live together, and pretend to love. Law 
 can restrain the passions, and it ought to do 'so far 
 more than it does, and ought to protect a woman as 
 much against her husband as against any other man 
 when he is forcing on her maternity, or ruining her 
 health by personal abuse, even degrading her morals. 
 But to return to the elemental origin of the pas- 
 sions, and renew the questions : Does or does not the 
 sexual passion of man and beast originate in, and 
 arise from, the same elemental source as the love of 
 a mother for her offspring ? of the love of a Christian 
 for his God? or the fraternal love of dear friends? 
 Does or does not the passional love of a refined, sen- 
 sitive, and spiritual woman for flowers or paintings 
 arise in and from the same element and source as the 
 love of a drunkard for rum, or a glutton for meat? 
 Are there distinct elements producing these distinct 
 attractions, or does the same element produce these 
 varieties and shades of manifestation? I cannot 
 answer these questions from any scientific experi- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 99 
 
 ments or philosophical principles as yet established, 
 but incline to the side of variety in elemental origin 
 and mixture of elements. I do not believe one is 
 evil and the other good, but each subject to both 
 terms by turns, and in different actions both good or 
 bad. A love of paintings may run to bawdy and vul- 
 gar pictures; and a sexual passion may lead the male 
 to defend, protect, rescue, and secure the welfare of 
 his victim. How we can make laws to control or 
 regulate the elements of love and passion, without 
 knowing the nature of them, and do justice to all 
 parties, I know not. That there is a large number 
 of elements in our physical and spiritual bodies which 
 produce the various passional actions is evident. 
 How to regulate them so as to produce the best 
 effects and results to society should be the study of 
 all who seek the interest and welfare of the race. It 
 is evident that a large part of the passional inter- 
 course between human beings is merely mechanical, 
 and arises mostly from habit, and produces the most 
 debased moral and destructive physical results upon 
 the victims, more so than the use of tobacco or intoxi- 
 cating drinks, which are bad enough; and these evils 
 cannot be cured until we discover and use the laws 
 that regulate the elements which are the source and 
 cause of the passions. It is undoubtedly the sub- 
 stances within us seeking affinities that produce 
 both the passional attractions and the appetites. 
 Pus in the body, producing scrofula, almost inva- 
 riably craves its affinity in swine's flesh and lard 
 cakes. So, also, a nervous and irritable condition of 
 the system, produced by tobacco, requires narcotics 
 
100 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 and stimulants to feed the system with materials to 
 keep it up. Thousands of people take tobacco or 
 tea to quiet their nerves or arouse them to action 
 from an unnatural state, caused by the very material 
 sent to relieve it, on the Hanneraan plan of "hair of 
 the same dog curing the bite.' , Our systems of treat- 
 ment are nearly all wrong in dealing with effects 
 instead of causes, venting our spite on victims, often 
 innocent, for they are the inherited and organic evils 
 of individuals. If we had a system of education that 
 would draw off or neutralize the excessive elements, 
 and supply the deficient, we could cure or prevent 
 most of the evils that afflict society and its members. 
 There are principles underlying all human actions 
 and elements producing them ; and when we find 
 the elements, as we have distinctly, we can put up 
 lightning-rods to prevent the passions from striking, 
 and conducting-wires to carry off and carry on the 
 elemental circulations in the human organism, as 
 well as in the outer and inorganic matter of our 
 world. Love is not subject to the will or intellect, 
 irrespective of circumstances and conditions, but 
 only by and through laws. It is an element more 
 dangerous for the ignorant than electricity or mag- 
 netism, or any of the gases, and we are easily blown 
 up by it if ignorant of the laws that regulate it. The 
 passional expression of love we try to regulate by 
 law, but succeed so poorly it is unless to talk of free 
 love, or bound love, or conjugal love, until we can 
 consistently deal with it by the laws of nature that 
 can regulate and control it, which I believe are as 
 simple as the laws that control electricity. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CIRCLES AND CYCLES OF HUMAN EXISTENCE. 
 
 We will now speculate upon the deeper philosophy 
 of life, death, and immortality. Having laid out the 
 timbers, and prepared the several parts of the struct- 
 ure, I will endeavor to put them together into a sys- 
 tem of life that is eternal, or endless. The reader 
 will pardon me if I take my own case, and, in per- 
 sonifying it, find the line, or path, of all human 
 beings. I am now an inhabitant of the solar system, 
 and of the particular planet Earth, and in the first 
 circle of earth life, where all soul germs enter that 
 have bodies, either physical or spiritual, on or around 
 this planet. I shall go through all the strata grades 
 and discreted degrees of human (spirit) life that 
 belong to this planet before I leave it, and so will all 
 who enter forms here, but none are born (or created) 
 out of, or above, this plane in which I now reside. 
 This is the germinal or gestation sphere or stratum 
 of this, as the solid matter of each planet is of its 
 own inhabitants, — the soil in which the seeds are 
 planted. I may have, probably did, pass from Venus, 
 and from the outer and last sphere of that planet, 
 where I left my last spirit form, and washing the 
 soul germ in the lethean stream between it and earth, 
 
 (101) 
 
102 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 resting a night between two days of my eternal life, 
 awoke and began my earthly life in this sphere as I 
 had done before in a remote period, far away in 
 time, — too far in centuries for the "reeling brain" 
 to compute. I may have, probably did, pass to 
 Venus from Mercury, where I had filled the measure 
 of my life and traced the circle of that planet from 
 its lowest to its highest condition of human form and 
 fineness. I may, or I may not (do not yet even con- 
 jecture), have passed from the Sun to Mercury, or I 
 may have passed from the outer planet and outer cir- 
 cle of the outer planet of some other sun or star; and, 
 having completed the cycle of that sun and its planets, 
 passed the deep lethean stream and left all its sub- 
 stance behind, entered upon a new cycle and the 
 many new circles, or planets, that pertain to it ; and 
 when I have run my course outward through every 
 stratum of each planet, and thus completed the cycle 
 of the Sun, I shall be ready to pass on to another 
 sun and its planets, and thus continue my eternal 
 life. But only the soul germ passes on this ; only 
 the essence, or divine part, of me, and of each of us, 
 moves on, and lives on thus forever, forming new 
 and ever-changing bodies in the infinite variety of 
 substances which it uses for its forms, and in which 
 it lives and dies continually, forever renewing its 
 existence and powers of expression and enjoyment. 
 The space or time between each planet, or system of 
 planets, is like the night between two days, and while 
 thus conditioned our experience is like that of sleep- 
 unconsciousness, and it makes no difference to us 
 whether it is one or one thousand years, as it makes no 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 103 
 
 difference to us when we sleep whether the time is one 
 or ten hours. The interior or divine germ of each hu- 
 man being has thus run its eternal career of life unto 
 death, and death unto life, never losing its identity, 
 and never securing an immortal body, nor is it more 
 likely to secure one on this earth than it has been on 
 other planets before, and, indeed, it never can in its 
 career of endless activity, as such result would put a 
 stop to change, and be to it little else than inertia, 
 or annihilation. It is a great stretch of the mind to 
 even conceive of an infinity of worlds and systems of 
 worlds, and the endless round of nakedness and 
 clothing which the soul germ has before and behind 
 its here and now. It is a remarkable degree of 
 power for a finite being to comprehend its world and 
 itself in connection with the w r orld on which it lives 
 at the time of calculation, but to stretch out and 
 grope after a whole system of worlds, and the cycle 
 of being walking over them forever — an entity, for- 
 ever human, forever safe and self-existent — is too 
 much for the capacity of most minds in this life ; but 
 in the manhood of our race, when we get out of these 
 shells and this gestation state, we can more easily 
 comprehend and understand it. Like astronomy, it 
 is too sublime and vast for the young student, but 
 adapted to some expanded minds: it has cost me 
 years of hard and close study to receive and accept 
 it. The periods of time that it takes a soul germ to 
 pass through all the discreted degrees, or spirit 
 spheres of each world or globe, is no doubt different 
 with different individuals ; but evidently each germ, 
 when once encased and entered upon its journey, 
 
104 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 tiikes a through ticket, and goes to the ultimate, last, 
 or most eliminated circle of the globe, and thence to 
 another system or sun with its planets. New created 
 bodies are constantly rising up before us, and spirit 
 forms inhabit them awhile, then, casting them off, as 
 a healed cripple would his crutches, walk without 
 them on the ether, supplying the elemental form from 
 corresponding material with as much ease and as 
 little effort as we supply the lungs with air in this 
 life. When the necessities of labor to support the 
 body are no longer burdening us, we shall have ample 
 time for spiritual growth, mental development, and 
 enjoyment which we cannot have in this life of trial, 
 trouble, and pain. It would not be strange if, in 
 such a sphere of being, we should recall some part 
 of past life anterior to our gestation here, and add 
 some snatches of recollection to the philosophy of 
 eternal existence which must surely be clear in that 
 higher life. If all organizations are aggregations of 
 simple particles of matter, there must surely be a 
 germ of sufficient essential potency to begin and con- 
 tinue the collection and arrangement of such parti- 
 cles, so as to make the specific form ; and, if this were 
 a blind and unguided effort of matter alone, there 
 would be no uniformity in species or kingdoms, but 
 one species of animal or plant would bring forth 
 forms of other animals and plants, and the human 
 kingdom would bring forth animals, and animals 
 human children. It is certain the forms are not like 
 castings in a furnace, run in molds, each form to take 
 shape or size from the mold, but the depositories are 
 reservoirs in which varieties of forms can be devel- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 105 
 
 oped, as we see by the various abortions and malfor- 
 mations in our race. The type is evidently in the 
 soul germ which molds and guides the form in its 
 first stages of development, and gives its own form 
 to the outer shape in every instance where the work 
 is not interrupted by causes that disturb the mechan- 
 ical operation of construction of parts. 
 
 There is law, order, and intelligence guiding the 
 formation of children ; and he must be a dunce who 
 attributes it to marriage, or to the parents, or the 
 direct and especial agency of God. It certainly 
 is not the guiding intelligence of the parents that 
 gives form to the child, and is not accidental. Two 
 other explanations have been brought forward with 
 authority to inform the youthful inquirer how we 
 came into being and shape as we are. One is that 
 Nature does it. If so, Nature is not totally depraved, 
 and it certainly is intelligent; and, if intelligent, 
 may as well be called God at once, as we shall need 
 no other to account for all phenomena. This would 
 be falling back to Pantheism, and to a rational system 
 at least of giving a name and power to nature suffici- 
 ent to harmonize the universe without other God or 
 intelligence, and, indeed, it might be stretched suffi- 
 ciently to cover entirely any system of explanations 
 for all existence; for to me all is natural and in 
 accordance with Law, and Law is God. The other 
 explanation is that of Christians, that God superin- 
 tends the formation of all human bodies for the pur- 
 pose of putting souls in them to be damned or saved 
 for His own glory to all eternity. If this be so, He 
 is culpable for all the births out of unholy wedlock, 
 
106 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 and for all the abortions and idiots and malforma- 
 tions in it, and for all defects of body which so often 
 cause sin as well as suffering through life; and if lie 
 work in and through nature, which He controls, He 
 is not less culpable for all these defects. If there is 
 a God superintending the making of children, He is 
 either wicked, ignorant, or incompetent. But this 
 is only childish folly, and too silly to be repeated to 
 intelligent minds, and we must seek some more con- 
 sistent explanation of the birth of human bodies and 
 souls. 
 
 In the infinite universe of essence and substance 
 are countless millions of soul germs, by inherent, in- 
 stinctive, unconscious, and involuntary action, ever 
 seeking encasement in forms, and moving, by Law, 
 from planet to planet in a law of affinity and attrac- 
 tion which bears them on, as liberated gases are 
 borne to upper strata by specific gravity when libe- 
 rated from lower; and as these soul germs are them- 
 selves distinctive in form, they use the best means at 
 hand to build the form in which they can ultimate, 
 and often falliug short in quantity, quality, or sur- 
 roundings, they furnish the abortions and malforma- 
 tions from which they escape with or without a 
 spirit form. If with one, they go on to complete the 
 man or womanhood in the spirit spheres ; if without 
 one, the germ still seeks in the earth encasement, 
 and finds success at last in starting a form that ulti- 
 mates and ripens, by which it is enabled to pass 
 through the " gate of birth" into the spirit realm 
 into which it can only come with its form taken on 
 in the rudimental sphere. Soul germs, following the 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 107 
 
 law of forms, must enter our, and each, planet in the 
 stratum of ponderable matter, and be clothed in it to 
 reach the next, or any other. As well might we 
 talk of having children without conception or gesta- 
 tion as of having spirits in the spheres that were not 
 born in the rudimental world. As we go to the 
 proper place and materials for garments for the body, 
 so we must for the spirit, and also for the soul germ. 
 Soul germs move by specific laws from planet to 
 planet, and from system to system, entering each in 
 its inner belt of matter where forms can be organized, 
 and gravitating outward through every stratum of 
 organic life, from base to summit, and at the outer 
 belt casting off the last particle belonging to that 
 planet, its day of life was reached, its covering and 
 the germ of essence is prepared to retire for its night 
 of unconsciousness and rest, from which it awakes at 
 the base of another world, and again begins its 
 renewed day of toil aud reward. 
 
 The involuntary, unconscious, and inherent action 
 of soul germs in seeking encasement in forms of mat- 
 ter accounts for the success and failures, abortions 
 and malformations by a uniform law that has no re- 
 gard for human institutions of marriage or prostitu- 
 tion. The germs seek their destiny and start into 
 form wherever conditions admit, and all find, sooner 
 or later, the starting-point, and begin the life that 
 ultimates in full germ forms, and lives to its old age 
 in spirit life. For a long period in the geologic his- 
 tory of the earth no human forms were upon its sur- 
 face, but the earth had not then reached its age of 
 puberty ; it was not in a bearing condition. To us, 
 
108 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 finite beings, only was the time long. Childhood 
 seems long to children, and the childhood of a planet 
 to man. To infinity and in eternity one day is as a 
 thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 
 There can be no loss of time to that which is immor- 
 tal or eternal. A soul germ can lose no time, and 
 gain none. Hence we lose nothing and gain nothing 
 by length of time between worlds or in worlds (I mean 
 globes, including all the spirit spheres with each). 
 Since this divine essence is part of God, and, conse- 
 quently, forever perfect, and perfectly harmonious, 
 IT can never suffer, suffering belonging entirely to 
 the form and its imperfections and temporary phases 
 of ephemeral existence and relative position. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 
 
 Germs of truth wander about the human world 
 sometimes for centuries before some finite intelli- 
 gence secures them, and encases them in a consistent 
 theory or philosophic system, for truth is admitted 
 to be immortal. Such were the facts of incarnation, 
 or reincarnation, of transmigration, of pre-existence, 
 of eternal life, of compensation, of spiritual life, and 
 progression, etc. All of these, and many more, have 
 each a consistent place and mission in this system of 
 life, death, and immortality, as we live it, in circles 
 of worlds, and cycles of systems of worlds ; but, in 
 their fragmentary wanderings in the past, they have 
 had no consistent theory combining them, and while 
 each was a truth in itself when rightly understood 
 and applied, yet added to untruths and inconsistent 
 theories, the virtue and value was lost. Among the 
 most absurd attempts to embody pre-existence in a 
 system is that of Edward Beecher, in his Conflict of 
 Ages, setting it up wholly as an excuse for total de- 
 pravity, which he believes we bring here from a fall, 
 or sin, in the previous state, which was a spiritual 
 one. This world would, indeed, be a hell for such 
 if Orthodoxy were the only religion, and had truth 
 
 (109) 
 
110 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 for its basis of the future state of existence. It seems 
 strange that some truths lie dormant so long, or are 
 so long in being taken up and put in suitable forms 
 of theory and demonstration. Such was the power of 
 steam, known over twenty years before applied to 
 mechanical purposes. 
 
 The different species of our race on earth evidently 
 have different routes and spheres, if not different des- 
 tinies after leaving the rudimental or germinal sphere 
 of this life. The Negro, the Indian, the Caucasian, 
 and the Malay have each ruling and peculiar general 
 characteristics which distinguish them, and unfit them 
 for that closer intimacy which binds the individuals 
 of each species, or the families and nations of each 
 together. It is hardly probable that these character- 
 istics will be less peculiar, or less distinctive, in the 
 first stages of spirit life than here. In fact, we all 
 widen into individuality as we recede from childhood, 
 and are all more and most alike when infants, both 
 as species and as individuals of the same species. 
 There is a geographical adaptation, or a climatic one, 
 which in the earth life distinguishes the species as well 
 as a physiological and psychological one. Whether 
 the fust has any effect beyond this life I know not; 
 but the latter evidently will. As we go out farther 
 from the center, and beyond the surface of the solid 
 parts of our world, the region is vastly greater, and 
 varieties of condition may be more or less abundant 
 and permanent. There is room enough for all that 
 are born on earth, and time enough for each species 
 and eaeli individual to ripen and mature, and pass on 
 to other worlds. The moon and the satellites of other 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. Ill 
 
 planets may have a class and grade of beings differ- 
 ent from us, or there may be some spirits more fitted 
 for such worlds. Nature does not mold all intelli- 
 gences after one pattern. Soul germs of essence may 
 exist, varied in form from us, and varied from each 
 and all of the species of our race, as the widest of 
 our species differ, and yet have the same immortality 
 we do. Since there is time enough and room enough, 
 and can be no crowding, even if the animals are 
 taken in, as there are no new soul germs created, we 
 may safely infer that the space is all and well filled, 
 and to the best advantage for the highest happi- 
 ness of all organized forms in matter, ultimated from 
 the action of essence. 
 
 Each being may be required to remain in, and con- 
 fined to, each stratum of life and being till fitted for 
 the next, and that may involve reincarnation, as 
 some teach it. This earth life, not being a stratum 
 but a gestation, the next, or spirit sphere near us, 
 may hold all till progressed and fitted for the next ; 
 the spirits of children, and rude, undeveloped men 
 and women, must stay near their earthly homes and 
 friends till fitted to take their places in more har- 
 monized and developed circles. No doubt, much of 
 our correspondence with spirits is with this class who 
 are mainly as ignorant as the minds in bodies, and, 
 consequently, we seldom get wisdom of higher grade 
 from spirits than we have taught on earth ; but this 
 is not evidence there is no higher, but only evidence 
 that we communicate with our nearest neighbors. 
 For the spirit spheres being stratified, and each soul, 
 as it leaves the body, gravitating to its specific level 
 
112 
 
 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 of intellect and affection, of course, many of the best 
 are quite remote from our selfish grasp and sensual 
 world, and can only reach us with distorted messages, 
 often through several mediums, each of whom lessens 
 the vitality and spirit of the message that started. If 
 you doubt this, let a rude, unlettered boy read some 
 beautiful poem or speech, and then let one who can 
 enter into the spirit and sense of the subject read it, 
 and see the contrast ; and apply this to the messages 
 you get from refined and advanced spirits, and you 
 will not wonder they send us so few messages when 
 they are obliged to use such mediums, or none. 
 
 To many, I am aware, this will seem a slender 
 thread that holds us to eternal life through the strata 
 of spheres in each world, and through the cycles of 
 life in the systems of worlds and eternal time; but 
 it is the only thread I can follow out into infinite 
 space and eternal time to which I can hold to keep 
 me from being lost in the universal dissolution of 
 organic forms. It is also the only thread I can find 
 to bind me to Deity, and on which I can follow the 
 essence of Divinity in the finite forms of intelligent 
 beings, and run each forward in that thread to 
 immortality. 
 
 The Westminster Review for July, 1865, in an arti- 
 cle on Herbert Spencer's Principles of Biology, fur- 
 nishes me a text for my whole subject which has been 
 written, and came to my hand at this stage of my 
 work, and is as follows: "The organic body consti- 
 tutes the point at which man touches the world." 
 There are several strong and beautiful points in this 
 article beside the foregoing, which I would gladly 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 113 
 
 incorporate into this work, but prefer to refer the 
 reader to the whole article, where he can follow the 
 writer from a pure fountain of truth in nature into a 
 muddy pool of Christian theology, where all great 
 truths lose their beauty and purity alike, and into 
 which all writers for the popular magazines of Amer- 
 ica and Europe are alike obliged to drift with all arti- 
 cles to secure for them an insertion. If a writer 
 sets out with a valuable truth, like the foregoing, 
 and several others in the same article, he must soon 
 spoil its natural beauty by covering with the slime 
 of supernaturalism, or the sophistry of Divine good- 
 ness, or the false logic of especial Providence, and, 
 thus dressed up, put it into the church to be pre- 
 served as a sacred relic or Divine revelation foe 
 man's salvation. It is well there are some men in 
 our time like Buckle, Lecky, Emerson, and others, 
 who can, and will, occasionally separate a natural 
 truth from the artificial covering in which church 
 writers cover and dress it for the devotion of the 
 multitude. Soon as we can get this important truth 
 of man's existence before conception and after death as 
 a naked truth before human intellect and reason for 
 dissection, examination, and analysis, we shall settle 
 the most important question ever raised: and as the 
 knowledge of the naturalist would soon prove, on 
 examination, that the bony relics of saints in the 
 cathedrals belong mostly to animals of late species, 
 instead of being, as claimed, the bones of saints and 
 martyrs of early church dates ; so the scientific ex- 
 amination of the truths in the church would soon 
 prove they were natural, not supernatural, and ex- 
 
114 
 
 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 isted entirely independent, with all their powers, 
 from all Bible, religious, or Divine revelation. The 
 organic body is truly the point where man, or the 
 soul germ, touches the earth, and touches it only for 
 a moment, branching off again into more ethereal 
 regions where higher powers and enjoyments await 
 it, without any regard to God, Jesus, atonement, 
 judgment, or resurrection, it being a scientific and 
 not a religious truth, existing in nature and not in 
 revelation, without need to be bolstered up by any 
 form of sectarian superstition. Even in the church the 
 world moves by such men as Colenso, Strauss, and 
 Kenan, and many others, to new religious truths, as 
 it has by aid of Galileo, Newton, Franklin, etc., to 
 new scientific truths, and as it is now doing in our 
 day by the work of Parker, Emerson, Beecher, Froth- 
 ingham, Colyer, etc. The ablest minds in the churches 
 are constantly rejecting, one after another, the old 
 rotten dogmas of early superstition, and looking up 
 the truths of science and Spiritualism as a basis for 
 discourses in the pulpit, and all these are signs of 
 progress. 
 
 A cardinal and vital truth in Christianity is that 
 Jesus had a pre-existence, and since he was born 
 into this life from one before it, we may as well 
 accept the fact, and extend it to the whole race, and 
 each individual in it; for it is not more unreason- 
 able, unnatural, or impossible for any other person 
 to have had a pre-existence than for Jesus. If I 
 were disposed to call in the New Testament to my 
 aid, I could find support in it, and although not an 
 authority to me, it is to many people good authority. 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 115 
 
 Jesus is said to have told persons in the other life 
 that what good deeds they did in this life to their 
 fellow-beings they did to Him, and to have attrib- 
 uted to others the same common parentage of God 
 the Father, which, of course, gave all a Divine pre- 
 existence, if he had one. 
 
 We accept the Christian authority that Jesus lived 
 before he was conceived in this world, and I extend 
 the same law and fact to all his brethern and sisters 
 of earth life, and as we believe in eternal life which 
 cannot be proved with a beginning, I submit to the 
 Christian world whether it will give up the pre- 
 existence of its Jesus, or admit his teachings, that 
 all men are like him in origin and destiny. "If I 
 go, I will draw all men," etc. "The Lord giveth, 
 and the Lord taketh away" life. Then He had it to 
 give, and has it when taken back ; and what is the 
 Lord, or God, but Law ? and what can It give but 
 what it possesses? Apply this to the Divine Es- 
 sence, and you have this theory. 
 
 It seems useless to spin out this argument, since 
 the truth is embodied in a nut-shell space. We are 
 either circles or straight lines, and with two ends, or 
 none. If the latter, we had pre-existence, and, if the 
 former, must end this by the law that began it. 
 Individual testimony of persons in this life, who draw 
 from fragments of memory, we may regard of some 
 importance, although not wholly reliable, and yet it 
 may be somewhat like spiritual vision which some 
 persons do possess here, but in such imperfect degree 
 that death seems to open to them a new world, and 
 a new vision, about as strange and distinct from this 
 
116 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 us to those who never had a spiritual sight in this 
 life. 
 
 It is the philosophy of the other life that makes it 
 acceptable to us in this, and not the phenomena. So 
 it is the philosophy of pre-existence that renders it 
 acceptable to us in this, and on which alone we can, 
 with any degree of safety, count upon an endless 
 future. Shut and open these senses, including con- 
 sciousness, whenever you please, and as often as you 
 please, but leave the soul germ intact and perfect, 
 and we will maintain eternal life, sleep, and wake 
 through eternity and never lose identity, and only 
 slough off from the memory that which is useless to 
 preserve, or which has performed its uses, and ful- 
 filled its mission. 
 
 It may be thought useless, if not improper, to 
 introduce this philosophy into this gestation life of 
 the soul where very few can appreciate it ; but since 
 we hear and read so much about eternal life which is 
 so utterly inconsistent with the beginning of exist- 
 ence here, we deem it important for those who see as 
 we see the inconsistency of our Christian religion on 
 this subject to correct its errors as far as possible. 
 
 We are often asked why the spirits who know this 
 truth, if it be one, do not teach it to all whom they 
 communicate with. We suppose they know many 
 tilings they do not communicate to us, probably 
 many we are not prepared for, and would not be bene- 
 fited by being told; and, indeed, it seems their policy 
 to let us find out as many truths as we can by our own 
 researches, no doubt realizing that the effort to us is 
 useful. Gifts are not as useful as labor-acquired prop- 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 117 
 
 erty. Earn it, and know its value. "Seek, and } T e shall 
 find." We feel lhat we have been aided in our efforts 
 to satisfy our honest inquiry on this and other sub- 
 jects of doubt and difficulty, and, perhaps, as much 
 as was consistent with our best interest. Ever grate- 
 ful and ever thankful for that spirit guardianship 
 which has for many years been our greatest blessing, 
 we feel to accept what it gives and not ask more, 
 believing our spirit guides know better than we do 
 what we deserve and need from them. 
 
 We should add one more Christian item of history 
 to our theory of pre-existence in the person of Mary, 
 the mother of Jesus, who is by Christian authority 
 decided to be immaculate; and as by her history, to 
 be found in the apocrj'phal New Testament, she was 
 of Divine paternal parentage, the same as Jesus, of 
 course, she had also a pre-existence ; and, with little 
 doubt, we might as well add Moses and Samson, and 
 several other mysterious characters of Jewish history, 
 as well as scores of Oriental personages who had no 
 earthly paternal parentage, according to their history. 
 According to Grecian mythology, the gods gave con- 
 tinued or perpetual existence to the children they 
 begot of earthly mothers, but did not admit a pre- 
 existence, as the Christians do, for their God-begot- 
 ten child or children. The Christian is in advance, 
 in this respect, although to us both are fabulous, ex- 
 cept in the fact of eternal life, or of its being a fact. 
 
 We submit this whole subject to the candid inves- 
 tigation of our readers, with the expectation that 
 many will at first reject it summarily, and afterward 
 recall or accept it, as this has already been our expe- 
 
118 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 rience in presenting it to friends; but we have the 
 fullest assurance that in due time it will be thor- 
 oughly canvassed and receive its appropriate recogni- 
 tion, clearing away, as it has with us, many heavy 
 doubts on the subject of future and eternal life, which, 
 in its latter sense, cannot to us be true without this 
 theory. 
 
 Edward Beecher, in his theory of pre-existence, 
 asserts that once we all were spiritual inhabitants of 
 Heaven, and enjoying the perfect bliss of that life, 
 but that we joined Satan in his rebellion against God, 
 and became totally depraved thereby, and, as con- 
 demned rebels, are sent to this state of existence, 
 where we maj' accept the atonement, and, for Christ's 
 sake, be saved, if we believe in and rely on Him, 
 but not knowing our former state, have no induce- 
 ments except what the Scripture and church offer, 
 and, consequently, very few of us ever get back to 
 Heaven, and the rest go to endless perdition, with 
 the "nations that forget God." What was the origin 
 of that pre-existence he does not tell us. I leave the 
 reader to judge between the two systems of pre- 
 existence, and accept either or neither. Some of 
 the Oriental nations teach that our souls are sent 
 into beasts and reptiles of various kinds as a punish- 
 ment for sins committed in this life; but all these 
 theories bring in a malignant God to sport with our 
 misfortunes. Some more rational ancients, and some 
 modern writers, believe we are swallowed up at death 
 in the Divine essence, losing forever identity and our 
 consciousness of being; but as these are beliefs only, 
 I leave them. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 INCARNATION AND RE-INCARNATION. 
 
 Admitting the divine incarnation of several an- 
 cient persons who have been worshiped as Gods by 
 succeeding generations, I extend the principle to all 
 persons, both male and female, and to every individ- 
 ual of the race, from the "wickedest man in New 
 York " to the worshiped Jesus of the Catholic church, 
 and find and leave them in all stages and degrees of 
 moral, physical, and spiritual development, with the 
 Divine germ in each that must, and will, ultimately 
 make a Jesus or a Mary of perfection of each. Hence, 
 whatsoever we do to benefit or bless these — "the 
 least of these " — we do to God, and for God, and it 
 becomes a religious act with or without devotional 
 feelings. The time has come to recognize this divine 
 incarnation in the race instead of partially in one or 
 ten of its members. 
 
 Every mortal pair who raise a child should do all 
 in their power by fitting themselves, and by care of 
 the object, to raise a Mary or a Jesus in perfection of 
 body and spirit, and thus build up the race to its 
 highest perfection. All efforts would be in the right 
 direction, and the race rapidly improve under such 
 ordering. If one half the care and good judgment 
 
 (119) 
 
120 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 were taken in raising children that is taken in rais- 
 ing horses or cattle, the improvement would be mani- 
 fest at once in a better class of children. 
 
 In our cities and large towns, boys of eight or ten 
 years old can be found smoking and chewing tobacco, 
 having inherited the depraved appetite from married, 
 if not pious, parents, and having no guidance or in- 
 struction to avoid the physical and moral deprav- 
 ity. These children are equally incarnations with 
 Jesus, and their sins are mainly from the earthly 
 parents, and have descended through a perverted 
 and polluted line of earthly body-makers, but never 
 reach the soul germ, or divine Essence, of being which 
 will cast off one after another these polluted bodies, 
 and at last attain a harmonized condition of finite 
 happiness. 
 
 Our greatest errors of judgment lie in measure and 
 comparison. We measure with a short-time rule, and 
 compare with few specimens, and thus condemn at 
 once each guilty sinner to a final destiny, when there 
 is no final or ultimate destiny, but a ceaseless round 
 of endless change and variety. Even in our own 
 life we often see extremes almost meet in the same 
 person. 
 
 Christ and the Devil are the two objects which 
 theology places at the extremes of character in good- 
 ness and wickedness, and on the line between these 
 the Christian writers place all human beings, and 
 most of them part the race by an imaginary line, and 
 send each way the feeble and abused race to final 
 and eternal destiny; but these old and superanuated 
 teachings are about " played out," and in their stead 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 121 
 
 we must have a rational system of origin and destiny 
 for each and all in place of this arbitrary and incon- 
 sistent theory; a new answer to the question: "What 
 is the chief end of man?" since he positively re- 
 fuses to praise and glorify God forever for Christ's 
 sake. Organs and bells have been substituted to do 
 this in our day, and many other devices may be got up 
 to save human effort, and be propelled entirely by 
 machinery so as to save all human effort, since we 
 are a labor-saving people, and have a germ of the 
 Divine ingenuity in us. 
 
 The first incarnation was the first human being on 
 earth, and the last the last child born, whether the 
 mother was married or not, or even if, like Mary, she 
 were married after conception, and immaculate till 
 the birth of her first child. 
 
 To the Jew and Christian Adam was the first in- 
 carnation of God's breath which made Adam a " liv- 
 ing soul," he not being such until he received the 
 Divine breath, or spirit of God. The fable says he 
 was threatened with death for disobedience, and that 
 the body did die, but not on the day it ate, as was 
 promised, but that the soul did not die, simply because 
 it could not ; so that, as the story runs, the Snake told 
 more nearly the truth to Eve than God did to Adam. 
 Since Eve was not forbidden to eat, I could never see 
 why she should incur the penalty, and not only have 
 to die but suffer the pains of child-birth as a conse- 
 quence of a sin of disobedience she had never com- 
 mitted, for, as the story runs, she was never designed 
 as anything more than a " help-meet " for the man ; 
 but nature seems to disregard all systems of theology, 
 
122 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 and to have made man and woman equally with 
 souls and bodies subject to death and life, harmony 
 and discord: the Divine Essence in each pushing out 
 forms, changing and destroying and renewing them 
 eternally. 
 
 Of re-incarnation we have not any settled theory. 
 There seems to be some object in a life here, and, if 
 so, those who die in infancy, or at or before birth, 
 certainly do not get the advantage or experience of 
 an earth life, by which it would seem that nature is 
 thwarted in her designs. From what seems to be 
 authentic we learn that these children who lose the 
 experiences of earth life exist in the next, or spiritual 
 life, but how or when they can be re-incarnated so 
 as to get the experience of our earth life and carry it 
 to the spiritual, where it would seem to be needful for 
 their future growth, we do not know. We are not pre- 
 pared to say that nature is thwarted, or that this earth 
 life is not a necessary link in the experiences and 
 changes of an eternal life, or in the cycle of our earthly 
 and solar rounds ; hence we cannot say that in some 
 way nature does not bring each soul germ round into 
 and through an earthly experience by which it can 
 gain the necessary experience of an earthly life. 
 Dissertations on this subject are quite common now, 
 and in time will, no doubt, settle into a theory that 
 may be some time demonstrated, and may substan- 
 tiate a re-incarnation against which we have no pre- 
 judice, to induce us to reject it before the subject is 
 thoroughly canvassed. If there should be a return 
 to the earth of those who enter and leave it in 
 infancy, of course there would be no memory to 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 123 
 
 link the two together; and if a return after a long 
 or short life here had been once endured and suf- 
 fered or enjoyed, the utter obliteration of the mem- 
 ory-plates would leave little or no chance for even 
 fragments to be collected, although some persons do 
 assume to remember some part of a former earthly 
 existence; jet these persons are not credited more 
 than are those who claim to be Christ, or some ficti- 
 tious or real person of the past. The evidence being 
 wanting that such being as the Christian's Christ 
 does or ever did exist, or even that such person as 
 their Jesus ever had a real earthly existence ; so the 
 evidence is wanting that 'dny one person now living 
 on earth in a body of SM&stance ever had a former 
 similar body life, and yet it may be true, hence we will 
 leave this for further and future investigation. We 
 have met several persons who claimed to be a re- 
 incarnation of Jesus, and one that claimed to be an 
 incarnation of Jehovah, and yet none of them had 
 any evidence to give, as not one could do any of the 
 mighty works to prove their claims. 
 
 There is a very common error running through the 
 public mind that morality is a part of religion ; and 
 some may think that the wicked and vicious will be 
 sent back to this life to be punished, and it is even 
 taught by some that human spirits do return incar- 
 nate in animal forms ; but, there being no evidence of 
 this, we need not admit it. In fact, morality and relig- 
 ion are as distinct as chemistry and astronomy, and it is 
 easy to show that some form of religion accepts nearly 
 every vice and crime as a part of its religion, — Mor- 
 monism adopting polygamy. Sects, strong enough, 
 
124 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 rob, steal, and murder ; and our sects, most of them, 
 sanction and take part in war, which is wholesale mur- 
 der and robbery, and not less wicked and immoral than 
 if it was without the sanction of laws of nations. 
 There is no uniform standard of morality, neither is 
 there of religion ; both fluctuate, and are ephemeral, 
 being popular and unpopular by turns. The morals 
 of the Bible are the most corrupt of any known to 
 enlightened nations, and have caused more murders 
 and wickedness than any other so-called religious 
 code, if not than all other causes known, and as we 
 progress in civilization, we gradually ignore and re- 
 ject them. 
 
 We cannot rely on our feelings or desires to estab- 
 lish any theory or truth in nature ; but if I was, as 
 an individual, to express my choice in this re-incarna- 
 tion theory, I should say : Let me come back and go 
 round again with the advantages and experiences 
 gained in this trial life ; but, if I am to lose them all, 
 and take my chances as I have in this, with no more 
 knowledge or experience to guide, I should beg to 
 be excused from another trial of earthly vicissitudes. 
 There is no doubt a fixed and inexorable law, and 
 we must submit to it nolens volens, and run in the 
 groove our ceaseless rounds of cyclic changes in eter- 
 nal life. There is no power of annihilation in exist- 
 ence, and whatever is is, and we are, and are to be, and 
 to be pushed along the endless line of being, whatever 
 we will, or declare we will not, do. If any theory of 
 re-incarnation is true, the number of human inhabi- 
 tants on earth increases, and some immigrants, or 
 new creations, are constantly coming to make up the 
 
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 125 
 
 increase; and some, surely, must get through and 
 take their final departure from our planet. So, our 
 theory would not be spoiled if re-incarnation should 
 be ultimately proved true. 
 
 Since writing the foregoing pages, I have seen 
 some published ideas, the gist of which is the same 
 as I have expressed in this work, and yet differing in 
 one essential particular. Their author teaches that 
 the spirit is objective, and the forms subjective only, 
 and hence not material ; holding the theory of Bishop 
 Berkeley, that what we call matter has no real ex- 
 istence. To me both seem to be material, essence posi- 
 tive, and substance negative, and each acting and re- 
 acting on the other. Hence objective and subjective 
 would hardly apply to what I call existence in those 
 varied forms. In the case of the mirage, the picture 
 may in one sense be said to be subjective, because it 
 is produced by and from the background, and yet it 
 really is material, for if there was no matter where 
 it appears, it could not appear to our vision. This 
 may be a better illustration of what we daily see and 
 feel in our outer life than the theory of objective and 
 subjective. The background of our being sets out 
 the forms in which we appear; though both are mate- 
 rial, but one is eternal in individual existence, and 
 the other ephemeral in form, yet eternal in particled 
 material. 
 
 Familiar illustrations of inferior and superior con- 
 ditions of matter are before us daily. The potent 
 power of steam is in the water, or it could not be 
 produced from it. The alcohol is in the grain and 
 
126 ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE. 
 
 fruit, or it could not be extracted. In our California 
 wine-cellars they put wine in the still and pump 
 brandy or alcohol out. We watch with interest the 
 curling smoke as it rises in clouds from the chimney, 
 and in a short time, and at a short distance, it 
 entirely disappears. Where has it gone ? Not a 
 particle has been lost. It is somewhere still, and 
 forming an active part of the air. We press the life 
 and soul out of organic bodies as we press the wine 
 and brandy from the grain or grape, but we no more 
 destroy the one than the other. The elements are 
 as real that propel the living organism of man and 
 beast as the subtle elements in the grain and fruit, 
 or in the seed germ that starts new forms in the 
 vegetable world. The air we breathe is filled with 
 elements that even the chemist cannot detect, and 
 that no retort can hold. It is time we recognized 
 the existence and potency of this soul of things that 
 appear and disappear before our limited vision.