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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
THE 
 
 LESSONS OF THE AGES, 
 
 BY THEODORE PARKER. 
 
 THROUGH THE INSPIRATION OF 
 
 
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 y 
 
 MISS S. A. RAMSDELL. 
 
 If we are God's, then let us do God's work> 
 And grapple with the fires of hell, 
 To burn to dross the selfishness 
 Inwrought in soul desire. 
 
 NOV ^882j 
 
 BOSTON: 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR. 
 
 43 KILBY STREET. 
 1882. 
 
^ 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 Copyright, 1882, 
 By Sarah A. Ramsdell. 
 
 C. M. A. Twitchell & Co., 43 Kilby Street, 
 PRINTERS. 
 
MY GUIDE AND I. 
 
 A FRIEND once met me in the dark, 
 And through much cunning and fine art, 
 Said : " Come with me, the way seems fair, 
 We'll walk along, a loving pair, 
 And give ourselves to duty's call, 
 Not asking Self or love at all, 
 But simply say ' in God we trust.' 
 Follow what will, come what must, 
 Our standard high, our faith supreme, 
 Humanity the living stream 
 That we must better if we can, 
 By lending will to heart and hand. 
 Unfurl our banner for the right, 
 The only power that giveth might ; 
 Step down, if need be to secure 
 The gem called Charity, whose birth is pure, 
 And greater than a diadem 
 To crown the hearts of living men. 
 To angels help we will give heed, 
 Asking whenever much in need, 
 And if the way seems filled with doubt 
 We'll never stop and turn about, 
 But bravely on, the uphill side 
 Oft times presents the loveliest ride. 
 And in our journey on together 
 
MY GUIDE AND I. 
 
 We will be friends in spite of weather, 
 
 In spite of all that's dark and drear 
 
 We will with fate hold goodly cheer, 
 
 And never murmur on the way, 
 
 But greet the monarch day by day, 
 
 As picking in the affairs of life 
 
 Is held to us the signal strife. 
 
 Must we turn back, think ye, my friend, 
 
 When duty calls and angels lend 
 
 Their strength of purpose to our walk? 
 
 Let us be careful how we talk, 
 
 Let us be careful how we act, 
 
 If angels guide this love compact. 
 
 The world expects roses full blown 
 
 From every bush that heaven hath shown, 
 
 Without a thorn, all coloring true, 
 
 Without a yellow mixed with blue, 
 
 Without a sham of any kind 
 
 To save the world from being blind. 
 
 Think ye, my friend, we can succeed 
 
 By giving life to human need ? 
 
 Succeed in yielding to the test 
 
 That God smites those he loves the best, 
 
 And crowns them with a work in hand, 
 
 Sustained in full by angel band ? " 
 
 I said : " My friend, your way seems clever, 
 
 Although despondent in foul weather. 
 
 Show me the truth — I'll give my life, 
 
 I'll enter in the coming strife ; 
 
 I'll bend to circumstances all 
 
 That may surround me like a pall, 
 
 To find this God of truth and right 
 
MY GUIDE AND I. 
 
 That took my mother from my sight, 
 
 And folded down the curtain dark 
 
 That shut from view one heavenly spark." 
 
 I said : " My life is poor indeed, 
 
 I'm helpless in the coming need, 
 
 Do with me as you will. Oh friend ! 
 
 I do myself most willing lend ; 
 
 Try me by every art you please, 
 
 On rugged ground, in paths of ease. 
 
 I would be true in every way, 
 
 If I am chosen at this day 
 
 To give my life at heaven's high call 
 
 I would yield self, and home and all ; 
 
 I'll take my sister by the hand, 
 
 I'll reach to you in heavenly land 
 
 For council and as guide to lead 
 
 Me safely through the tangled weed. 
 
 Again, I say to thee, Oh friend, 
 
 My life to you I willing lend, 
 
 Give it the coloring that you please, 
 
 The discipline devoid of ease : 
 
 I must be suited in my giving, 
 
 Else my poor life is scarce worth living." 
 
 You say, " we must not talk of ease 
 
 When we have this whole world to please, 
 
 But I will do my best endeavor 
 
 To balance foul with fairer weather, 
 
 And as this compact is agreed 
 
 I'll state to you my present need. 
 
 A scribe I want, with pen in hand, 
 
 To give my thoughts from spirit land ; 
 
 I've tried in many ways to find 
 
MY GUIDE AND I. 
 
 One suited wholly to my mind, 
 
 But well I know a perfect zest 
 
 Was never found in any guest, 
 
 And so I take you, sister, friend, 
 
 And do my duty to the end. 
 
 I'll give you books — can you indeed 
 
 Make them supply your present need ? 
 
 Give you bread without the honey, 
 
 Experience without the money, 
 
 And as you are the one I choose, 
 
 I'm sure to win and never lose, 
 
 For well I know no trick can enter 
 
 Where money fails to be the centre ; 
 
 And well I know the golden lever 
 
 Can never you from duty sever. 
 
 I'll give you books, a few short years, 
 
 I'll give you smiles, and also tears ; 
 
 I'll give you aspirations grand, 
 
 And lead you with my spirit hand 
 
 To where the soul shall find new light, 
 
 That breakest through the darkest night, 
 
 And leaves the captive mind as free 
 
 As crested foam upon the sea. 
 
 And when I've tested all your worth, 
 
 And opened out the newer birth, 
 
 Think you, my friend, I can dissever 
 
 The ties that bind us well together ? 
 
 And leave you when you're most in need 
 
 Of strength to battle with life's creed ? 
 
 I know you've oft times thought it strange 
 
 That I could take you such a range, 
 
MY GUIDE AND I. 
 
 Without more comforts on the way 
 
 To give more strength from day to day ; 
 
 But well I know the faith that's best 
 
 Is never found beneath a crest. 
 
 Now at this time and in this place 
 
 Let us in friendship still embrace 
 
 A newer work of broader hue, 
 
 Both suited to myself and you. 
 
 It shall combine in system grand 
 
 To show myself throughout the land, 
 
 And take no money at the door, 
 
 Although I know you're wondrous poor. 
 
 But still have faith, like Ruth of old, 
 
 I never can be bought or sold, 
 
 But in your case, on moneyed land, 
 
 I'll give to you a business band 
 
 That will probe hearts with rod of love, 
 
 Dipped in the fountain head above. 
 
 Do you agree to this new scheme ? " 
 
 " I answered yes, as in a dream." 
 
 " Then here's my hand, my sister true, 
 
 We'll sift the old world and the new, 
 
 And bring our work within the range 
 
 Of every human heart and grange." 
 
 I sat quite still, I could not think 
 
 The spirit brought me to this brink 
 
 Of joys so grand, so filled with awe. 
 
 I said, Oh God ! take every flaw, 
 
 I would be pure as him of old, 
 
 Who in his deeds shone forth as gold. 
 
 I would be free from sin of every kind, 
 
MY GUIDE AXD I. 
 
 Of selfishness that so distracts the human mind ; 
 
 I would be free, that angels in their great desire 
 
 Might touch me with that living fire 
 
 Called Inspiration, and blend with me 
 
 For double life and work. 
 
 My guide then spoke, I held the cadence long, 
 
 He said, " My child be strong, brace well your feet, 
 
 On smoother ground we surely soon shall meet. 
 
 I've heard the new renunciation with joy, with hope, 
 
 You nevermore shall in the darkness grope ; 
 
 For in this living stream of truth 
 
 You'll find fair health and more of youth — 
 
 You'll find me true to every promise given, 
 
 I'll make it fast with knot of old gold ribbon. 
 
 Therefore be strong, be doubly stayed, 
 
 And brave and true as Orleans maid, 
 
 When in the springtime's early day 
 
 I bear you on your journey's way, 
 
 And stand in honor by your side, 
 
 A claimant for a spirit bride, 
 
 To work with me while time shall claim 
 
 The rivulet sounding in your name. 
 
THE LESSONS OE THE AGES 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WH O shall paint the lessons of the ages ? 
 Not one who has always carried flowers in 
 her hand, or song bird notes in her soul ; not one 
 whose life has always detected a blossom at the close 
 of every experience, or felt friendship in every extended 
 hand, or smiling face. Not by one shall the lessons of 
 the ages be wrought out, who has never tasted poverty, 
 or seen the hungry wolf in the distance, battling for 
 that which God has given freely, but man has closed 
 about with laws more arbitrary than Satan ever dared 
 to assume. No, the lessons of the ages must be written 
 by one who has suffered in many ways. Prostrated by 
 sickness for years, but held to earth by God's hand of 
 love, to be a ministering help to impart to the world 
 what God may give to her of material spiritualism, 
 which is the bud of promise now opening to the world, 
 and of its flowering the coming years must each hold 
 out its prize offering, to be tested by science and fath- 
 omed by knowledge. God's basic testimony in every 
 outlay of Deific skill. 
 
10 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 No, these lessons must be penned by a woman, 
 chosen to do this work, for, from natal condition was 
 seen, that strength was given to suffer for truth or prin- 
 ciple, although the fagots stood as clearly out in their 
 burning glory, as they did to the martyred Joan of Arc, 
 still, the aspiring soul saw God above all, with a glory 
 of the resurrection, a brilliant and final success, and 
 no earthly chalice however bitter, could frighten the ex- 
 pression of truth imbedded in the soul of the writer, and 
 ready to act with those truths, when God opened the 
 way for their benefit to mankind. 
 
 The way is opening, for in 1878 the cry is for truth, 
 for demonstrative evidence, that shall do away with 
 doubt, and place materialization above the fraudulency 
 of these exposing times. Every advent of Spiritualiza- 
 tion, or Spiritualism, has had truth for an usher, so 
 much of truth as compatible with the ideal growth of 
 human kind, and" to-day the mind force of the whole 
 world is drawing around this center figure that has fed 
 the creedal world since the Hindoo mythology found 
 strength in symboled signs, and since theology has been 
 the fashion-plate, from which the world has reared its 
 Christian arbitration, and still the cry is forms. The 
 world is not done yet crying for materiality — crying 
 for the spirit manifested in outer signs,, and in the 
 flesh, crying for a holocaust of truth that shall dampen 
 the toadyism confined in the whole system of church 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 11 
 
 anarchy, that is criminal before God, and is a slave 
 owner of men and women. 
 
 The world's cry is still materiality ! materiality ! to 
 crown the returned spirit, to make heaven and earth on 
 terms of union footing, and give orthodoxy a hunch she 
 will feel in every joint of her crumbling architecture, 
 and finally go down in the dead sea of the world's 
 ignorance. 
 
 The lessons of the ages have a broad sound, a travel- 
 ling back expression, a dipping in all the waters of the 
 past to find the evidence of man's faith in God, and 
 faith in the immortality of the soul, as a truthful struc- 
 ture, embodying the principles to maintain individual 
 sequence before the bar of infinite progress. 
 
 The world has always had its system of religious 
 worship, from the Zendavesta of the Persians, from 
 Buddha's heathen hieroglyphic gods, and structures 
 of mundane objects, supposed to possess some recant- 
 ation virtue with Deity from the Romish divinity of 
 passional greatness, symboled and confined in the pow- 
 ers given in wood and stone, in priestcraft, and in the 
 idolatry of pomp and show. In all the vast regions of 
 the mighty past, farther back than man knows for, have 
 the principles of religion been forstered and held by 
 such faith as comported with the world's spiritual 
 growth and education. 
 
 Mind has ever had its grasp on Deity, and has ever 
 
12 TEE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 sought a system whereby to express recognition and 
 fellowship with the infinity stamped upon his mind, and 
 merged in every part of his being, and yet held aloft as 
 the Father and Ruler over all existant life. Protestantism 
 is as far back as mind cares to linger, but its sweeping 
 folds still trail over the alters of Catholicism, that can 
 never clear herself from Romanism, the babbling foun- 
 tain that contains the spittle that has inoculated the 
 creed-bound world, and given religion the glittering 
 finish of being sold for so much a drachm. Romanism 
 can never clear herself from the jupe of Zorasteric 
 reign. The connecting links of all the monuments of 
 religious show are as clearly defined in the mental 
 histories of the past and present time, as Darwin's 
 process of dovetailing all the species of animal life into 
 one rythmic verse to produce man. 
 
 Every age carries its weapon of Christianity to place 
 at the hand and heart of Deity, and its acceptance has 
 been in accord with its lasting virtue, as seen in the 
 perfecting of humanity. 
 
 The lessons of the ages, in the present writing will 
 not so much embrace the historical facts of the past 
 fundamental worship-ground connecting God and man, 
 in a labyrinth of mystery and materiality that belongs 
 to the darkened condition of their respective age and 
 time. These lessons will take a broader scope in ethical 
 science, in past and present gradations of mind achieve- 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 13 
 
 ments, or purposes, guiding or leading on to achieve- 
 ments. The world has ever drank to drunkeness of 
 every fountain, having a showy placard announcing its 
 whereabouts, and where with all to feed the stomach or 
 mind of man ; and the fountain serving its purpose has 
 dropped apart, leaving the truth it contained feeding 
 many channels, to irrigate a broader landscape of dom- 
 inant power. 
 
 Christ stood witness eighteen hundred years ago, at 
 the temple of spiritual knowledge, and besought man to 
 search for the right key to unlock that feasible temple, 
 when earth could no longer hold together the shadow of 
 outward seeming. And ages before Christ the love 
 messengers instituted a wider search for a religion, that 
 would grace the inner temple of man and woman, as 
 well with ihe shamrock of ever increasing verdure and 
 beauty, that death could have no power to destroy. 
 Heathen history served for a time. The Jesuitical sal- 
 vage only pre-empts for a season. The Cathedral of 
 unlimited sway has never been builded. No theories, 
 or system of theories, can stand under a progres- 
 sive unfolding of mind in matter. Old dynasties of 
 pomp and unmitigated wrong and cruelty of design and 
 purpose, have dwindled away before the sunlight of a 
 more Godly education, that could not tolerate the vast- 
 ness of heathen ignorance and cruelty, unless staid, 
 would render God a nuisance whose power all had a 
 
14 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 right to question, and all had a right to combine in pur- 
 pose to make God better, or make men to understand 
 God better. 
 
 Theories have never stood the test of religion, be- 
 cause theories only satisfied in a measure the outside 
 plan of life, while religion is a fundamental principle 
 inlaid in God, and followed out through all the inverse 
 tide of human nature, and therefore Theocratic history 
 has run stale and barren of good, while religion has 
 handled the white nectar of peace since time boasted 
 of man, and man realized inate sensitiveness, which 
 has ever reached for better things in accordance with 
 the unfolding of spiritual law, which law is integral 
 action, controlled by no force, but eliminated and per- 
 fected by concordant design in the atomic realms of 
 space. 
 
 Spiritual law is older than God, because anterior to 
 mind as an element of supreme power. Mind is a 
 thinking apparatus, dependent on outward expression, or 
 symboled form, to educe growth and consequent action, 
 while the spiritual law that radiates from centre to cir- 
 cumference, and holds nature for mind to grasp at will, 
 is the volition encased in fire and water, capable of pro- 
 duciLg thought, and therefore anterior to the circum- 
 scribed position of thought. Thought dwells in evolu- 
 tion, and is rounded out from her broad lap of 
 indulgence, while spiritual law is evolution itself, or, 
 
THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 15 
 
 in other words, is the ever-producing or unfolding 
 agency, that is a cause without limit, a preponderating 
 inflow and outflow of gasous fluid, self immolated, or 
 inducted in fire and water, that girdles all space with a 
 power of cohesion that mind has never meddled with. 
 Mind is an outgrowth from the workings of spiritual 
 law, never yet having consolidated to a system of 
 thought that could not be impeached by some other 
 thought, which shapes its dependency at once, showing 
 conclusively there must be a law superior to any range 
 of thought yet discovered. 
 
 If God is a thinking power, holding the vastness of 
 space in any logical manner that the world can educe 
 geometrical design from, and an equilibrium in all the 
 forces of gestative nature, if thought can hold system- 
 atically so broad a schism apart from the just and 
 forcible law in primated matter from the friction forces 
 of light and heat, or fire and water, having nebulous 
 design, why then, thought bound and controlled in the 
 one Godhead of supernal philosophy is yet awaiting 
 discovery, from lesser minds, intent on probing this 
 grand equation of mental calibre, that has stood 
 through all the lessons of the ages, a ghost haunting 
 the infidelity of man, and only awaiting a spiritual 
 discovery to become a law-abiding god, that no thought 
 can distrust outside of molar action. 
 
 We, in spirit life, term God the incarnation of mind 
 
16 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 in matter ; the spirit going before a purpose. The law 
 of progress evolving a solution that time must deal 
 with according to her capacity of spiritual attainment. 
 The law of evolution primated in matter has evolved 
 our heavenly God, that must clasp hands with science, 
 becoming one under the law of solar equation. Mind 
 outside of matter can divulge nothing, but as an out- 
 growth from the conjunctive elements in matter, acted 
 upon from atmospheric condensation, is sure to reveal 
 everything respecting our epitome God. God cradled 
 in the lap of solar indulgence is an infant at play with 
 its mother's apron strings, but God, as an elimination 
 of mind force from the body system of opaque space, 
 is the world's plummet for sounding the viscera of all 
 natural design. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 17 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 YOU see, my earth friends, the sooner you let go 
 of your dogmatic God-head the sooner will the 
 true revelater attach itself to your creed of intellectual 
 feelers. All system has had God for a mouth-piece to 
 blow its horn of merit. All philosophers have found 
 basic installments in God. Few have thought to reach 
 farther in illimitable space than the supposed man 
 figure of supernatural wisdom and power of design, 
 because man's nature is to cope with man. The ul- 
 terior forces in matter, or in nature containing the seed 
 time and harvest of every functional atom, bearing date 
 of conceivement, man has treated in a desultory and 
 unfaithful manner, for it requires thought intense and 
 strong to search for life, for individuality, and for a 
 purpose connecting those two monuments of suppressed 
 power, life and individuality. It requires intense activity 
 of the mind to go outside of our repeated God, and 
 find a basic structure for all life, for all activity, for all 
 conceivement and all achivement, for all growth of 
 mind and matter, for the rosy and the thorny side of 
 every day's beat of time, for all there is of God in his- 
 tory, or in the broad Thesis of nature's designs, that is 
 
18 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 caught and caged somewhere by one vast ripple of love, 
 whose key-note of virbration reaches from centre to 
 circumference, holding God in the folds of evolution, 
 and man in the same channels of evolving light, to be- 
 come perfect when God is perfect. 
 
 I say it requires such method of thought as mind on 
 earth has not grown to. To step back of God as a 
 supreme revelator and find the forces of life fixed, and 
 held by cohesive laws that God could not meddle with, 
 God being the radiation of mind from the working or 
 reflex of those laws. Minds of earth have been quite 
 content with the God of fabled history. It is easier to 
 take pills when we know that some one else has been 
 dosed with them and claimed relief therefrom ; much 
 easier to try what has been tried as a mental or phy- 
 sical panacea than to break over old rules and forms 
 and plunge for something undiscovered that holds a 
 point of trust that must satisfy every investigator, how- 
 ever skeptical, in their out-reach after knowledge based 
 in facts. It pays one to travel, whether it be with the 
 mind let loose for a theological tramp mid the dry 
 bones of ancient technology or for the body's ease and 
 gratification that takes something new to its house of 
 clay, and casts away something it has no further use 
 for. Mind governs the body, and both are partners 
 for the reception of good, or the reverse, as experiences 
 meet the two natures. What we grow from is as neces- 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 19 
 
 sary to be understood to bring compass to natural 
 design, as it is to know whither we are tending and 
 to what forces we are to beat against in the future 
 tense of time, if we are yet to face God in any other 
 way than by thoroughly mingling in all the varieties of 
 materialistic nature. We never speak without express- 
 ing a design, without showing the God-mark of our 
 construction ; we never move in any way but we 
 show the whole equator of design. We show the power 
 of mind expressed in matter, we show the God within 
 us, dealing with the combination of chemical results, 
 from the friction rasp of light and heat. Every typical 
 expression of nature thrown out on base endeavor that 
 meets and mingles with the occult springs that out- 
 stamp our type of expression, are the result of chemical 
 action inborn in gaseous fluids that have wrought to- 
 gether to the unfoldment of God in nature or mind in 
 matter, simplyfying what heathenism made blind and 
 obscure. 
 
 To-day we are travelling out into the realm of chemi- 
 cal action. Past history teaches of the mind's enslave- 
 ment, of Greek meeting Greek on the bended knee of 
 fear, with judgment warped and set to dry beside the 
 holy Church of the living God, remote from any con- 
 ception of science, .remote from any breath of fractional 
 or sectional life but what was rounded out and clasped 
 by the hand of God in church and creed. Enslave the 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 mind and where and what is God ? A school boy at 
 play with a chip house, or a supernatural being living 
 in a fleecy heaven without top or bottom of any known 
 substance, where the righteous will find firm foundation 
 without fear or trembling of ever coming in contact 
 with a lake of fire that is ever kept burning for the sin- 
 sick and weary ones of earth. O ignorance ! thy birth- 
 right gift is foolishness ! is a label of dogmatism and 
 scintillating wickedness, more fearful than the hell of 
 thy brimstone coloring, more fearful than tar or 
 feathes, ax, halter, or gibbet, press, pulpit or Com- 
 stock's free pilfering of rights ; for these etceteras are 
 thy offerings and cannot harm a soul, bordered by the 
 sunlight of God's evolving truths. 
 
 Touch but a key of the world's grandest organ and 
 the whole vibratory system of music is felt by the soul, 
 attuned to the harmony of sound — touch this grand 
 system of evolution and the thinking mind is immolated 
 on the shrine of duty, from which out-flows the har- 
 mony that angels are voicing heaven with, and sending 
 the glorious refrain to the free-thinkers of earth. 
 
 Free thought, riding on the shoulders of our old the- 
 ology, is like the glitter of a new buckle on an old 
 shoe, or a new harness on the family horse that has 
 out-lived its service. Free thought ! Why it is God's 
 right shoulder moving the wheels of progress, and 
 sooner or later the sword shall be turned into pruning 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 21 
 
 hooks, and man's church shall be the inner temple, 
 from which has grown the best thought and the best 
 endeavor to rear a system where love shall supersede 
 and destroy the vulgar use of money. Money to-day 
 is the autocrat that swamps the soul and deadens the 
 nerve force of humanity to be noble and just to each 
 other — to live and let others live also, to deal in the 
 spirit knowing that the spirit finds us out, and reports 
 to the surface shadow ever in attendance when we do 
 an unjust or unholy act. 
 
 In the passing of time old theories are swept away, 
 become obsolete, out of date and consequent use. In 
 the passing of time we also see the newer utterings of 
 wisdom manifested in the attestability of science to 
 clear away the imperfect issues surrounding man's 
 accountable nature. 
 
 Man grows from transverse position from two 
 accountable pulsations of life and motion. Force is 
 always the agent of control, whether it be with good 
 intent or a motor put forth with illegitimate purpose, it 
 is creative principle under the sway or banner of Al- 
 mighty science inducted to the centre of negative 
 design. The same power or force that placed this 
 earth in the orbit of motion places a baby on the 
 rostrum of a living entity — places a star in the mid- 
 night grandeur of the heavens, and a pebble on the 
 white sanded shores of the wondrous ocean, and places 
 
22 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 the ocean, with her roaring melody and inflexible water- 
 power, a wonderful self-poise of constituent design, in 
 a world that has no anterior thought of growth, or per- 
 fecting only what comes from the elimination of a more 
 rarified force condition, brought about by the mingling 
 and comingling of sexual primates in the embryotic 
 pulsations of gaseous nature. 
 
 Man learns to think from the force of circumstances, 
 and so the material body of this world-orb has grown 
 and become thus far perfected from and by this same 
 law of circumstances, inlaid in the formula of gaseous 
 design, or gaseous instituted power, infiltrated in the 
 science of cause and effect. Circumstances govern us 
 completely. There is no such thing as pulling up the 
 track wherein we are to walk, it having been laid by 
 the skilful hand of science. We are adjusted with the 
 credentials for its trial and consequent discipline. All 
 lives have started from the centre gravity of motion, 
 and have perforce a centre law of accountability, which 
 is brought to bear in the formation of character, as 
 circumstances shape results. There is a continous law 
 of change ever working from centre causes, and in- 
 dividual life is the apex whereon is placed the index of 
 accountability, because matter is in no way accountable 
 until punctured by the God-star of reason. 
 
 Nature is ever lifting in her gyrating motion, and 
 swells to the full her tremulous tune of visexual pri- 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 mates interlacing and folded away in the cunning re- 
 treat of abnormal design. Nature never speaks but 
 once in building a germ for procreation, one effort of 
 magnetic will stamps the life of everything — stamped 
 the Caesars with their mighty wealth, and George Wash- 
 ington with his free philanthropy of spirit ; stamped 
 wars upon the world, and whirlwinds in the heavens, 
 rosebuds in thorns, birds in tiny shells, and God in the 
 ascendency of nature and design, working out the pre- 
 cepts laid in natural law, to the comprehension of 
 human minds. 
 
 Forsyth sought God for the knowledge that he could 
 attain to, by the close inblending of spirit, that would 
 bring him near to purpose, and the ultimate principles 
 of progress. Who studies God to-day, with the excep- 
 tion of a few church runners, but with the eye of 
 faith, with the time-worn goggles hazed over with the 
 dusky green to shut away the light embedded in a godly 
 Christianity ? whose head and shoulders dip in nature 
 continuously, for the fostering hand to support the true 
 religion. 
 
 I do not suppose Christ was a church-going man, in 
 any sense of the word. I believe the church he labor- 
 ed in, and for, was the people's church ; human hearts 
 ever held a text for him to enlarge upon, and pour into 
 the full orchestra of his grandest love notes, that in the 
 symphony and sympathy of appeal, might come resto- 
 
24 THE LESSORS OF THE AGES. 
 
 ration with new life and consequent hope. Christ was 
 a toiler, not for churches and the word, but for people, 
 and the spirit. 
 
 I believe that the lessons of the ages taught up to 
 Christ's time were lessons of crude materialism, les- 
 sons where the soul warbled faintly of heaven. God 
 was seen but as a man with huge proportions, with great 
 geographical latitude, capable of any immense under- 
 taking to show his power and skill to outwit man in 
 finite hemispheres. Christ's God was the infinite soul, 
 permeating everything, stamped upon human intelli- 
 gence, and moving in the crater of human ambition. 
 Christ saw God clearly, because he saw himself pure, 
 and therefore free to do right, and consequently knew 
 that the spiritual man was en rappotw\'d\ the soul of a 
 living entity. 
 
 Confucius saw with a living zeal that the whole plat- 
 form of Christianity was submerged in the material 
 workings of men, that the spirit of the divine word 
 cropped out anew in every advance of mind above mat- 
 ter. Confucius was as near to Christ as the lessons of 
 the ages would admit of, as near to Christ as the God- 
 spirit of his nature had advanced in the darkness of his 
 time. If Confucius saw God, it was not as Moses saw 
 him, in the material sense of view, but with his spirit 
 burnished with the aroma of love and goodness. God 
 was the principle wherein the world was to dip for every 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 25 
 
 amendment of error and atheistic darkness. Confucius 
 was a star in the tideway of human affairs, a lighthouse 
 in his age of mind crudeness and Deistic proclivities, 
 lighting the way to deeper thought and better action. 
 Confucius is the Chinese monument of living strength, 
 whose glory has swept through many generations, and 
 periods of time ; and no Chinaman to-day but what 
 holds the living principles of his reign as a motor with 
 God, for redemption and purification ; although their 
 foolish idols are the play-boards for feasts and festivals, 
 making a show of parliamentary action with their typi- 
 cal saviors, who are as mute and silent, as were all the 
 gods of heathen history ; who stood sponsor for crimes 
 as black as the travestry of error, that has run through 
 all the creed-bound systems of religious worship, and 
 stepping from the material plank of heathenism, we 
 find that Christianity or religion, which is the taper 
 lighted from the altar, is scarcely more than the spicing 
 to the minister's cake; which can scarcely be called 
 food to allay hunger, but simply a little ceremonious bit 
 to tempt the appetite and tickle the taste for something 
 more solid and substantial to build upon for Christ 
 and his kingdom. 
 
26 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 I SAY to you, my earth friends, that the religion of 
 to-day is altogether too showy in its announcements, 
 and too aristocratic in its typical expression, to be of 
 much use to a famishing soul, hungry for the true bread 
 to succor the love principle that has actuated every 
 martyr, of every age and clime ; and those martyrs 
 have, in most cases, stood out from church and creed, 
 and battled face to face with this principle of right, im- 
 bedded in the soul, and transfigured in action upon the 
 living scroll of a nation's honor. 
 
 It is not the churches that have done the weeding 
 for the world's progress and advancement in spiritual- 
 ity ; but it has been individuals, single handed and 
 alone, who have fought our greatest battles, whose spirits 
 of wisdom have more thoroughly permeated the godly 
 anarchy of rule, than any combined force of Christian 
 creed ever stamped upon the world. Where is there a 
 church to-day asking for redemption from sin and 
 slavery, that wields a force in its combined strength for 
 spiritual help in its hour of need, as did our Whittier 
 when the throbs of his soul went out in verse for the 
 liberty of three million slaves ? What said our churches 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 27 
 
 then ? Why, that liberty must be gagged, too much 
 frontal show would displace their kingdom of policy, 
 which was to cramp where it would not do to enlighten, 
 but Whittier's heart-sob pierced the multitude, and 
 spirit took action. Men saw God in the work, and God 
 saw Abraham Lincoln would wring the serpent's neck 
 by his stamp act of emancipation. 
 
 Have the churches, go as far back as Ninevah you 
 please, ever done so grand a thing ? ever careened so 
 much to the right, as to speak a hope as bright and 
 saving in its tendency as the word Liberty to the bond- 
 men at the south ? Search every record of creed-bound 
 religion, every sophistry of pulpit and press, to make 
 brilliant her God-face of ordination, and you will surely 
 fail to find in all of her broad territory an act or deed 
 more worthy of God's acceptance and approval. 
 
 Religion is more mighty to-day than ever before, be- 
 cause it is better understood what constitutes her power 
 and worth. If I say I am a religionist, let my acts 
 every day of my life confirm my saying to be true ; let 
 me look continuously if I will to heaven, for aid to 
 strengthen my purpose of right ; but let me also look 
 in the world for her objects and aims, on which my re- 
 ligion may show in good results. 
 
 Ministers tell us we are all in hell until we are con- 
 firmed and set to brew in their oven of safety, that opens 
 and shuts with the apostolic certainty of having secured 
 
28 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 an overland traveller for heaven, who has nothing to do 
 but to pay tithes, say his prayers, drink holy water if 
 the creed demand it, partake of a little white bread to 
 soothe the atonement, and feel scot free of sin, at peace 
 with God, with a side wink at the devil, saying, you, I 
 have outwitted by paying so much a year into this holy 
 temple, and submitting to a few Christian et ceteras, 
 which custom demands and age has withered. 
 
 The devil never worked to any better advantage to 
 promote his territory of reign than in the churches, by 
 cramping the soul to fit a creed. My soul has fought 
 the sternest battles with that wide-mouthed Apollo of 
 power, that has sapped the life-blood of Christianity, 
 to swell the papal crown of influence and deepen the 
 spirit of mammon, about the whole ecclesiastical step- 
 board of religious show ; and I am free to say, that the 
 pulling down of creed will lead to universal freedom 
 and communion with the angel world. 
 
 So much I have said as a preface, before enlarging 
 upon the nature of ethical religion, as based in science, 
 and carried out in the philosophy of natural law. Sci- 
 ence is a word greatly used, but its point of illumina- 
 tion has scarcely been touched ; and its meaning with 
 regard to life and death is yet merged in darkness, and 
 no Plutonian school of past or present scholarship has, 
 or can fathom its depths of meaning or light of life. 
 
 Plato was very learned from the intuition of his soul. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES 29 
 
 God took root in creative science, and would be a last- 
 ing teacher, so long as the spirit of progress fronted 
 the atheism of all coming time; but Plato, deep as he 
 was in the true solvents to a practical religion, did not 
 see that ethical science, understood and lived, would 
 stamp the world with a religion that angels could trav- 
 erse, thus bridging the spiritual and material continent 
 with an unending method of communication. Plato, 
 who comes before us to-day, comes as a mighty ray of 
 the past, so far back that it scarcely seems to be our 
 world that produced that living anchor to a Godly hope. 
 Is it a supposable case, that Plato has become extinct ? 
 that the fire that lighted his soul has burned to dross ? 
 the genius of the world's greatest orator, whose sayings 
 are chiseled in God, burned into Greek history, and live 
 in the spirituality of to-day. The word death does not 
 fit to any part of such men's lives, the sweeping fires 
 to a greater illumination awaken the soul to a master- 
 ship over time, that eternity may cull the living gem, 
 whose sparkling brilliancy reaches to God, and claims 
 the science and purpose of its power. 
 
 Can death ever reach a Galileo ? ever unite its icy 
 fingers with the lustrous crowning of his mighty intel- 
 lect ! that could traverse the realms of space, solve the 
 equation of stars, fix planets in their orb of circulating 
 splendor, and move the world to the study of equatorial 
 design ? Such men live for a purpose, and if purpose 
 
30 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES 
 
 can die, then God, man and nature can die, become 
 extinct, become the non-accesor to a single principle of 
 filial worth. 
 
 We cannot lose a single orb, be it great or small, in 
 the galaxy of human life but what the break would pull 
 down center, law and gravity of motion. If death 
 could ensue to me — reach my centre compass, destroy 
 my equation of manhood — then God comes under the 
 same law of deathly destruction, and God and man have 
 a beginning and ending. 
 
 The surf upon the sea becomes white by the con- 
 tinued lashing of its waters ; and so shall the white 
 peace of immortality show brave and clear, when the 
 lashings of science has whipped out creed and rent her 
 dominant ministers, although they be Spurgeon like, 
 outside of their mole-hill churches, to fatten on thought 
 instead of popular favor, that tips and bends with a 
 rod of gold. 
 
 Dish washing, says Auntie Soul, is a splendid work 
 if God unbends and steps to the side-board of duty. 
 Thought, I believe, has no regular pew of worship, but 
 can solve a problem in algebra, in nature, or in that 
 great husk of Noah's Ark that carried so much bullion 
 in live stock, when mind dealt in figures instead of 
 facts ; as well can the mind study when the fingers shell 
 beans as it can under the glory of that old Bible, brewed 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 31 
 
 under the cover of church and creed, with an ecclesias- 
 tical whip, lashing to slavery and subdued order. 
 
 Why, friends of earth, I would rather sit under an 
 apple tree, famous for its worth of golden fruit, with a 
 poem of Leigh Hunt and the last nail of Baxter over 
 the doomed condition of man, than to sit in a creed- 
 bound church and follow out the meaningless trail by 
 which sinners can bear a part in the resurrection, 
 reach heaven, sit at the right hand of God, and wave 
 their plumes of triumph over the non-converted that 
 are in the other valve of secular influence, trying to 
 reach the spirit of mercy, but God refuses, because 
 they refused or failed to come in contact with the 
 church filter. Why ! Baxter's nail is harmony com- 
 pared to this seething foam of churchly Christianity, 
 presented in golden cups for the nations' respectability 
 and glory of Christian enterprise. 
 
 The songs of the angels are nearing the earth, the 
 voicing touches to a mighty revolution will make free- 
 dom of speech the grand hiatus to the evolvement of 
 truth, and immortality will stand face to face with the 
 world's bigotry and superstition. 
 
 Robert Ingersoll is playing ball in the old theological 
 camping ground of historical romances and God-speak- 
 ing wonders, hitting where I dared not touch, because 
 sectarianism held closer reign than now, and if I spoke 
 at all my voice must be muffled and truths held back, 
 
32 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES, 
 
 that to have uttered would have freed my soul, and 
 made me more worthy of my vocation. Robert Inger- 
 soll — I pray for his incoming speeches, pray for his pro- 
 longed strength and sufficiency of manhood, that dares to 
 utter his truths in the face of the fashionable toadyism 
 and bankrupt religion of to-day. The nobility and 
 goodness in the man's face is better study than the 
 tiicks of Moses, which he has made himself familiar 
 with, and by which he masters his audience completely. 
 The fun in the man is worth the money he gets for its 
 dissemination over the hearts of his hearers ; and I am 
 fain to say* I would rather go to his non-committal 
 heaven with him, as an usher, than to follow the bee- 
 line of modern sectarianism and be seated at last in the 
 golden ring of promissory Godism. 
 
 The mingled fables of Antioch could not combine a 
 greater fraud to please God and sooth a weakened con- 
 science than these ministerial strokes of policy to fatten 
 the church camel, whose humps of discord have shown 
 through all ages, linked together by spiritual promise, 
 shown in the advancement of the arts and sciences — 
 nature's grandest themes of worship in the freedom of 
 speech that will not be bound in the out-cropping of a 
 religion shown in the souls of men and women, who 
 cannot be content under prayer, fasting and penance 
 under any organized form of worship, but must needs 
 show their hand with God — and their hearts in solar 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 33 
 
 light, by trying to prune society of its errors, and make 
 a break on the dead sea of materialism, never more 
 apparent than now, when ministers are seeking the 
 truth of immortality outside of God-written word, 
 knowing that the gospel teachings of the Bible cannot 
 succor a soul whose idea of heaven is life and action. 
 Teach a soul that heaven is one perpetual psalm-ground, 
 and God the direct focus of praise and thanksgiving, 
 for having saved what is claimed was, and by him cre- 
 ated, and you dwarf the soul at once, by making it an 
 idol worshipper, as purely legitimate as the Sanhedren 
 worshippers of wood and stone. 
 
 It is useless for ministers to try and lead a people, 
 unless the people feel they are being led aright, and 
 ministers are feeling the dissatisfaction of the people, 
 and also their incapacity to lead much longer on the old 
 prologue of hell fire as the penalty of sin. Moral 
 ethics is coming in on the old line of the Tudor aris- 
 tocracy, whose burden of materialism and religious 
 crime England still feels, and is trying to cut loose 
 from the despotism of such fraudulent powers, under 
 the ecclesiastical assumption of God's will and mea- 
 sures. Ethical science could find no root to branch 
 from when honesty was considered a bore, truth a 
 fiction, crime a virtue, that God took heed of with 
 willingness and approval to swell the orchestra of 
 Catholic favor, settling over the whole government 
 of Europe, making a flood of woe more devastating 
 and cruel than Noah's flood of mythic history. 
 
34 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE lessons of the ages will teach us that God never 
 rules by force, unless he sees that people having 
 eyes to see refuse to see that virtue brings its own re- 
 ward, and those having ears to hear refuse to hear the 
 rippling tune of love over the booming cannon of op- 
 pression. 
 
 What surety have we of life only in the facts of 
 science and in those facts we may safely rest everything. 
 It has been the willingness of all time to give God 
 the credit, and the experience of constructing life and 
 governing death, and with that thought and willingness 
 people in a measure have rested, seeing God afar off 
 on the judgment seat of the world's salvation, and man 
 catering thereto under a diplomatic ruling of church 
 discipline. 
 
 What evidence have the churches after so long a 
 supremacy ? What evidence of the approval of God 
 of the after life, through their channel of adoption ? 
 None, whatever. It is a supposition of the crudest 
 and most irrational view of life, and its characteristical 
 signs with God and science. The Deity over first 
 motion, first law and its rights. I question the inalien- 
 able power to give life, because it cannot be a gift ; it 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 35 
 
 is a design, a flower, that is to be. If cause and effect, 
 the God voicing in nature have blended a perfect bud- 
 ding, and the will-force of light and heat expand the 
 germinal quiver or feotus to its destiny of purpose, how 
 irrevelant is Scripture, how unsound its doctrinal points 
 galvanized with heathen mystery, stale and unprofitable 
 only as the pillars of ignorance and consequent super- 
 stition, from which the law of progress or the eliminat- 
 ing principle of evolution have removed the mindality 
 of to-day. 
 
 I ask in the earnestness of my spirituality if there is 
 any good in keeping a fiction at mast head when every 
 eye with the focus fire of sense must see the inability 
 of its purpose and show ? I trust the world is becom- 
 ing strong enough to face heathen mythology with the 
 wisdom gained from the repeated tricks of priestcraft 
 to tie soul and body to the letter, a wonderful hulk of 
 ignorance, instead of the spirit, the illuminating princi- 
 ple, which only makes the Bible a readable book, and 
 transferable from one epoch of time to another. 
 
 The Zendavesta of the Persians is as good for us to- 
 day, as a guide to the spiritual courts of heaven, as the 
 Christian Bible — aside from the silver rivulet per- 
 meating the valley gorges of Christ's unassuming life 
 and unwearied toiling for a heaven based on a funda- 
 mental principle of right, in its broadest and most 
 spiritual sense. There can be no Bible, no holy writ, 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 no God enunciation of righteousness, purity and broad- 
 cast virtue, no grander chrism for the world's salvation 
 than the flowery bulb of Christly love, never to be ex- 
 panded in full until mind grapples science as the 
 desideratum of unqualified power. 
 
 We, in our spirituality, acknowledge no power but 
 the divine Power, the leading purposes to a grand un- 
 foldment in the natural system-house of matter. 
 
 Divinity signifies everlasting purpose, everlasting 
 power, derived from the expanding forces of light and 
 heat, that are ever bringing to view the genius we attach 
 to Diety. There is no Deity of moral ethics that can 
 blend deeper in humanity for good, and the perfect 
 growth of good, than the far-reaching and systematized 
 monition of the purely human and divine Jesus, whose 
 out-flowing of spiritual love will galvanize every error 
 of life with the beneficence of a lasting regeneration, 
 and whoever hearkens for a sound from any church, 
 warbling a new religion, will hearken in vain, for a 
 better than Christ exemplified, and is sending out in 
 every love-note of reform to bless the coming ages, and 
 make a stronger peace with God. Christ is for all 
 time, for all countries and for all climes, for all re- 
 vealed religion, for all mental philosophy, and all 
 didactic study, that can make men better, purer and 
 wiser. 
 
 Cato dreamed in heaven and fought in hell, dreamed 
 
TEE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 37 
 
 of the glorious sunlight of God's love pouring out over 
 the world, and saw the benighted and selfish condition 
 of God's humanity spurning the love-light of spiritual- 
 ity, the all of Christ, and all of heaven, for the pottage 
 pomp and show of the world's renown for a nucleus of 
 time power that heaven can never deal with, for heaven 
 is the parallel term with love, and cages nothing but 
 purity and peace. 
 
 The world is not ready for heaven ; when it is, heaven 
 will be its centre to act from, and hell the fleeing clown 
 of selfishness. 
 
 Buddhas' religion was mythical, but it also had a 
 grandeur of conception that the ideality of to-day can- 
 not fathom. The old world, with its treasured arts and 
 neglected sciences, is a rare basin of wealth ; and its 
 theological structures, whose domes reach the sky, are 
 but the outward expression to the inner grandeur of 
 spiritual conceivements. The old world has flooded 
 itself with its errors of typical design, which are the 
 flaming swords keeping back the true religion of 
 Christly import. 
 
 Christ bore his religion within himself, and yielded it 
 to suit all times and purpose*. He did not hold it forth 
 in the world as a church, from which so many tenets 
 could be expelled for as much money taken in. Ah, 
 no ! Christ held his religion above board, whatever else 
 might sink about the man, that was the casta diva of 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 immortal worth, whose lustre was as imperishable as 
 the twinkling brilliancy of the midnight stars. What 
 Christ gave to the world was himself, the all he had to 
 give the inner temple for the world to enlarge upon, 
 and make better if it could. 
 
 God is a sphere within the immortality of a broad 
 and wonderful design, whose compass no mind can 
 span, or even touch the foot-board of the wonderful 
 conceivement power in science. Mind can only hold 
 science to the depth of its cultured and spiritualized 
 shaping or condition ; and it is therefore necessary for 
 mind to enlarge in the spaces of infinity, that God may 
 be understood, and nature grow into the compass of 
 individual worship and protection. 
 
 God never errs because nature is true to her spiritual 
 instincts, and builds according to the spiral tendency in 
 the feotus of design. 
 
 The earth, world or planet, has had its conceivement 
 hour, its father and mother planet or visexigon inter- 
 lacing of cosmo adherents, that fashioned and formed 
 on the solar key of universal lifehood. This world has 
 also had its babyhood, with its infantile experiences in 
 fossil, rock, and in the vegetable kingdom has the inner 
 germ grown its outward symbol from its best spiritual 
 conceivement. I find no world more perfect in its de- 
 sign than the world of earth, because it fits the cubic 
 root of science in every formative principle from centre 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 39 
 
 to circumference, and is as true to the mind force of 
 design in one stage of development and growth as in 
 another. 
 
 The worlds or spheres, that are termed more spirit- 
 ual, are only so from the more ethereal or sublimated 
 condition of science, in its natural elongation, from the 
 process of blending and inter-blending of the rarified 
 selection of mind encased in the armory of science, 
 and when understood and breathed upon by the best 
 breath of adherent qualification, why, a broader type of 
 chemical and therefore spiritual condition ensues, and 
 man and his sphere is enlarged, and become an infinite 
 soul together, and one through the process of time and 
 eternity, if there is a difference that is countable and 
 in the arc of solar wisdom. 
 
 Etherealization takes place when motive power is 
 ready to face the Deism of purity, that finds no shack- 
 els in the way of growth, because conscience speaks 
 her mission to serve for the highest attainable point of 
 God witnessing and God approvement of action ; then 
 comes justification through the law of moral purifica- 
 tion. 
 
 Spirit life is emblematical of the highest type of ex- 
 istent being, and its gradations occur according to its 
 sphere of action. We see the gradations of spiritual 
 life in all of the earthly spheroid of motion and ac- 
 countable design ; we see gross conditions under the 
 
40 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 same solar law of indulgence, that we see purity ex- 
 pressed and lived beside the shekinah of a more spirit- 
 ual unfolding. 
 
 Nature never errs, her facts are every time soluble to 
 reason, when reason lets go of the snorting horse of 
 creed, and attaches its limner of versatile thought to 
 the open sesama of Godly science. Nature is ever con- 
 versant with God, ever saying : I hold myself under, 
 above, and around the law of progress. I hold myself 
 to no creed, but one of universal factorship. Universal 
 primates rule my order of design, universal feelers 
 shape my course of action, and universal God-ism 
 crowns every effort of my triune cause. Nature is 
 girded in the armor of a prince, and defies any ancestor 
 to wheel a great chair over her claim, with any proto- 
 listic benefit derived from claimship. 
 
 All authors have seen nature through a glass darkly, 
 not comprehending her internal melody on executive 
 workmanship — not understanding her God and Devil 
 in hand to hand effort to fulminate a picture where 
 every rift, sunshine and shade, shall so speak and 
 blend, that no critic could be found to find a fault with 
 the conceivement process. All authors have given from 
 the full of their comprehended knowledge, and one and 
 all have felt the drain, and also the inability to feed the 
 multitude with that degree of success that the author 
 could say, " I have found the pearl of great price, that 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 41 
 
 will satisfy the capacity of the present and future con- 
 tingencies of mental research." 
 
 Mind first grasps the rudimental, and then comes a 
 deeper working in the concrete, until it would seem 
 that what has been termed chaos, or chaotic condition, 
 is fine order, transferred to the mind and consequently 
 to the understanding, by the subtle alchemy that unites 
 mind to all that nature contains, from her base to the 
 rounded structure of her highest God. 
 
 Order was always existent, being the first law from 
 which sprang motion. Order is the rivet that fastens 
 cause and effect, and making the triune God on basic 
 condition ; but behind cause and effect is the instellar 
 key, that unlocks the fluidic wells, containing the gase- 
 ous solvents that make motion possible, and in the 
 hand of Godly sway. 
 
 From the world of spirit and the world of matter, 
 conjointly one, will the mysteries of world building be 
 made plain to the reasoning faculties of men and 
 women ; because mind must fathom the depths of its 
 equation, fixed as it is in the centre house of design, 
 and budding and flowering in all the occult forces of 
 nature. Destiny is man's guide-board, and he cannot 
 run counter to it, for results follow causes as surely as 
 the law of gravitation masters the world, and hangs her 
 flag of truce on the winds of freedom. 
 
 Shelley, the world's hero on limitation, spanned a 
 
42 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 broader design in compass and range, in the idyl or 
 spiritual relationship of being and knowing, than any 
 poet scribe of ancient or modern time ; his genius was 
 ever lighted at the altar fire of sacrifice, and so the 
 whole tone-centre of the man became free from dross, 
 and ever broadening on spiritual territory. Because he 
 sought for spiritual harmonies, and knew that in the 
 broad conclave of natural science that God was but the 
 crowning principle or soul-light over all of Ethiopean 
 condition, and as God was in the beginning staid and 
 true. Shelley mounted the rostrum of free thought to 
 find the truth, and the way in and to first principles. 
 What God has joined together cannot be put asunder, 
 and is marriage contract of the first degree ; migrations 
 may occur, but Shelley found, that true as the needle 
 to the pole, would the law of attraction bring together 
 harmonies ; and disintegration and decay would be the 
 result of unsocial centre law. The law of gravitation, 
 that holds worlds suspended by the quivering thread of 
 conjugal love or attraction, is no more paramount and 
 certain in result and effects in that capacity of employ- 
 ment, than in holding each atom bearing constructive 
 genius to the orbit of natural design. It would cost 
 God just as much to lose a pebble from the seashore, a 
 grain of sand from the ocean's level, a red leaf from 
 old autumn's flowering trees, as it would to say goodbye 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 43 
 
 to a world in motion, for if anything could be lost, 
 there is no safety fund in God. 
 
 The lessons of the ages have taught men and women 
 to grow fitly to nature, and as nature is ever coursing 
 upward, the springs of human achievements are becom- 
 ing spiritualized and also galvanized with the true spirit 
 of progress ; and from the old dutch oven to bake in, 
 we have baking done by gasometers that seem almost 
 as ethereal as canary on toast, or nectar from the bill 
 of a humming bird. This may seem like a simple 
 digression from the theme before us, but for illustration 
 we can descend from a world to a mouse, and make 
 sober and true meaning. 
 
 The Jews fought for power, fought with the devil of 
 monopoly, to foster a ring, wherein God could send a 
 Savior especially Jewish and bearing all the credentials 
 of worldly pomp and show. The Jews catered to 
 Babylon, catered to the mundane philosophy of wealth, 
 that God must be en rapport with money, because its orb 
 of show was altogether lovely and pleasing, around 
 every earthly condition. God to the Jews was a money 
 God, unscrupulous in his management with the world, 
 as they were in their deal with each other around any 
 board of trade, where principle involved sacrifice. 
 
 I now see from my broader light that God lives to 
 every nation, in the nation's highest soul condition. 
 The Scandinavians were fetish in their worship, heaven 
 
44 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 with that sorrowful tribe had earth for a base-board to 
 lean upon, and the things of earth swamped them com- 
 pletely. 
 
 The Hindoo mythology was wrought from carnal 
 condition. Persian history is a blank to the spirit of 
 the living God. Heathen ministrations will last as long 
 as principle succumbs to motive, and God is seen in 
 the floating ambitions of men, or in the topmost wave 
 of heavenly grandeur, unmindful of the wrongs and 
 corruptions of earth; and Satan comes to the front as 
 a guest, easy of entertainment, willing to stay, and 
 freely kept in a world whose policies are as deadening 
 to virtue, the breast-plate worn by the Gods, as the 
 sting of the asp is a deadening virus to the citidel of 
 human life. 
 
 Monarchies have reeled and fallen under the sicken- 
 ing stench of a personal God, who crowned every mon- 
 eyed effort, of a moneyed nation, with that degree of 
 pomp and cruelty that made terror the boon of life, 
 and materialism the carnal religion of the day. Crecian 
 captivity was but the manifestation of a powerful God, 
 whose weapon was the blood thirsting heart of the na- 
 tion, to make ruin and subjugation, where God had 
 failed to put the stamp of a moneyed monopoly. 
 
 God will always grow with the growth and intelli- 
 gence of the people. To-day sacerdotal history cannot 
 feed the mind with a just conception of Deity, for Deity 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 45 
 
 at this stage of mind development is justice from cen- 
 tre to circumference of every intelligent force, bearing 
 the stamp mark of Godly equation. 
 
 Pollock's Course of Time was a graded constellation 
 whose bursting power proclaimed the wrath of an angry 
 God, proclaimed a benediction from the flood-gates of 
 hell, to swamp the sinner in the pit of endless torment, 
 ever burning on the haphazard side of God's fluctuating 
 purposes. Pollock wrote under the banner of an angry 
 personal God, wrote from the tideway of a superstitious 
 intellect, covered with the black cap of materialism 
 that failed to let in a ray of science. Pagan idolatry 
 was fast crowning the world with a harp of a thousand 
 strings drawn through the centre of creedal religion, 
 which means religion by the plummet and rule of 
 church democracy, kept in running order by the labeled 
 word of God, and the open purses of a class of people 
 who take better to religion on a server, under the aus- 
 pices of regal show, than they would a working out of 
 the bright jewel through the fiery furnace of earthy 
 discipline. 
 
 Pagan idolatry was waving her crown loftily, and 
 materialism was floundering to the surface in squadrons 
 of free thought disciples, when a rap came into the 
 midnight camp of idolatry and atheistic proclivities of 
 thought, to awaken a search on broader territory, where 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 science should show her face, and God could speak 
 through the voices of the dead. 
 
 The first rap at Rochester saved the world from 
 Deism, saved God in the bond of love, and Christ in 
 the rightful capacity as a man medium, born under the 
 same law of science that all are born, having no heav- 
 enly power only what came from the purity of his 
 purposes and acts in his deal with earthly conditions. 
 Christ never proposed to save the world only by the 
 out-wrought influence of a true and righteous life : — 
 follow me, was saying : indorse my principles, if ye 
 would live for spiritual things, and receive spiritual 
 help, for my Father never refuses those who rap on the 
 right door of heaven's sanctuary. We bless the in- 
 coming tide of earthly saviors, the incoming tide of 
 scientific facts that will brace individuals to save them- 
 selves through the insular law of spiritual detective- 
 ness. 
 
 I question if there was ever a person, of able-mind 
 ambition, that felt satisfied with the atonement process 
 of salvation ; it seems too much like shirking our God 
 and devil responsibilities, and laying our characters 
 away in the orthodox heaven to get lean on the fluted 
 flummery of: Thus saith the Lord, handed round through 
 the lip service and policies of men, who learn to read 
 God's thoughts and purposes in the theology of an 
 unscrupulous money democracy. I say away with 
 
THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 47 
 
 these rasping cudgels of church and creed, that deaden 
 all insight into the spiritual harmonies of scientific 
 workmanship, based in nature and her God. I say 
 away with religion on stilts, seeking from its uplift how 
 many it can surround, and place in the ring of God's 
 acceptance. Away with our false theocracy that made 
 a God out of nothing, and gave him power over heaven 
 and earth — a masculine God of course — subject to 
 fits and spasms, and frequent discussions with the devil, 
 to learn the best method of carrying a world that was 
 continually troubling him by the unfaithful results of 
 his advices. 
 
48 TEE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 YOU see, my friends of earth, that the base struc- 
 ture of our theological God could not stand the 
 wear and tear of the Christian religion, So many 
 devil meetings broke the ring of confidence, and God 
 seemed to lose caste as a competent and advisable 
 ruler with a class of people that had two-story heads. 
 Let us take God naturally ; no other way can serve us, 
 because no other God fits cause and effect, and no 
 other God can solve to us the problem of life and 
 death. We grow from base design, and we accumulate 
 so much of God as we can contain day by day, and 
 hold it in the world as staple fund for future use. 
 
 To-day finds me in possession of a larger God than 
 when time held me bound in my earthly casket, and 
 this, now in space, and now in God, is grander than 
 anything earth can conceive of ; it is to see my past 
 lessons hung on the broad tree of life, and moral ethics 
 holding a golden pointer to every thought and its effect. 
 
 I see at the time of my life, where I searched the 
 bible to find a God I could endorse with every upright 
 principle of my being, was the darkest period of my exis- 
 tance, and my God within said and the pointer found 
 it : " Theodore Parker, sow your theological seed if 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 49 
 
 you will, but find my correspondency in nature." And 
 I find that God in me is God in nature, eliminated and 
 prolonged by culture and a widening understanding of 
 progressive law, where harmonies meet and mingle for 
 the reincarnation of a broader divine purpose. 
 
 Nature is the highest type we have of divine excel- 
 lence, for nature always crowns herself and wears her 
 crown with the true elegance of non-assumption. We 
 grow deeper in God when we understand the polemic 
 theory of nature's inverse condition, when we under- 
 stand how light and heat are formed, and their con- 
 tinuous struggles to farther manifest in nature's desing- 
 ihg. We will understand why God is spirit lightening 
 up every material compressment with the instinct of 
 growth. I shall sing jubilanti when my inverse God 
 shall find the completement of one star in the corres- 
 pondency of nature's light-house, and give me the effi- 
 cient power to solve its glittering finish. Can God, in 
 the travestus of solar atmosphere, know more than to 
 know the process of world-building and growing ? know 
 more than I am capable of knowing when this universal 
 God meets in equilibrium the height of my divine or 
 love nature. Love is solar hemisphere ; love crowns 
 us with wisdom ; love causes me to feel the growing 
 God with me, that I am to be ever capable, because 
 love is infinite in capacity, surrounding in process, and 
 all holy in effort. I ask no brighter crown than one 
 
50 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 made so by the expanding of my love nature. I ask 
 no brighter jewel than a heart made happy by my pres- 
 ence, for therein I know a world has been touched and 
 my own life carrying the acme of a grander purpose. 
 
 Saul of Tarsus preached and prayed for a divine 
 mission in, and of, the world, wholly capsized in 
 material pomp and power ; because God to the Tarsus 
 king was a man flllibuster in heaven, recruiting on 
 eanh, to establish a monarchy, where kings could snuff 
 the air of heaven through the nostrils of national sub- 
 jection. Saul, while on earth, always found God 
 through the devil's causeway, and never appealed in 
 God direction, only through his policy God within. I 
 find that the God man carries within, never wars with 
 the one outside. First purify, and then magnify by 
 cultivation your own God of conscience, and you will 
 ever harmonize with good wherever found, and with 
 God as the centre figure of elongated principle. What 
 I am, here and now, progress has made me ; day by 
 day have I drank from life's perpetual fountain cf 
 knowledge. Whatever has been my work in hand ser- 
 vice, or footstep mission, my mind has been the active 
 monitor that gathered up the prizes and laid them in 
 the storehouse of memory, to round out my self-hood. 
 I never fought while on earth with anything so tantaliz- 
 ing and perverse to reason as the lame old hen of the- 
 ological assumption, setting on the nest-egg of heathen 
 
THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 51 
 
 Christianity, if we can call form service Christianity, 
 and believe that the voice of the living God proclaimed 
 wars, and system of wars, proclaimed that the heart of 
 the nations might be sheathed in cases of steel, to 
 glitter with the cold selfishness of a mammon God 
 within, and a mammon God at the battle door of 
 heaven. I have always fought Theocratic religion, 
 termed Christianity, fought it with my search-warrant 
 of reason, until the tail is in sight in the form of the 
 Young Men's Christian Association, which will run a 
 thorough leak on the old dogmatic Godism. And I 
 now see, with my reason top-lighted, that the children 
 of to-day will be men and women of a living religion, 
 and Christianity will embody the spirit of the living 
 Christ, and his blood panacea will be the dead shuck 
 of renunciation, that can never hold another straw of 
 promise in a world where free thought is the life of 
 progress, and in a world that the angels are traversing, 
 holding the law and the promise secure in the bond- 
 house of science. The Bible is a frail barque to rest 
 our future keepsakes on, or in. Give me a life and 
 death in motion, a God, in the equation of central 
 design, firm to every part of my being, that cannot let 
 go, sin or no sin, that cannot look back with a shadow 
 of regret, but ever leading me out to the understanding 
 of the fundamental principles, attaching to my birth- 
 right gift of life proper and in the scales of human 
 progress. 
 
52 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 I have no objection to the Bible, only as a book pro- 
 pelled by the sentiments of a personal God, as a book 
 for mankind to rest a hope on, in regard to future 
 saving. God implies attributes, and can a belief in 
 attributes turn one scale in God's favor? Can fear 
 promote one inch of my growth mentally or morally ? 
 Can hope blend one shade with faith to open the func- 
 tion of divine hearing and restore me from sin to the 
 mercy seat of salvation, and make me a whole and 
 complete man? I accept no salvation, only what 
 comes from inbedded principle in the science of moral 
 ethics, leaving me free to find its channel, and apply 
 its lessons to my daily experiences. Functional life is 
 a life within the law ; and I make out with observation, 
 united with reason, that law is everything. Let those 
 who will call law God, it makes no difference. We are 
 as capable in birth, and every change under one term 
 as the other. Some, no doubt, will call me an atheist 
 in my spirit home, having found that hell, that was pre- 
 dicted for me ; but here, and now, my atheism, if you 
 will, wears the living crown to a godly principle, perfect 
 in the law of science, whether that principle be inlaid in 
 the function-house of matter or in the reasoning and 
 spiritual forces of heart and brain ; there is no separa- 
 tion, because mind claims protection from that God of 
 of which it is a part, a limb from the tree or law of 
 elongated primates. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 53 
 
 Schiller tells me that his life, so far, has been a poem 
 of rare beauty, for everything that the world would call 
 stern prose, he, with his spiritual key, unlocked the 
 hard surrounding, and his idyl prose stood clothed in a 
 poem of functional truth. 
 
 I am glad that I am under a law that will fit me to 
 every condition that belongs to me ; glad that my God 
 is larger than the one-handed power that catered to the 
 Jews, glad that my God lingers long by the fountain of 
 ethics in moral phrase, and in the soul-house of nature's 
 divinest revelations ; for I know that as I have lived 
 through the great change called death, I shall always 
 live in my centre gravity condition, and nearer my God 
 to thee in every harmonical advance of progressive 
 free thought. 
 
 I would not linger beside a stream filled with drift- 
 wood, that there might be good in, if cleared from 
 rubbish, unless I took off my gloves, if I had them on, 
 and my boots, if they impeded my progress in clearing 
 the stream of its unnecessary bulk of waste material. 
 And so with the Jesuit Bible ; I cannot linger idly beside 
 it ; I must work with reason unbound and cleared by 
 the fresh wind of free thought, knowing that the living 
 stream of Christly love, cleared from heathen rubbish, 
 and photographed in the world, where deeds fill the law 
 and the gospel, will be all that is needed to make peace 
 with God and good will on earth. 
 
54 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 
 
 I feel like saying Amen to my own inspiration that 
 lifts me above the surface of things, to find a remedy 
 to better surface condition, and bring down our heaven- 
 ly God, into actual life, to establish in finance, and in 
 evey department of national business capacity, that code 
 of laws where love shall hold the balance weight, and 
 Christ, if you will, to formulate the figurehead of jus- 
 tice. 
 
 Minds that have unwound from the wheel of pro- 
 gress, look upon life as too sacred a boon to be wasted 
 in mastering the problems of Noah, Ham and Japhet, 
 Isaiah, Moses or Shadrach, or even trying to attach a 
 suction quill to the dead hulk of God's crucified Savior, 
 the form of Bible theology. God is better understood 
 to-day than ever before. Progress has unfolded mind 
 to look for principle, for strata security in building 
 process, and God cannot escape the investigating 
 spirit of man, for divine council is, to search and ye 
 shall find that spirit is the light governing the world, 
 and God the promissory figure holding the key of sci- 
 ence. Man outwardly lives in an atmosphere of light, 
 but in the spirituality of inverse being. The divine 
 rays of light and promise do not enter the soul system- 
 atically, as the daylight by virtue of order holds us ever 
 in the bond of expectation and consequent realization ; 
 but we are not to suppose from that fact, that the di- 
 vinity of science has failed in concordant design in her 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 55 
 
 inverse law of light and revelation, that fixes us before 
 we are, to the great primordial of natural order and 
 design. 
 
 Life is an index pointing the way to infinite causes, 
 bound by the controlling law of light in the swaying 
 atmosphere of heat. We should ever grasp our spirit- 
 ual infinity with that surety of truth and knowledge, as 
 we grasp the infinity of light that is everywhere sur- 
 rounding us, and filling us with that sense of oneness 
 with the soul of the infinite God. 
 
 We may close our eyes and the light of immortality 
 looks us full in the face ; we cannot gainsay the fact, 
 for every nerve is pulsating in light and heat. We see 
 God enthroned just as clearly, see the stellar key that 
 unlocks the spaces just as accurately, see oceans lull 
 and beat, landscapes harmony and adjustability to feel 
 the triune cause in man ; see friends at distances far 
 away from us ; see humanity's platform of deal quite 
 as clearly ; see the full tide beat of affection, and the 
 raven wing of discord flapping to action the spirit of 
 antagonistic elements ; and finally we see all there is to 
 see with the eyes closed, see that nature's God is our 
 God, radiating ever in light and heat, touch us day by 
 day with the arm of filial promise, made secure in its 
 spiritual fitment to every function of our outspoken 
 lives, and to the agency always ready to take prece- 
 
56 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 dence when the lapwing of death embraces the sub- 
 stance belonging to earth. 
 
 Oh ! friends of earth, humanity at large, I must come 
 to you with this truth, and do you make of it a weapon 
 of use, for the enlargement of culture and spiritual un- 
 folding, for therein lies the stamen to Godly reality, 
 expressed in all things, and rounded out in the solvency 
 of etherealized condition or atmosphere. I must come 
 with the truth, having tested the reliability of its solu- 
 tion thus far to my entire satisfaction. Come now, with 
 its white flower of peace hung on the waving branches 
 of a complete knowledge, that I must hold before creed, 
 synagogue and temple, to confound the substance of 
 their teachings, and cause them to see as I now see, 
 that God is the emblematical figure to a complete sys- 
 tem of ethical and ethereous science, born to the des- 
 tiny of motion by convolving evolution. 
 
 There is no death, no change, no flaw, but one 
 serene, stupendous law, by which we are as sure of to- 
 morrow as to-day, and by which we shall ever be mani- 
 fest to the orb of spiritual understanding. And so I 
 would say to all the people of earth, that I live in 
 spirit life. I have never lived in any other life , that 
 tangibility to earthly condition is but the one expression 
 of spirit to manifest while to-day or now ; the power of 
 the spirit is intensified or elongated, so that I no longer 
 wear handcuffs, but can practice my theory to better 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 57 
 
 advantage, and sprout new germs of thought on liberal 
 principle, without the fear of being ostracised. 
 
 In a word, my friends, I am Theodore Parker, alive 
 and well, unshackeled and free, and I glory in my 
 power, which is spirit power to reach you, and make 
 known the process of death, that all must pass through 
 that are born of the earth. I passed that Rubicon 
 safely, was witness of the whole scene, was floating, not 
 in the arms of Christ, as the world knew and predicted, 
 but in a safety valve, just as safe and sure. The om- 
 nipotent ether flow, that buoyed me up, before death's 
 icy hand had taken all heat from my body. I do not 
 know as all persons pass out that way ; I only speak of 
 my own dissolution, that I look upon now as one of the 
 many incidents on my journey of life, and from which 
 dates broader life, light and knowledge, broader God, 
 hope and heaven, broader inverse action, realization, 
 and therefore manifestation. Every part of God be- 
 longs to me, now as of old, for I have lost nothing but 
 have gained much, gained love and respect for my 
 teacher, which is experience wearing the golden crown 
 of a monarch, leading me on and on to test the worth 
 of my being, and the ability of God within, leaving me 
 free to cancel my every indebtedness, and feel the full 
 measure of my own guilt, which I cannot ask God to 
 forgive if I cannot myself approve. And I make bold 
 to say, that every true man and woman must of neces- 
 
58 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 sity feel the same. We cannot deceive ourselves, and 
 therefore cannot deceive God, for the Devil, as of old, 
 reports correctly, and always conspires to have us own 
 our bankrupt condition. Death always finds us in the 
 right time ; we cannot doubt the fact with any satisfac- 
 tion to ourselves, because in doubting God's system we 
 doubt God, leaving us on a basis of chance, without 
 guide or rudder. 
 
 We cannot choose our death-hour, neither can we 
 govern our birth; both issues are in the control of 
 Godly science, that never wavers in duty or design, but 
 firm and true to the principles holding control. Death 
 is a microscope in which we look through and see the 
 enlargement of life and its realities ; see ourselves in 
 the equity scales of justice, and no aristocracy of creed, 
 caste or color can move in the decalogue of God's favor. 
 The process of death commences with our birth. At- 
 mospheric pressure carries the power of condensation. 
 The infant cannot keep its first wrapping, neither its 
 second, or third, and so all along the years of earthly 
 life are filled with death or decay ; the terms signify 
 the same, and we cannot help ourselves ; the fact is 
 intact in nature, and we cannot disturb the equilibrium 
 of its motion. Death is as much a portion of God or 
 science as life ; we cannot disintegrate the two factions 
 of equal merit, that have joined hands in the orbit of 
 nature's design. We only perceive life with our sense 
 
THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 59 
 
 to feel life in all of its bearings, from the raising of an 
 arm to the motionary grandeur of an earthquake, or 
 the rippling thrill that comes from the expression of 
 love and friendship — sure monitors of life and heaven. 
 We perceive death with that same sense quickened to 
 fortify against it, showing to us conclusively that we 
 only antagonize against the body, that our sense to feel 
 with the spirit is more acute, more deft to discern the 
 death process, which clearly defines itself by the weak- 
 ening of functional security. Every thing is a fact in 
 its design. The design of death is progress, and pro- 
 gress nullifies the term as applied to the spirit. 
 
 The issue of death is life indissoluble, and in the 
 compact of never ending of purpose and power of ac- 
 complishment. The power to live is greater than the 
 power to die, because life is contingent on necessity. 
 The necessity for a thing is greater than the thing itself; 
 cause is greater than effect, and is always calling for a 
 prolongation of effects, that must perforce come under 
 the law of give and take. If I give my body, my tene- 
 ment of clay, that belongs to time and its conditions, 
 whether I do it willingly or not, the law remains the 
 same, and necessity is a stern master, and I am forced 
 to take my wider experience, as the child is forced from 
 A B C to Baker and the problems of Aristotle. Had 
 the child died or passed from the body in the A B C of 
 advancement, the Ba-ker term was just as much a 
 
60 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 necessity, to fulfill the law of progress, which never 
 goes down, but is ever onward and upward in its tend- 
 ency. 
 
 The law of death takes us one step higher from 
 bondage or slavery to matter ; takes us into that school 
 where we learn primates, where we see the spirit in 
 substance, see godly worship of science under the ham- 
 mer of nature's divine necessity, see why we die or 
 change, for there is no such term as death in reality ; 
 see why progress is the standard shield, protecting the 
 universe of matter and spirit. 
 
 Spirit is combined gasses. Disintegrate gas and it 
 loses its power to act in proper order, therefore a screw 
 is loose at the centre of causality, and nature goes 
 down for readjustment and broader security or" purpose. 
 The spirit world is all about us ; all under the law of 
 divine necessity, all under the force power of the living 
 God, and we cannot escape its harmonies and inhar- 
 monies, which prepare us for universal lifehood. 
 
 I would not escape the destiny of counter currents, 
 swaying to action every part of self-immolation, causing 
 me to say and to feel that I am but as the one blade of 
 grass forming nature, and building God. We are never 
 so small as when living for our own elevation, with a 
 motive for self-aggrandizement. 
 
 Tennyson, I think, has somewhere said, " Live for 
 the good of all, that all may feel the good in thee.' , 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 61 
 
 i 
 
 That sentiment is the expression of God that all do 
 feel and reverence, as the living attribute of the all- 
 pervading Deity of motion. Dearii can never enter the 
 precinct of the living principle of goodness ; it is the 
 foundation on which rests the science of immutable 
 law. Death is an abstract idea, that cannot be joined 
 to a living principle in any secretive sense, however 
 vast in its systems of disintegration ; it burrows in its 
 own eternal cavity of decay, and all the forces of ether 
 light cannot reinstate the fallen casket over which death 
 holds its midnight watch. 
 
 All nature is under the law of disintegration. Co- 
 operation in gaseous forces necessarily educes elonga- 
 ted substances, that are continually being acted upon 
 by the counter currents of astronomical science ; and 
 what we term death is as much a necessity in the origin 
 of nature's divine humanity, as what we term life, that 
 looks through each tenement of nature's providing with 
 an uplifted self-poise that makes grander life and God; 
 grander the system house of principles, because better 
 understood and better lived. How can we murmur at 
 death, when science shows it to be the open sesame to 
 a broader portal of life, never ending but ever pro-, 
 gressive, and within the limit of individual selfhood. 
 
 I have never lost my structure of manhood, never 
 lost my centre power of action, never lost one iota of 
 theological balance power that has ever radiated from 
 
62 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 the central idea of God, as a universe of primates, in- 
 herent in the cosmogony of science, and relatively in- 
 clined to everything in nature, which is art, glorified by 
 its highest expression of truth. 
 
 As day by day the endless chain 
 
 Of God's eternal law, 
 Unwinds in endless beauty 
 
 Wherein is found no flaw. 
 
 I cannot now traverse all of science, and probably 
 never can, for God is but an infant in the substance of 
 his works, and science educates on the free-masonary 
 plan, by letting no more in than can hold reliable 
 friendship. 
 
 I ask no greater boon than this : 
 To live in God and Science kiss, 
 And bow to none that holdeth sway 
 But what I can in love obey — 
 But what I can with love embrace, 
 And meet in friendship face to face. 
 
 If death holds anything of my soul's accountability 
 I cannot progress. I cannot harmonize with heaven, 
 and there is nothing else to harmonize with, for the law 
 that fits us to heaven is the law of progress, ever evolv- 
 ing light and truth, and ever satisfying to the soul's 
 need. Death never can hold me. I cannot be held to 
 quietude of any kind that can shut from me the 
 reverberating sounds from off God's altars of pro- 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 gressive harmony. I cannot be shut away from sound, 
 sight, feeling, tasting, smelling ; all my senses are acute 
 to the spirit, and I can never sleep, but in rest and 
 peace of soul, with the light of accountability shining 
 full in my face, and the sermon on the mount para- 
 phrased in all the occult forces of nature, and appeal- 
 ing to all of my senses. Sensorium, which is con- 
 science, bearing arms to whip out creed, only that 
 which can be sustained in the actualities of the love 
 principle. 
 
 Christ had no creed but a business creed ; he had no 
 heaven only as the resultant effect of the full use of 
 his business capacity. Heaven never swamped an idle 
 soul ; and Christ found that deeds filled heaven's bill, 
 and were ever useful in the crucible of the future. 
 
64 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 WHAT I hold to-day, or now, of spiritual life, 
 has always been in my orb of attainment ; 
 there is nothing gained, nothing lost. God, or nature, 
 is all provident unto the end, meaning the terms of pro- 
 gress, and their sufficiency of purpose to maintain 
 self hood in a world that is continually repeating itself. 
 By the term world, I do not confine the idea to earth, 
 but to the harmonical cord in nature that winds its 
 golden length through all the vastness of limitation, 
 and sounds broader and deeper than minds of earth 
 can dream of in the present spiritual unfolding. 
 
 I bless God for the change that took me into broader 
 fields of light, nearer the system-house of science, and 
 nearer that Deity which my mind always sought and 
 felt was somewhere within my reach, somewhere within 
 my own being, if I could grow to its attainment, and 
 feel secure in its promises. 
 
 We can never reach an outside God until our interior 
 God holds out the hand of friendly recognition, and 
 saying with the heartiness of soul-wording : " We have 
 at length met, at length find we our balance in Thee ; 
 at length, oh ! God we find that thou art the mighty 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 65 
 
 channel through which all minds must pass to find the 
 rubicond of glory and peace." 
 
 I am glad that spiritualism is crowning herself with 
 stability of purpose to work through the sheaf to the 
 bright kernel of truth, that says : "I am the resurrec- 
 tion and the life." I am so much spirit going out to 
 find the greater spirit, of which I am but a component 
 part, swaying in the atmosphere of etherialization, 
 crowned with the attributes of selfism, which renders 
 me free to cage the living God wherever I may find so 
 much pf that principle of Godly import as my soul's 
 fruition can comprehend, and be satisfied with the 
 results. 
 
 I never could grow strong on sweet potatoes, al- 
 though at times they are relishable and pleasant to the 
 appetite. Neither could the cream of the church fat- 
 ten me to any degree of pomposity, although its liason 
 with error i9 smooth and creamy with that politic 
 assurance that renders God a tool worker, in .sympathy 
 and love with creed and her proselytes of unstable 
 purposes, going the rounds of God's Bible items, and 
 resting with a self-poised consciousness that they have 
 mastered religion, shaken hands with God, and bal- 
 anced all their indebtedness to heaven, making that 
 abode of harmony scot-free, wherein they may enter at 
 will and be happy, by simply believing, with or without 
 the exercise of reason, that God has invested all the 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 power of salvation in and through the Church ; and by 
 paying well to support the great conundrum, the 
 chances are enlarged for a right hand seat, well 
 cushioned, a harp at hand, and God listening — well 
 pleased of course — to another prelude from the aris- 
 tocratic peans of earth, and saying, no doubt, in a busi- 
 ness like way, with the sexton : " I gather them in — I 
 gather them in ! " 
 
 Where in the name of the living God is there any 
 spirituality in such an off-hand process of salvation ? 
 it is like any other ring method for securing an equiva- 
 lent that will fit some future scheme. I tell you, my 
 earth friends, God cannot be bought, never was, never 
 can be, and heaven being a conjunctive term used for 
 God's location, is also impervious to ring scheming. 
 No one enters through the golden gate but those that 
 bring their credentials from off the altar of self-sacri- 
 fice, self-immolation, and that abnegation of spirit that 
 walks on thistles to find a star, that abnegation of spirit 
 that has led up through all the past, that has given a 
 life to secure a principle. 
 
 Robespiere, of the French Revolution, fought in the 
 kingdom of his fury to protect the blood of France 
 from the stain of inoculation, and thereby lessen the 
 fame of ancestral glory and renown, which bigoted 
 France clings to to-day with that tenacity of spirit that 
 holds sacred a truth and a trust. It is the spirit of 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 67 
 
 self abnegation principle, before the sword, that has 
 decided the fate of nations. The rise and fall of em- 
 pires rested in the individual spirit to conquer wrong 
 and oppression, or die. 
 
 We may count a world saved when there is one right- 
 eous individual, be it man or woman, to protect the 
 issue of life out of death, or right out from wrong. As 
 long as principle lives, man and woman lives by the 
 same law of encasement that governs the acorn from 
 which springs the tree. 
 
 If man's life was only in the realm of ideality, there 
 could be no principle at stake, because principles only 
 cage facts, and the ideal support that the brain claims 
 and receives are the floating shadows on the round- 
 house of science. 
 
 Principles stake out our lives, and if we run counter 
 to their admonishing appeal we suffer in the extreme 
 of spirit life. 
 
 My mission now leads to the planet Jupiter in its 
 perihelion with other planets, and nearing the earth by 
 the process of internal law, to protect earth from going 
 backwards in the scale of intellectual compass. The 
 earth forces retrograde in every thousand years, in 
 capacity to overreach a certain point in law where mind 
 can master the problem called death, and become en- 
 tirely en rapport with that sphere of spirit life that is 
 
68 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 helping on the work. Jupiter has a protective force in 
 consanguinity with the minds of earth, and her platform 
 of liberty crowns her with power to throw out an elon- 
 gation movement that earth may grasp and become 
 self-protecting in the scale of progress, and not go back 
 to any darker age, to start again on a dead sea basis 
 that always surrounds an unfledged world. 
 
 Hypocrates, — whose ancient history baffled the minds 
 of his time, — now reaches to me the hand of fellow- 
 ship, saying : " Come with me, thou searcher after 
 truth, let us walk hand in hand, heart in soul to the 
 fairy land of Jupiter, that I have but dimly seen in her 
 wealth and beauty of - conception. Come, Theodore 
 Parker, to this mount of transfiguration, and bend thy 
 soul in reverence and awe sublime before this grand 
 equation of truth, that thou must make friends with, 
 and comprehend by study the glory of her mission with 
 earth." 
 
 I have known for some time that I must advance 
 from my mole-hill of ideas, to a broader atmosphere 
 where I could study the planetary system and evolve a 
 compass that would lead me to the exact figures I 
 sought in the algebra of my mental philosophy. I 
 have long known that God signifying good only existed 
 in all natural law, in all the fundamental principles gov- 
 erning the planetary system in all the orbit of space, 
 God-lived in the soul right of spiritual law, governing 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 69 
 
 all matter. I now know that a grain of sand is as much 
 a kingdom to establish the soul of its being, as a moun- 
 tain or a monarchy ; and as I live in that grain of sand 
 or matter, I live in the infinite God, or whole of infinite 
 principle, which is evolving substance from the friction 
 forces of .crater strength, meaning heat intensified by- 
 polar light. 
 
 In visiting Jupiter I have two objects in view, first, 
 to try and arrive as much as possible under the law, as 
 I am of limitation to the necessity of life, and its con- 
 sequent unfoldments as relative to the term God and 
 the truth in the term science, because God and science 
 journey in the same craft of obedience to polar secre- 
 tiveness ; the one carries the credentials to sustain it- 
 self, while the other hangs on the hinge of credulity, a 
 wiseacre supported' by the theology of all nations. 
 My second object in visiting a globe of the immensity 
 of Jupiter, is to ascertain for a certainty her relative 
 position to earth, and her keynote of principles, and 
 their vibratory accord with the inherent action of earth. 
 The motor impelling me is grander than I ever dreamed 
 of while on earth, else I think my midnight toil would 
 have made me a wiser student, and a more glorious 
 man. 
 
 I must know for a certainty if the law establishing 
 materialization on earth is a governing law in Jupiter, 
 and in any way controlling in the matter of earth. I 
 
70 THE LESSORS OF THE AGES. 
 
 must know my accountability to principles ; if the law 
 that gave me birth fits any unknown law in science, or 
 if the same law that projected my life and individual- 
 ity to earthly condition, is able by a lengthened process 
 of primates to re-establish my earthly appearance. 
 
 I do now know that the law governing birth is the 
 forensic law governing all of matter, and all of spirit. 
 I now know it to be a fact, which I have demonstrated 
 to my great delight, that I can clothe myself in a rari- 
 fied condition of matter, and appear on earth, under 
 the positive and negative forces of the male and female 
 aurification of blended harmony in purity and purpose, 
 letting me choose the subjects, and bring the help of 
 band influence to aid in mastering conditions. 
 
 But the point I wish to establish is this. Is Jupiter 
 in harmony with earth in this present work ? and is 
 this law an abiding law with the inhabitants of that 
 planet ? and do they work for the furthering of science 
 and the eliminating of principle, or for pleasure, and 
 her train of idlers ? 
 
 Hypocrates says to me : " I believe that Jupiter car- 
 ries the key to unlock this male and female element in 
 all the universe, of extended matter, and bring out the 
 finale of readjustment to first law or primary condi- 
 tions. This then must be the secret of spiritual labor, 
 to so formulate a plan that death cannot occur when 
 the spirit understands its mission and how to protect 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 71 
 
 by infiltration the germ of its being and accountability. 
 Many minds of earth have tried to grasp this idea, but 
 have failed in its spiritual sense to grasp the lever of 
 its accountable purpose ; and now while the world is 
 asking, " What shall we do to be saved ? " let us in 
 spirit life touch the rudimentary of this life, in system 
 and concern of achievement and final success over all 
 difficulties. 
 
 Webster has so compounded words and parts of 
 speech, that there seems to be no abstract formulation 
 of language on which to build a system of complete 
 rhetorical study for the capabilities of coming genera- 
 tions ; but we are not to suppose from the outspoken 
 fact that the key to language has served its purpose, 
 and been lost in the rubbish of the past, never more to 
 unlock another sentence, silver tipped for the ideality 
 of the future's demand and comprehension. 
 
 Basic law is first law, and law always keeps pace with 
 demand. To-day the world demands spiritual light, 
 demands a hearing from the other side of material dis- 
 solution ; since the rudimentary stages of life could not 
 grasp the spiritual side of nature. A constant mingling 
 of duodecimo parts have spiritualized and refined mat- 
 ter from the cosmo of condition to its present utility of 
 rarified action, that finds its spirit in spite of the whole 
 creedal world, in spite of any system of logic not com- 
 patible with the growth in the admixture of primitive 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 science. If we dwell in a house not made with hands, 
 who is to find fault with the house only from the stand- 
 point of not living to our best spiritual knowledge ? 
 Science never errs, always true in quality and quantity, 
 always true in the mandate of its mission, whether it be 
 in the growing of a potato cr building a world. The 
 essential elements are always wanting to produce cer- 
 tain effects ; if the farmer likes not the effect from one 
 year's cultivation of the soil, if he is wise he tries an- 
 other method the next year, and so by experience he 
 tests science, and finds that her crescent of peace always 
 rests in the harmony of conceivement, always rests in 
 the male and female aura for procreation. 
 
 Science folds all things to its bosom of purification, 
 and unites principles by the force of consanguinity in 
 the soul-relationship of being, while God moves in the 
 orbit of secular opinion, a sarcasm over all prolific 
 nature. 
 
 The dead sea of Micha's time and generation calm 
 and purposeless, serving only in name and the fetish 
 proclivities of all nations and generations of men. 
 
 When the mind outgrows a personal God, there can 
 be no personal Devil, the league will be broken, and 
 science will split the difference between the two, and 
 shoulder the responsibility of both; both are factors 
 for church mogulship and play their parts to suit the 
 mission of the ministry, which fears to lose either as 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 73 
 
 the natural props to their ghostly religion, soon to droop 
 . for want of that nourishing principle called faith, that 
 has held so many centuries to the horns of this great 
 dilemma, in hopes to obtain the knowledge which it 
 sought, but never can reach through any cidevant at- 
 tachment of creed. Faith has shouldered more spirit- 
 uality than the church ever dreamed of ; her sweet be- 
 nignity and smiling care has pushed doubt from its seat 
 of error, and led out on a wide range of ideal beauty, 
 whose conceivement process lies in the true adaptabil- 
 ity of scientific principles, that always hold for better 
 conditions when rightly blended in the fetus of design. 
 Science has always been trying her luck at reconstruc- 
 tion ; reincarnation means the fitment of principles to 
 produce causes ; cause follows effect as naturally as 
 sunshine follows a shower in May-time. 
 
 The dark ages were followed by light, from off the 
 altar of a broader demarkation in the spiritual fitment 
 of things relative to life and order. 
 
 I presume to say that no object stands in my way of 
 progress, because circumstances must bend to a will 
 determined to receive a lesson for good in everything 
 that moves on the car of fate destined to cross its path- 
 way in life. I am no more afraid of death, for I have 
 mastered its first problem, and shall solve its second 
 and third appeal for more wisdom, more self-suf- 
 ficiency in ordering my way of growth, my school of 
 
74 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 learning, my square and compass guide, if it leads 
 through brambles, the scratching vibrates for greater 
 efforts to be true to the man within, although the out- 
 side Parker stands shabby before the public, and his 
 third term or out-reach in spiritual effort offer him no 
 more friends from the stand point of orthodoxy, still 
 the spirit climbs to equalize the forces for readjust- 
 ment and self poise, to maintain my feudal principles 
 by the sword of truth, held firmly by the hand of ma- 
 terialization. 
 
 I ask no crown but the one made secure in the 
 principles of reconstruction, that I can wear for the 
 soul's benefit and humanity's need. I cannot toil 
 without recompense, and I find it day by day in the 
 mediums of earth, that are struggling to give food to 
 the million, while they scarcely obtain food for them- 
 selves ; but well I know that for such there is a richer 
 repast awaits them than earth could serve from all 
 her dainty store-house of luxuries ; and well I know 
 that the souls of these mediums are rich and ripe with 
 anticipation of future revealments that will cover all 
 fraud with a mantle of truth. 
 
 I know that preaching is good, but sight is better, as 
 far as the second birth is concerned ; and if I come, 
 again, readjusted as of old, who shall say that spiritual- 
 ism proper is a myth, and not reliable under test con- 
 ditions ? My will to do is greater than my ability, 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 75 
 
 because conditions always move their front of opposing 
 power before me, and I have to await time's movements 
 for a better adaption of chemical adhesiveness, which 
 buoys me up through the law of consanguinity or polar 
 attrition. 
 
 The mediums that I am now testing for my reappear- 
 ance are not new to the world, but to each other they 
 are comparative strangers ; but destiny is stronger than 
 death, for death only speaks to die body, while destiny 
 masters the spirit. I have said to these mediums : 
 Prove yourselves willing to obey my wishes, prove to 
 me that you have faith in me, and I will in no way for- 
 sake or cast you off, and now my hold over these 
 mediums is as strong as the rosy bowers of God that 
 are held together by the bond of duty and love. And 
 can I play false at the eleventh hour when one of the 
 poles of my battery has served me a score of years, 
 never wavering when called upon for a broadening of 
 experience, though the way out led through many dis- 
 comforts ; faith held the anchor firm and true, and if I 
 now make a demand that calls for different conditions, 
 I am sure of my two bowers of strength, prolific to 
 sound my title clear from all fraud. 
 
 When next I move for readjustment it will be in the 
 city of Chicago, when the spring time opens for the 
 removal of my mediums, which number three, poor in 
 purse as a Cambellite preacher, but rich in the circum- 
 
76 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 ference of toil, and daring of spirit to live on cobwebs 
 if need be, to secure the right of way, with the attach- 
 ment of modern spiritualism, whose first note awoke 
 the world from the dead sleep of atheism, to find life 
 and death in the broad arena of nature's design, and 
 science, the folding power that will prostrate and cripple 
 every synagogue of error in the land. 
 
 If my visit to Jupiter brings me nearer to earth, I 
 shall hail all light that I can make use of for the 
 world's benefit ; and should my mission prove fruitful 
 I have a wide range on earth for my gleanings ; the old 
 world as well as the new must feel my presence and 
 acknowledge my return. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 77 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 WHAT lessons do we need, or what lessons 
 can we receive but those of experience ? If 
 we walk into the school room wherein is taught all the 
 verbal languages, wherein is taught mathematical pre- 
 cision on blackboards and on slates, wherein is taught 
 philosophy, mental and scientific, wherein is taught self 
 culture in its rudimentary stage, it is so much experi- 
 ence for the world we are building, so many lessons for 
 our world in space, that we are prone to take care of, 
 because we cannot help it. 
 
 Necessity speaks to the soul the demand of its na- 
 ture ; and sooner or later every soul possessing the key 
 to individuality moves for more light, more wisdom to 
 guide it safely to headland quarters. All the lessons 
 we learn prepare us for broader research, broader lati- 
 tude for thought, broader demand on heaven, a broader 
 insight in the kaleidoscope of science, and a fulminat- 
 ing purpose to grasp science and secure God. 
 
 Men and women live too much on the external issues 
 of developing conditions, they do not reach for the 
 silver lining that pervades every circumstance in life ; 
 they do not see that events are the mile stones on the 
 
78 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 
 
 road of progress, at which we stop, look back and take 
 thought for the onward way. 
 
 I know that my medium's soul is filled with beauty, 
 as she writes at my dictation, filled with that sense of 
 oneness with all pervading nature, and feels my pre- 
 sence as teacher, friend and guide, to lead her higher 
 than earth and fill her soul with a spiritual light, to 
 become a better and more efficient worker while time 
 may hold her physical strength. The experience to me 
 is beautiful, because I feel the good I am doing. I 
 feel that it is a lesson which could not have been 
 spared from my book of life ; and so I treasure it as a 
 gem in the rough, that time and experience will polish 
 for infinite acceptance. 
 
 Of all the past I would not rob one moment of its 
 treasured influence. One tear drop may contain the 
 heart throes of nations. One smile, when lighted at 
 the heart-core of sympathy, may sunbeam a universe, 
 of trouble and feel no loss at the centre flow of 
 benevolence and sweet-eyed charity, that sees God 
 behind every ambush of wailing sin, when disintegrated, 
 finds its leader heavenward and above board, intent on 
 probing the equation of motive and action that sink or 
 save us all the days of our lives. No one's life boat 
 can save me but my own. I must stand at the helm 
 and do active service every day of my life. I must 
 receive light and compass by looking within, and help- 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 79 
 
 ing without, by studying the laws of my own being, and 
 if I can, find a correspondency in the man-made laws 
 of the land, but if not, if antagonism is the result of 
 scrutiny, and my life boat gets creaky under the pres- 
 sure of tyrrany, I say, Avaunt ! ye spurious shackels, 
 let me steam ahead, guided by my interior law of God 
 welding and purity of purpose, to breast every storm of 
 whatever character, with my armor of trust buckled 
 firmly around me, and truth carrying the pointer to 
 success. 
 
 Want never troubles me, because I know I shall 
 solve its mystery, and fatten on its purpose. I never 
 wanted money but to prolong my knowledge, to make 
 me at ease with my out-reaching soul, and at peace with 
 conscience, that always told me to succor the needy, to 
 give of my portion, for my own soul needed a growth 
 that it could only receive through giving. Money never 
 had any meaning for me but God ; so much money for 
 so much wisdom, which I liken to God, and is the ulti- 
 matum of all the value there is in money, or capital 
 representing money. If I use money, speaking from a 
 worldly point of view, to cater to all the unnecessary 
 wants that the physical may rear before me, I am 
 playing nigard with my soul, and creating a desert 
 where should be an oasis of ever springing verdure 
 and beauty of design. If I have a thousand dollars, 
 and I divide it with a friend that needs just half to 
 
80 THE LESS OX S OF TEE AGES. 
 
 satisfy his law of necessity, I am building my God, and 
 helping another person in a like process. If I have 
 but an apple, and give it to sustain a hungry brother or 
 sister, as the case may be, I am doing just as much 
 with my apple as with my thousand dollars. The 
 motive is the flower in the soul that fills all the arcana 
 of nature, and God picks it with great hope of its ex- 
 panding merit. 
 
 The only thing that Christ taught that holds vital 
 import to the world was the crucifixion of selfishness. 
 Subdue the lion in his den, that the keeper may walk 
 free and untrammeled to the hearts of the people. Self- 
 ishness robs us of heaven, and keeps us knocking at 
 the door of hell continuously, with a burden that every 
 pilgrim, thus loaded, finds too heavy for easy carrying 
 and straight walking. Selfishness is the crown of 
 thorns piercing our temple of thought with the startling 
 inquiry : " Of 'what use is self, when burdened with its 
 own offal, and weltering in the flimsy guise of trying to 
 deceive itself ? " It is of all burdens the heaviest to 
 carry. 
 
 Our homes may be built in all the typical splendor of 
 the architect's design, may be filled with all the com- 
 forts and elegancies that modern ingenuity has grappled 
 with and accomplished, and we may dwell therein free 
 from material cares, but we cannot shut away the other 
 side of life that God holds before the mental vision, 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 81 
 
 and folded within each appeal is Christ's sermon on 
 the mount. Little homeless children carry it in their 
 earnest faces for progression for care and love to make 
 heroes for the battle of life. Men and women whom 
 misfortune has shouldered with crosses heavy and true, 
 carry these same sermons before the selfishness of the 
 world, for the world to read and act from. 
 
 These sermons come in the feuds and discords of the 
 national escutchion for liberty ; come in finance and 
 its influence on all trading capital that national in- 
 terest places in the vortex of use ; in railroad scheming, 
 in banking speculation, and shaving of noted capital. 
 
 We see sermons pointing upwards for a better rendi- 
 tion of justice, mercy and love. In home circles these 
 love pointers reach for more confidence and trust, if 
 the terms have a separate meaning, more fidelity to the 
 truth that is the binding cord uniting all families, unit- 
 ing men and women in a lasting union that time cannot 
 dissever, for eternity catches the unction of its promise 
 and fulfillment of design. 
 
 Christ's sermons can never be forgotten, because 
 sooner or later every heart-beat of humanity must 
 adopt the corner stone of liberty, for self poise and 
 accountability of action. When we are free we are 
 strong ; when bound we are like the caged lion, in 
 measured tread, whose eyes speak the daring of the 
 soul. 
 
82 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 Oh ! Liberty, thou art the crowned eagle whose eyrie 
 is builded in the hearts of the nation. Thou art the 
 giantess whose strides all nations have felt, and won- 
 dered at thy power of inoculation that sent the thril- 
 ling force divine to hearts and homes, to nations in 
 bewilderment, whose crazy wrongs, the fires of hell 
 could not destroy. 
 
 Thy era, oh liberty ! is forever on, forever is thy 
 chair in state, forever are thy handcuffs loosened, and 
 thou art monarch in the nineteenth century, curtailed 
 never more, for the league that bound thee to ignorance 
 is broken ; and thou, oh wandering bird, art free, free 
 as the name of God, whose idyl force no world can 
 comprehend. 
 
 No world, oh liberty ! can build without thy cheering 
 smile ; no home can rear a structured tower of love, 
 and thou be absent from its temple point of honor. 
 Go forth, thou free-born autocrat, never more bend brow 
 or knee to fulminate an unholy purpose ; never more 
 can Gehenna's flames burn out the solid masonry of the 
 triune cause, if thou stand firm and true, a belching 
 volcano in the hearts of the people. 
 
 It has been stated, and is at the present time, by 
 scholastic and learned men and women, that Jesus of 
 Nazareth came to the world to save sinners. Why then 
 has he failed in his mission, both in and out of the 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 church ? for we everywhere witness the traces of un- 
 development ; everywhere see Christ's failure as the 
 vicegerent of God to wipe out sin from the hearts of 
 the people. Those in spirit life that passed from earth 
 under the hallucination of the blood atonement, find 
 themselves hard pressed to seek a new anxious seat, 
 where they can better contemplate the internal motive 
 force that makes sinners or saviors, and find their sal- 
 vation in accord with principle and practice, that go 
 hand in hand for good or evil. The Jews fought 
 Christ because he was not a more thorough diplomatist, 
 because his spirit felt not the ring of policy and na- 
 tional frenzy to protect the Jewish autocracy in its 
 liason with the fungus power of money, that always 
 swamps a nation when the golden key of principle fits 
 not the locker of common sense. There is not a Jew- 
 ish synagogue in the land to-day that endorses in full 
 the messiahship of Christ, because Christ is not the 
 holy templar of Jewish policies, and cannot fit the de- 
 mand of Jewish cunning, and subterfuge of deal with 
 mankind ; and so the Jewry tribes are trying to save 
 themselves in a coop of financial scheming, where the 
 devil presides ad libitum. 
 
 Christ's burdens are over every medium in the land, 
 because the force power of Almighty God is calling for 
 conditions that the world is not prepared to give ; but 
 sooner or later there will be a vigilant committee ap- 
 
S4 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 pointed in spirit life to oust all selfishness from its seat 
 of ownership, that the light of immortality may shine 
 clear and true. If men and women knowing the truth 
 do not work with us, they are against us, and sheltering 
 under the cover of some policy the grandest harmony 
 the world ever vibrated under. 
 
 The truth is apparent why mediums are dying or 
 passing out to spirit life ; the love soil of earth is too 
 harsh, too unyielding in sympathy and the twin-sister 
 friendship to make conditional strength for a sensative 
 in the hands of spirit guides; and so many of the 
 world's workers are being removed to more genial soil 
 for recuperation and prolongation of use. 
 
 Eppes Sargent says to me : " Why ! Parker, I feel 
 like a boy in this atmosphere of love and individual 
 protection. I feel new springs of attachment, new 
 vibratory powers, new ambitions, new forces, new life ; 
 a newer God on which to base my preconceived ideas 
 of theology ; and now that I am clothed anew, I must 
 work with new vigor, and new daring, to clear the world 
 from bigotry and superstition." 
 
 We in spirit life hail all new comers that have the 
 spiritual light, opening the way to a better readjustment 
 of solvent principles, that can help on the world's re- 
 demption from sin, or the carnal field of ignorance, 
 which produces all there is of our so-called devil. 
 When I wrote, or caused to be written, " Food for the 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 85 
 
 million," I was ignorant of many things that I have 
 since familiarized myself with. I have been obliged to 
 change the chemical aura in the brain-working of the 
 medium employed, and have been obliged to almost 
 separate the spirit from the body, in order to accomplish 
 the work I have in view. And now, at this period of 
 writing, the brain of the worker is punctured through 
 and through with the spiritual afflatus that the angels 
 can make use of, in disintegrating matter for the pur- 
 pose of reconstruction on a more spiritual basis. 
 
 The key to unlock dynamic science has been used to 
 some extent in all the generations of men, but the les- 
 sons of each age show to us how rudely science has 
 been treated, when brought to bear on the divinity of 
 God, and man as well. 
 
 The rudimentary stages of life in formative concep- 
 tion were the outworkings of gross conditions ; nebulous 
 design furnishes no clue to rudimentary matter, for the 
 reason that the key to matter is found in the solvents 
 of light and heat. There is no mind that can grasp 
 the strength of heat, no mind that can solve the power 
 of light ; it is centrifugal in its omnipotence of working 
 order, and must perforce work out a broadening of 
 matter and intensifying of spirit. In grasping science, 
 God is chained to the only vehicle that moves by the 
 lever of internal force or action. We cannot see with 
 the external orb of sight, science at work in her dainty 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 kitchen, preparing with a skilful hand all the outward 
 display of nature's grand variety, tossed into space 
 and uplifting for strength to stay its equation. 
 
 Nature is no mystery when we understand design 
 and its full toned law of equity ; nature builds from 
 centre effulgence, and all of typical science is an 
 expression of centre inspiration, an expression of the 
 harmonizing power of love that permeates all of chem- 
 ical vibration. Chemical law is the love law ; there is 
 no other law that can make use of the stamp act for 
 procreation. Love fathoms everything in the unity of 
 forces, and its highest expression is always obtained 
 from its conditional activity. Love in its spiritual 
 meaning is outside and beyond any human law to con- 
 trol, and there is where the world must balance its jus- 
 tice, and let love work in its chemical adaptability for 
 the furtherance of a true science, and as the modus 
 operandi for spiritual manifestation and life, giving 
 hope to the world. Love is the true chemist in all 
 nature, touching all the germinal points with a skill 
 known only to love in the silence of her ecstatic mo- 
 ments. Love dares to do, because love is the highest 
 attribute in the equation of Godly science, and cannot 
 be overcome by any show of nominal power ; and in 
 its highest expression on spiritual basis, it is uplifting, 
 outreaching, and forever in the sphere of duty, leading 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 87 
 
 the way to the grandeur of conception and the possi- 
 bilities of man. 
 
 The second birth should be above suspicion ; should 
 be as clearly defined and original in circumference as 
 the first birth. The first broadens in matter and spirit ; 
 the second birth deepens in spirit to fathom the possi- 
 bilities in the concavity of science. We dig our own 
 graves, lay aside our bodies, if indeed we can call any- 
 thing our own that fully belongs to God in nature. 
 
 " We are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 Whose body nature is, and God the soul." 
 
 A truth that Pope immortalized when under the glow 
 of a divine revelation, and as we are component parts 
 of this stupendous whole, we do not wholly belong to 
 ourselves, and thus from the law of necessity, which we 
 cannot countermand. We dig our own graves, lay aside 
 our bodies, and work in the springtime of regeneration 
 for the elongation of a correct love principle, founded 
 in justice and applied to all of human work. 
 
 The terror of the cross is more than the cross itself, 
 because we all lack the full development of trust, and 
 go on wailing in the fear of what is to be, borrowing 
 that which we do not need, and trampling in the dust 
 that which we do need. 
 
 Of all things transpiring in order, truth is the most 
 able revelator, that stands guardian beside our daily 
 
88 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 lives ; but we, heedless of its strength to sustain and 
 uplift us, grow weak in suppressing the claim of her 
 mission. We are wanderers in the dark, from the fact 
 that we do not seek the light from the border-land of 
 ethical science, that fits in evenness to every part of our 
 structured whole ; and so we roam in midnight caverns, 
 because we have not the stamp mark of individuality 
 that lays a claim for spiritual need. 
 
 Spirit is the solar key that unlocks the universe of 
 matter, and therein finds the subtlety that produces 
 aurefaction. 
 
 Goethe found life's history in stones. In climbing 
 rocks he saw the grandeur of aspiration. In the bril- 
 liant hues of earth's smaller gems he attested the power 
 of inspiration ; the power of harmony in its distilling 
 effects, to make counterpoise the light that never goes 
 out, but ever makes strong the claims of its possessor. 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE lessons of the ages have been wrought into 
 all of our lives, and we cannot fathom the cur- 
 rent of their work ; however deft the hand of time it 
 fails to cover up the deformities of ancient precept and 
 example which were the result of crude materialism 
 that hampered all outflow of spiritual light, and be- 
 came the channel through which floated all the errors 
 of life ; and to-day the materialistic element is flooding 
 the world, and leading the way to a religious insurrec- 
 tion that, if not beating the old world in its terror and 
 crimes, will place a stigma over the newer empire that 
 no freedom of thought can ever clear away. Oh I ye 
 of little faith, when ye only see the body, and the 
 world, when ye only see God in money, in the shifting 
 of currency to make speculation the grand hiatus to 
 fill the coffers of the rich, and to blast all the energies 
 of the poor, making them slaves in this land of consti- 
 tutional freedom. 
 
 If we do not accept the things of this world on a 
 spiritual basis, as God's table-land of trial to the hu- 
 man heart, then we are living in an atmosphere where 
 Satan rings the bell to duty. Every shade of deal in 
 
90 TEE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 the whole world should be carried outside of self, and 
 into the charming atmosphere of filial duty, to prolong 
 its success and make friendship with God. 
 
 What is grander than self-abnegation, getting behind 
 ourselves in God-effort to secure the principle that 
 will benefit all who may come within its influence and 
 scope of wisdom. There is no use in trying to live 
 for ourselves ; it cannot be done with any satisfaction 
 to mind or body. The mind becomes dwarfed, and 
 the body a prey to the worm that never dies, surround- 
 ing itself in an atmosphere where devils love to linger, 
 and carry on a wdrk with the soul, that leaves its stag- 
 nant impress in all the atmosphere surrounding it. 
 
 The mind can never learn too much of Christ, for in 
 learning love in all of its missional aspect, we have 
 travelled away from self and entered into the lives of 
 others, reincarnated ourselves in God for peace and 
 protection. He who lives away from self lives the 
 most to the self's advantage. Purification takes place 
 when the soul says, " Let me help mybrother or sis- 
 ter ; " let their temple of want be my soul's stronghold 
 of growth, and let my friendship pass around their 
 trouble, making their burdens less, and the cord of 
 sympathy strengthened, which must yet pass round the 
 world as the galvanized chain, uniting all hearts in the 
 brotherhood and sisterhood of evangelical principle 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 91 
 
 and purpose, the two forces that work together in 
 Godly sway for humanity's good. 
 
 The time will come on earth when all will have 
 homes ; all will be protected and cared for ; all taken 
 by the hand and made to feel that they are welcome, 
 being so much of God given to the world to prolong 
 all the attributes of mankind. 
 
 I have noted all the footsteps of my medium, have 
 seen her struggles to overcome want, to place herself 
 in the conditions for unfoldment required by me. I 
 have seen her in the homes of the rich, where arbitrary 
 measures was the death-blow to any spiritual manifesta- 
 tion, and where her sensitive spirit felt the chills of 
 despair. The rich have an arrogance and self-satisfac- 
 tion that leads hell-ward faster than the dram-shop, the 
 billiard saloon, or any outward appeals that tempt the 
 weaker side of human nature. I have traced my medi- 
 um to the homes of the poor ; have witnessed the per- 
 fect display of charity ; the unfoldment of a love that 
 stood sponsor to God for many sweeps of error that 
 the world term unpardonable sin and flounders loudly 
 against, but secretly courts the shadow and embraces 
 the substance. It is strange how the rich curse the 
 poor for the same fealty to error that they cling to so 
 tenaciously themselves. I sometimes think that in the 
 world's opinion there would be no sin if there were no 
 poor ; it is so easy to skim over the faults of those sue- 
 
92 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 cessful in money developments, and hang a bell and 
 clarion around the neck of poverty at bay, with the 
 same offence that should meet with the same penalty. 
 
 Self-sufficiency, from a money basis, is a very poor 
 article to attempt to reach heaven on ; its strength is no 
 more than ihe vapor from the sunshine on the dew, and 
 never bears a feather's weight in the great system-house 
 of Godly principle. I should rather be swallowed by 
 the whale that drank in Jonah — if it were possible to 
 resurrect him with all of his swallowing capacity — 
 than to load my soul with the principle to gain all that 
 is possible by fair means or foul, as the case comes to 
 hand, and never let go, whatever the necessity before 
 me. 
 
 Why ! Jonah was in heaven with his whale, compared 
 to a soul in the stagnant pool of self-gain, reaching 
 continually on all the baser passions of the brain, and 
 only asking for a heaven as a place to make money in, 
 and show up the Jew side of character. 
 
 Man is the result of chemical combination, the radi- 
 ating stream running through and penetrating all of 
 nature's ambitious movements. Chemical combination 
 holds God in firm faith to the universe, a beacon star, 
 beckoning mind to the glory of rightful conceivement. 
 God is the influx of solar consultation or attraction, 
 which means the fitness of two or more harmonies to 
 produce a decided result. God can never go down, 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 because God is imbedded in principle ; even the name 
 signifies everlasting, a grand hiatus unfolded in all the 
 mental strata of science. 
 
 What has the Bible to do with God, only as the offer- 
 ing of so much mind when intellects were grovelling in 
 materiality, and knew not of the power of the spirit, 
 but nevertheless is the meandering voice that holds the 
 Bible accountable for good. The science in the Bible 
 is its spiritual fitment to the minds of to-day. We must 
 admit that God has either grown, or the standard for 
 intellectual capacity has moved for higher expressions 
 and experiences of God's forensic merit, as a builder 
 and protector of even this one universe that we are 
 trying to embrace with knowledge and spiritual appre- 
 ciation. 
 
 God holds us by force of consanguinity, by the law 
 of cause and effect, by solar attrition, by all the love 
 power that blends in the science of action. The les- 
 sons of the ages tell us that mind travels by the force 
 of its need, by its inability to lay idly by on the moor 
 of a harvested whole. The children of Ninevah, when 
 time shouldered them with responsibility, found them- 
 selves in advance of their parents, found that when 
 mind doubled its equation it was, technically speaking, 
 a broader builder, and a more cosmopolite anchor on 
 which to rest responsibility. We only grow because 
 God grows ; God says, " find centre law, and eliminate 
 
94 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 or unfold for the expression of your God," which I am 
 bound to respect, being managed and controlled by 
 the same law of science that I stand sponsor for. 
 
 Science tells me I am but a chip from the olden 
 block of. the free masonry principle running bi-sexually 
 through all nature, and from nature up to nature's God, 
 meaning the Schiller of spiritual attainment. What, to 
 me was death, but gain ? Gain masterful and grand, a 
 climax in my life that makes me wide awake to every 
 duty that I may owe to every individual, to every cir- 
 cumstance that held within its scope of influence one 
 burnishing ray to beacon top my spiritual manhood. 
 
 God placed me. in the world in accord with scientific 
 adjustment to the principles of harmony that produce 
 instellar light ; and to-day, or now, I possess the same 
 basis of life that science gave to my babyhood, and 
 entrusted to my spiritual being to protect and enlarge 
 upon as the outflowing demand should effect my mental 
 supply of Godly truth and Godly error, or good and 
 evil, for both stratas of propulsive science are under 
 the harmonizing influence of God's equatorial design. 
 My voice of conscience is my speaking voice of God ; 
 my solution of right and wrong, my mental algebra that 
 I figure from to find the right heaven that claims the 
 right God. 
 
 Let men and women seek heaven through the right 
 motives and methods and it is sure to be found, sure to 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 95 
 
 crown every effort of mental out- reach that has the love 
 of humanity in heart and soul. 
 
 Every thought we put forth for good wears its crown 
 in the atmsophere of godly light ; and every thought 
 for evil trails alongside the red flag of treason to the 
 doorway of devil devices and sin. The resurrection 
 morn commenced when mind cut loose from the 
 caprices of a personal God, and started out from the 
 dead waters of rebuke to find the mystery of God in 
 the principle of elongated science, winding its shaft of 
 power wherever there is an enactment of cosmo law. 
 
 The science of to-day rears its formidable structure 
 against the bare-headed godism that faced the world in 
 the bloody reign of the Csesars, in its almighty hoist of 
 strength in moslums, towers and inquisitions of the 
 fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. God, at 
 that time in the world's wisdom, was force, murder, 
 rapine, and all that made life's history hideous in 
 detail, and the summing up of each epoch of godly 
 goodness was confined in the church globule of sin and 
 unmitigated tyranny. 
 
 The world is owing to God at this day a sermon on 
 recantation, a take off or apology for having shouldered 
 him with the devil's luggage, when he was trying . so 
 hard to out wit the adversary that through a false move 
 came into partnership with him in his idea of build- 
 ing a world. Superstition, which is the child of 
 
96 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 
 
 ignorance and the hell fire of orthodoxy, has be- 
 smeared our true and living God with an ornamenta- 
 tion of diabolism deeper set in coloring and purpose 
 than anything ever ascribed to Satan in the method of 
 his labors. 
 
 As I journey heavenward, or scienceward — the 
 terms imply the same in effect — I am forced to re- 
 spect the truth, finding it wherever I may, in its local 
 bearing around earth and time, and in its Fielding like 
 force around the altar of man's spiritual attainments. 
 Truth is the iago wrapped in a mantle of disguise and 
 treading the foot boards of time in the close attention 
 to the ever fluctuating devices of man, but ever firm in 
 its stately method of cause and effect. If I flit away 
 my time I am a pauper before the infinite God within 
 me, and the truth of my skeleton ship maintains its 
 evidence against me, and I am forced to see myself a 
 sail boat, when I might have been a ship, might have 
 been the two Parkers and maintained the trio on earth, 
 had I not flitted away time in the souless search after 
 the immutability of all things in the creeds and diplo- 
 macies of men, that run counter to truth, ever have, 
 and ever will, so long as science is separate from God, 
 or so long as God is only found in the heavens, 'and 
 man is trying with the wrong key to unlock the sanctu- 
 ary of this divine selfship. 
 
 The term heaven is the acme of all growth, the main- 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 97 
 
 tainance of virtue over vice, good over evil, the perfect 
 self poise gained from the possession of the right instel- 
 lar motor ; to first search within, to find God or heaven, 
 and if there is a counterpart in the heavens, be it in- 
 dividuality or condition, you are sure to come into 
 cotopaxion with the governing element in space, and 
 find the solution to God's mysteries, which is found to 
 be individuality, termed heaven and hell, good and evil, 
 or God and Satan : Bible mythologies. 
 
 The all pervading universe of matter and spirit I find 
 in the individualization of the human character, which 
 perforce reaches the summit of its aspirations. Man 
 finds no God outside of his own temple of keepsakes, 
 outside of his analytic powers of comprehension, that 
 must resolve God to first principles in order to find 
 the substratum or bono on which to rear a living 
 entity. God is as plain as ABC, but it is the God 
 within the manhood of man, or the fire and water 
 principle permeating the fluidic strata of all conceiv- 
 able purpose which lies in the womb of nature, and is 
 male and female in its approximating influence of ges- 
 tative design. 
 
 Noah's Ark is but a representation of the world or 
 nature in cosmo condition, allegorical, a picture within 
 the frame of human reasoning and human condition. 
 The Bible is a pool of philosophy, so large that it takes 
 in everything and admits nothing. God is a bankrupt 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 from the first : guilty of spurious power, spurious method, 
 and spurious attachment to heaven and earth, and is 
 therefore allegorical and filled with the fumes of smoke 
 that will last as long as man sees a crown above the 
 principle in nature, or in the liberal sentiment in his 
 own Godism. 
 
 It is not theory to-day, but facts, that the mind is ask- 
 ing for — facts to substantiate our creed in the natural 
 law of order and disorder. Creed signifies the handle 
 to a solution of what has been a mystery. 
 
 My creed was once Unitarian, the baptism of all to 
 final restitution or peace with God, providing there had 
 been a quarrel. My creed is now humanitarianism, the 
 whole world my brother and sister, and God within 
 pointing to success as we remove the object of selfish- 
 ness by clasping hands with the monarch we allow to 
 be progress. 
 
 The lessons of the ages say the mind has been 
 dwarfed by holding to a creed ; it has thus happened 
 because the creed was false ; there is no dwarfing in 
 the knowledge of facts. My creed is a fact that no 
 one can gainsay, for God's home is the human heart 
 and templed shrine of wc manhood and manhood. 
 
 The spirit world is the objective force, I may say, 
 which the world of time is laboring under to-day, or 
 now, because spirit permeates matter with a concussion 
 that disintegrates conditional purposes and designs. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 99 
 
 The design is now money, and the world wants to be 
 let alone in the methods by which it is to be obtained. 
 This rut of pollution and sin is deepening in its criminal 
 principle to submerge the poor in the bankruptcy of 
 rich men's souls, tying them hand and foot to this demi- 
 god of church mogul-ship and church instituted power 
 as old as God, being the base frontal of man's spiritual 
 kingdom, done brown in the histories of his material- 
 ism, and never so much awake as now in the internal 
 voice that finds its correspondency in the thrilling mes- 
 sages from spirit life, saying : " Oh, man, do justly, for 
 the hour is at hand when the kingdom of heaven must 
 be found within and graded with love to suit the wants 
 of every human being. There shall be no mine, no 
 thine, but all shall become a living temple of unselfish 
 spiritism. 
 
100 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE lessons of the ages are folded away in the 
 sepulchre of the past, and only needed as way 
 marks of encouragement to the human soul. God is, 
 and ever has been, the forensic law that binds all the 
 epochs of time together ; for the circumstantial evi- 
 dence that progress mounted the rostrum of effort, 
 when God said : " Let there be light," meaning evolu- 
 tion. It needs no teloscopic view to bring the past 
 with its subjoined effort to master conditional circum- 
 stances and step higher to the more elastic tune of 
 progress that is ever in the breezes of God's theocratic 
 design. 
 
 History repeats herself ; and why ? Because God is 
 before history, submerging science by the tail, that the 
 head may become a revolving shuttle to feed all the 
 looms in the centre cause and gravity, making the past 
 ever in correspondency with the present vibrous motion. 
 The past and the present, and I may also say the future, 
 are in the keeping house of God's wisdom, and man 
 must traverse and retraverse the mysterious clue to 
 birth and accountability before the understanding is a 
 ripened centre to act from in freedom and purity of 
 design. The blessing of life is the only blessing that 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 101 
 
 God could give, because it embraces all consequent 
 action and motor of purpose. It is the liberal senti- 
 ment permeating the glory of God's fullest conceive- 
 ment, and is the affixed I Am that dwells on the throne 
 of the most high, and the travelling agency that fills all 
 the equator of motion, fills God and man with the same 
 right to use those elements when nature makes a 
 demand on the function of use. 
 
 Life is the system of motion self existant in the 
 gravity of law belongs no more to God than to man, or 
 to the star fixed in the galaxy of the heavens, or to the 
 tiny pebble in the singing brook, or to forest bird, or 
 mountain ; all the wide range of natures individual 
 plumings are first in life, and then in the effort of 
 progressive evolvement. 
 
 Why does man seek life out from the decay of the 
 physical body ? Why, because life is the master beck- 
 oning on to duty and work, beckoning on to the broad 
 hemisphere of individual culture, which is the 
 rarification of the God principle, love. Our world 
 builders have been men and women, ever have 
 been and ever will be, because there is no other 
 method of propulsive being only what the male and 
 female aura contain for the system-house of evacuation. 
 Man possesses the key to unlock all the mysteries in 
 or of science, and must insert that key to the right 
 lock when God says let us move higher, for the tern- 
 
102 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 pies of spiritual growth are wanting more students, and 
 your place is needed in the world of financial dis- 
 counts, where dollars and cents try souls for the king- 
 dom of heaven, and fit each soul with the implement to 
 build for the spirit of mammon, or for the spirit of 
 progress, that is wound into every cord of sympathy, 
 vibrating in the hearts of all the nations, slow perhaps 
 to perceive, because man is slow to reason from cause 
 to effect, and builds more to the external revenue of 
 solid worth. 
 
 Spiritualists, as a class of free-thinkers, are more 
 given, I think, to speaking of building their spiritual 
 home than church going people, or those between the 
 two. Those elected to church fellowship take it for 
 granted that their spiritual home is secure and perfect, 
 when the ram's horn of ecclesiastical power has sub- 
 merged the sinner into the beatific attitude of saint, 
 and their home in spirit life is builded under the ham- 
 mer of God's selfishness, to bring a few to repentance 
 to sing psalms for the honor of their salvation. How 
 absurd the idea of a partisan God ; it fills the soul with 
 a debasement more fearful and intolerant than the sup- 
 posed wrath of their Supreme Divinity. 
 
 The non-committal conditions of life betray very 
 little selfishness, willing to leave the matter of life 
 and death wholly in the bosom of fate, and if 
 there is a God of infinite wisdom, having the affairs of 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 103 
 
 all in hand, suppose him to be capable of distinguish- 
 ing the saint from the sinner, whether the church holds 
 him or not, and in the generality of cases do not suppose 
 that by searching they can find any clue to a spiritual 
 home that is so much talked about and so little under- 
 stood. But the Spiritualists, or those calling them- 
 selves such, talk in vivid manner of their prominent 
 homes in spirit life, builded they scarce know how ; it 
 may be on the church plan, because they believe so-and- 
 so, and are in the crib of spiritualism, bound for glory, 
 because mediums say : " This peach of infinite life and 
 beauty is for you," notwithstanding they are possessed of 
 the knowledge that good candy cannot be made from 
 rock salt, and that homes in heavenly atmosphere are 
 the result of a well poised central balance, that all the 
 fires of earth's discipline cannot sway from its poise of 
 honor and integrity of movement. Spiritualists have a 
 broad acreage of truth that they are mounting with the 
 skepticism of by gone and present time, because they 
 do not see better results in the condition of humanity 
 than the churches are bringing forth with the top light 
 of liberalism that will eventually demolish creed, when 
 mind swings the pendulum to the soul's accountability 
 to the God within. 
 
 Spiritualism proper mends all the breaks in human 
 life, and places man in the round of circumstantial evi- 
 dence that bears its own weight for or against a perfect 
 
104 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 union under perfect conditions. The union of friends 
 in spirit life is under the law of condition the same as 
 in earth life ; in spirit life the law of interest runs 
 parallel with that same law on earth, although it may 
 diverge in cause and circumference, and duty speaks 
 her mission as correctly in one sphere as the other, and 
 souls mingle and seperate much after the plan of 
 earthly discipline, and carry forward the harvest of 
 intellectual gleanings for the prosperity of a broaden- 
 ing work. Spirit life is the life of the soul, the inner 
 raying of thought for motionary work in the spheres 
 that are material, and in the spheres that are graded 
 more with spiritual deflections and are moving higher 
 in the concordance of space. 
 
 Soul life is the life that takes precedence in the morn 
 of the resurrection, when man sees through the glass 
 darkly, out to the broadening grandeur of a newer life 
 that takes cognizance of angel forces and their modus 
 operandi in the different departments of their missioned 
 labors, that run parallel with earthly demand. Labor, 
 in the sphere removed from earth, or in the local de- 
 partments of spirit life, is as conducive to growth of 
 the spirit as labor in earthly localities is condusive to 
 physical expansion and mental accountability. 
 
 All growth is the result of friction power. I must 
 necessarily use my mental faculties else I rob God of 
 so much time, which reflects to my own disadvantage, 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 105 
 
 and makes me a pauper in the sight of riches which 
 are always accumulating through the forces of mental 
 need. 
 
 I now need to come back to earth, having drawn on 
 the exchequer of science. I am fortified with the 
 weapon of truth, undeniable and unmistakable, that 
 my mental labors have never ceased, that my whole 
 orbit of action is as much a fact now as when earth 
 held me to my physical body, which body disintegrates 
 to suit my present need. I shall never loose my body, 
 friends of earth, distinctly understand me. My body 
 is at my own disposal, having learned its make, and my 
 own necessity for its readjustment after a period of 
 twenty-two years or thereabouts of sojourning in spirit 
 life. I shall claim its resurrection and fitness to serve 
 me in whatever time and place I can best make condi- 
 tions which I intend to do in the coming months of '82 or 
 '83. Do not doubt me, for God is with me in my work, 
 holding science to the letter of transfiguration the same 
 now as when Christ assumed the mythic suit for time 
 and purpose. Christ's purpose was evangelization ; 
 showing the power of the spirit to take on its earthly 
 raiment, evidence conclusive that there is no death to 
 primates; that man fosters his own birth in nature's 
 storehouse of sexual cooperation and all transmigratory 
 movement is as surely under the law of scientific ability 
 and adaption as the law governing birth, which is the I 
 
106 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 
 
 Am to all there is of the Gocl-power of encompassment, 
 which power turns on its own axis of individual ac- 
 countability. 
 
 The evangelical principle is firmly fixed in nature ; 
 and had there never been a gospel utterance in the 
 literature of any nation, science holds the revibrating 
 spirit for better conditions to establish better results, 
 first in the spirit and then in the raying for external 
 conception, is in accordance with the spirit ability to 
 fashion and form on material basis to work out its own 
 progressive march. Spirit is the acme surrounding all 
 the spheres, and God being the spheroid around which 
 all life and motion revolves, it appeals to reason that 
 there can be no break in the spirit altitude of any 
 scientific conception, because God holds nature in the 
 rotundity of non-escapement, necessity being the lever 
 law, unfolding mind to the full of its capabilities. 
 Mind grapples circumstances with a force unrecognized 
 by itself, because motion is quicker than sight either in 
 the mental outreach or in the eye's power of compre- 
 hension. The mind inflates before sight perceives. 
 This world in its nebulous design was first a motion in 
 science, then the rays of intellectual sight grappled for 
 its rotundity in space, and the earth became a living 
 poem inexhaustable and ever fresh in lyric substances, 
 ever onward and upward as a sphere, working with all 
 other spheres for the deepening of thought, the perfect- 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 107 
 
 ing of principles and a maintainance of a Godly self- 
 hood that will unite with the divinity in all things for 
 mastery and accountability, with no Christ as a Saviour 
 in mythic form and verse, but as far as his principles 
 carry us. 
 
 The rivulet opening to the great tributaries of moral, 
 intellectual, political and financial success, " Nearer 
 my God to thee," ever thrilled my whole being with 
 that radiating impulse to lift every cover that concealed 
 a truth or hid a God in embryo ; that a seed, a pebble, 
 the roaring cataract and midnight star contain as much 
 of God as I do, as much of centralization. The power 
 of capability inherent in the chemistry of design, and 
 acted upon by the circumstantial law of cause and 
 effect, the light and shade of nature's evolving principle. 
 
 Cassius dreamed of God as a sunbeam floating in 
 space with always a reflecting ray of brilliancy for the 
 just, who found favor under the law of foreordination, 
 or the cast of an electoral vote, sueing for that redemp- 
 tion from sin which is close upon the sin itself, and 
 which no external God can remove without clasping 
 hands with the God brother within, saying : " Let us 
 work out of this moral mire which stamps both soul 
 and body with the pauper's claim to infidelity." 
 
 This rock of ages upon which individuals of all 
 nations, countries and climes have split, and held 
 fuedal opinions, is the rock of the God individual hold- 
 
108 THE LESS ON S OF THE AGES. 
 
 ing the issues of life and death at the juncture of wilful 
 caprice, and man the target to shoot down or up, as 
 will dictated the preference. I think my God within 
 me greater than any I have found without. 
 
 If I accept the free songster bird of love in science 
 which fills the whole bosom of our Father God, in 
 heaven and on earth, I thank my God within my 
 science of accountability, for the comprehensive power 
 to join heart and hand with this wonderful God love 
 ever around and about me, filling me with an un- 
 bounded desire to use this redemption key to reach the 
 highest altitude of my mind's capacity, for thereby I am 
 gaining more of God, gaing an insight into the labra- 
 tories of reincarnation, that men and women of earth 
 so little comprehend at the present time. Scientific 
 reincarnation is the great beam on which rests the 
 opaque system equation ; the principle of evil bears the 
 same weight for resurrection that is accorded to the 
 principle good, else space fails in its power of distilla- 
 tion to make an equipoise under the law of give and 
 take. God's law is salvation ; which can only be sus- 
 tained and perfected through the process of the re- 
 incarnation of primates, unseen the by mortal eye, be- 
 ing the work of the spiritual mendacity to accomplish 
 raiment for the solidity of earthly pressure and need, 
 and thus we all come under the subtle law of reincar- 
 nation every day of our lives, be it under earthly 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 109 
 
 atmospheres or under a more rarified condition of 
 spiritual ramification, the law of equivalents works the 
 same, and the law of justice reduced to practice, which 
 is compensation, runs a parallel line of coagitation, 
 working good from evil, and vice versa, as the case 
 demands by the force of elongation. 
 
 Mud is as necessary as sunshine ; both are the reflec- 
 tions of conditional circumstances, inherent in the 
 Godly aura of reincarnative science, which doubles its 
 force under the grappling iron of mental accountability, 
 freeing men and women from sin, being death, symbol- 
 ically speaking. Luther admitted no death when he 
 proclaimed heaven and hell to be eternal, and in 
 cotopaxion with the juncture of God's will, because 
 the lake of fire must be ever burning to be ready for 
 sinner's, while heaven's platform must be stable ground 
 on which the good find rest and hope. 
 
 I well remember while on earth of being called to 
 lecture in Burlington, Vt., a place then ready for the 
 sweet crumbs of truth, but popular religion gives the 
 bright winged songster a douche, before a full song can 
 be heard outside of a popular church ; but I am well 
 aware that many liberals in that vicinity believe that I 
 spoke truth when I said, " There can be no evil only 
 what God must claim, arrd claim by the law of rightful 
 ownership, since all there is is God's to destroy in its 
 infancy or to co-operate with, and swing before the 
 
110 THE LESS OS S OF THE AGES. 
 
 mind of man that its deformity may show the work to 
 be done, and to show that the power of God exists in 
 the two contending forces, the positive and negative 
 subtleties that work from density to the confluence in 
 almighty space." Man must see God fully in order to 
 grapple with or control this one half, or third of evil 
 that as surely belongs to him, as that God belongs to 
 the ripened grandeur of all things, either on earth, or 
 in the outreaching glories of the summer lands. We 
 cannot cage a beauty of any kind, but what has had a 
 background of deformity of condition, relatively speak- 
 ing, and termed evil by minds that cannot see God 
 only in sunshine and roses, or in sylvan streams and 
 ocean's garnered waters, that surely speak conditional 
 umpire with a conditional God. Who flouts at sin, wastes 
 his powder, unless it stirs within the soul the ambition 
 and method to hunt it to the death, by the reconstruc- 
 tive agencies of civil governments, that can only flour- 
 ish as justice dips deeper for supremacy and the right 
 to cast off and utterly destroy the money God of feudal 
 sway ; whose hand is ever ready to grapple at the 
 throat of demarcation. 
 
 Who but God can destroy God ? I say let God alone, 
 whose mythic grandeur fills all the spaces with an uned- 
 ucated love, to make rich every soul desiring reforma- 
 tion, but let us rather test this burning bush of evil 
 proclivity, and see if Moses can come forth unscathed 
 
THE LESSONS OF TEE AGES. Ill 
 
 and free to roam at will, when mind becomes a reflector 
 that embraces sin if it does not seek to destroy it, and 
 thereby fulminate a purpose of Deific import to all 
 concerned in the grand march of the world's revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 If I cast off an old coat, I shall ask no one to adopt 
 and wear it without its undergoing the process of 
 renovation, to free it from the stain or ambition of a 
 Parker ; neither do I wish any one to treasure my old 
 sermons, without giving them the broad sweep of mind 
 renovation ; for they could in no way serve me now, 
 having lost balance in that groove of accountability, 
 and I want my earth friends to come higher with me, 
 walking the streets of the New Jerusalem, with the God- 
 fire of solution pointing to better evils from better 
 causes ; and I am as firm to-day on liberal and recon- 
 structive principle as when those utterances lighted 
 the feeble torch I held before the world, but which the 
 world often refers to as the wheat and tares from off a 
 mind not wholly free, but a carper still bound by the 
 noose of public opinion, and the bull-dog of church 
 aristocracy, labeled religion. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount speaks of beatific condi- 
 tion, speaks as every sermon must that benefits a soul 
 of that great latitude of love that covers a multitude of 
 sins, until the reaper of education can cut down the 
 shadow that obscures the sun. Wherefore do I speak 
 
112 THE LESSONS OF TEE AGES. 
 
 to-day of the lessons of the ages, as each lesson bears 
 its record in the spaces of eternal light, and the record 
 is also kept in the earth's volition of movement, kept 
 by the finger-marks of liberalism, that cannot tolerate 
 a dogma unless it carries a truth in science, and sticks 
 to that truth in church and out of church ; cannot tol- 
 erate infidelity that runs counter to the God moloch 
 within, and hangs tooth and eye to that power that set- 
 tled over Babylon, laying her in the arms of priests to 
 suffocate and strangle with hell-fire and brimstone ; 
 and also dragged Rome by the iron hand of Godly 
 despotism to the petrified condition of non-assumptive 
 rights, quelching where it could not destroy free speech 
 and free assumption to individual rights. Each lesson 
 of each age has had this same infidelity to the princi- 
 ple of right to contend with ; the God within has been 
 nothing compared with that figure of expression with- 
 out, riding in sunbeams and glory over the headland 
 quarters of the rich, and casting the fungus of doubt 
 over the hearts and homes of the poor. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 113 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 LIBERALISM is the mind's liberator, and has 
 cropped out wherever and whenever the hu- 
 man brain has felt the inspiring motor of God's own 
 truth, which is the spire of individual responsibility 
 within, fixed within the human soul, soluble to reason, 
 when infidelity stands by the side of sense instead of 
 creed, and that olden holy book now undergoing recon- 
 struction at the hands of this same priestly power, who 
 are afraid to let go entirely of this shark that has been 
 the open mouth through which sinners have passed into 
 their church, dead to sin and individual accountability. 
 I do not suppose God ever thought of revising his 
 Bible, the good book of Greek indiscretion of compiled 
 order ; but the enthusiasm of modern ecclesiastics has 
 ignored its fitment, it seems, to serve the present need, 
 and Bibles on the plan of Grecian approval are at a 
 discount; and so this shark of ancient power must 
 part with half of its head, tail and fins, to allow that 
 the spirit of progress has entered the churches and is 
 meddling with God in spite of himself. 
 
 Ho ! for a deluge of God's immortal truth that will 
 swallow up the sin and subterfuge of priestcraft that 
 shines over the most important issues of life, and its 
 
114 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 consequent growth and bearing on Deity, the elongated 
 principle in the method mills of science, and pins its 
 favor on canon and creed, as something of easy access 
 to obtain to, and covers what it cannot destroy, adding 
 glory to monopoly and shame to Christendom. 
 
 Ho ! for an archangel to place over Bible ground the 
 placard, Peace to thy ashes, for liberalism must burn 
 thee at the stake of common sense, and let nations find 
 in thy ashes reconstruction ; for the hour is at hand, 
 and the day not far distant when spirit voices shall ring 
 in the new era, and put a new vamp to the soul of ille- 
 gal power, which the Bible as surely contains as it does 
 the Christ whose principles we all admire, and is the 
 white dove of purity that will arise from the funeral 
 pyre of Hindoo and Greek mythology, that have held 
 plasters for creed and caste until the mind revolts at 
 this Satan that assumes to be God in the face and eyes 
 of honest people, that dare not pin-mark a Bible, for 
 fear the cry of infidelity will mar the prospect of bread 
 and butter, which is as necessary to physical life as 
 truth is to the inner raying of thought and methods of 
 growth. 
 
 When childhood plays with beads and strings them 
 for pleasure and system, shall we find fault because 
 God did not produce a tree before an acorn ? a stagna- 
 tion before a ripple ? which would upset his work com- 
 pletely, as a drop indicates a shower, a seed a harvest, 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 115 
 
 system, progress, and God, evolution. Crater power 
 from crater cause, embedded in the foetus of gestative 
 nature, and cannot cease to act, or turn from its orbit 
 of personality that determines its sex and accounta- 
 bility. 
 
 The crater of knowledge is the fundamental princi- 
 ple in which rests the brain power of man, and no con- 
 ceivement in science can escape the blasting force of 
 mind ability to bring to its comprehension the methods 
 and by-laws of scientific workmanship, which as surely 
 underlie the brain throne of man as the brain throne 
 of nature, both entities, being the natural results from 
 natural law, and cannot be gummed over by the stucco 
 of heathen history, that would make God a builder, 
 without a known credential, hap-hazard like, prone to 
 error and fits of reproach because his works were not 
 better, from what he had to do with. The infinity of 
 its bulk the world is now beginning to deal with, and 
 to place where it belongs in the principle strata under- 
 lying the outstamping of all material things. 
 
 As the sunshine throws its golden rays around my 
 medium, I hear the echoes from within her stirred soul 
 for the broadening of a truthful monopoly, that will 
 hang on the hinges of the world's intellectual, moral 
 and free democratic government, that the swaying hand 
 of our God in principle may sharpen the instrument of 
 individuality to cut from the mind, creed, dogma, super- 
 
116 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 stition and the underbrush of popular opinion, which 
 dwarfs and cramps the soul, making a cripple where 
 might be a provost of power, and man might become a 
 government unto himself, with nothing illegal to crush 
 the growth of any other individual. 
 
 The storm-king is at work as of old, to root out the 
 spirit of monopoly, to make money an agent instead of 
 a pcwer ; to make rebellions unnecessary, and peace, 
 the organ of divine approval, sounding through all the 
 avenues of reconstructive agencies, formulating around 
 the system of governmental duties. 
 
 Mourn not for a Garfield ; but measure the standard 
 of his worth, and seek to imitate his virtues, and crown 
 his loving kindness by showing mercy and care to an 
 imbecile half crazed with the weight of his responsibil- 
 ities, in a government all afoam with the spirit of trea- 
 son, and Garfield's removal filled the measure of a side 
 issue approval. Ye who seek the life of a Guiteau, 
 and by taking it, can in no way replace in your midst 
 the grand physique of James A. Garfield, his loving 
 words, kindly deeds, and high sense of honor, would 
 scorn to become a murderer, scorn to take revenge 
 because he was no longer in the capacity of president 
 needed in the world. The instrument that caused his 
 death, the world needs to purify and cleanse from the 
 leper of its own dishonest purposes. James A. Gar- 
 field, in the magnanimity of his spiritual life, would 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 117 
 
 have his successor pardon the criminal that is now be- 
 fore the world of infinity, — would have the world of 
 earth see that he has proper treatment and care ; that 
 his labor and education be not neglected ; that, in his 
 solemn duties he may become en rapport with the angel 
 messengers, and learn that forgiveness is the spirit of 
 Godly attainment in man, and worthy of his careful 
 inspection, in the lone hours of meditation and com- 
 munion with self. He says : 
 
 "My soul goes out to Guiteau as a friend and 
 brother. Forgive him, I do, for the rash act that gave 
 to me the knowledge of the world's love for me ; gave 
 to me also the knowledge of how far I could have 
 satisfied the world as a leader, with my limited view of 
 justice and knowledge of the right God in the right 
 constitution. Forgive Guiteau, I do with my whole 
 soul, and I want him to know and feel it ; want him to 
 know that I am his guardian spirit forever on, or until 
 we shall meet and he shall wish to appoint another, 
 which I now know he will not. I only thank him for 
 my release from the bonds that kept me in ignorance, 
 and laid away the pillars of caste, creed, church and 
 state monoply. Crowns and scepters become as naught, 
 and I stood at death's release with a knowledge of a 
 universal self-government that will lash its waters of 
 contempt and discord, until my broadening sight takes 
 in the new Jerusalem of earthly building. Would I 
 
118 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 fail in acknowledgment of the world's expressed love 
 for me by withholding the broadest side of my nature, 
 making of myself a pigmy at the entrance of my new 
 life, where everything glows with the radiance of divine 
 love and pardon. Oh ! no, friends and family of earth, 
 dear as my own soul, because a part of my soul, hear 
 me say, Pardon Guiteau. I claim it as my right that 
 the nation burn its animosity at the stake of Garfield's 
 approval, and let Guiteau live on earth to condemn the 
 spirit that prompted the act. What more can I say 
 than I have here said ? Pardon the criminal that has 
 already passed under the rod of public condemnation, 
 and still hangs to the hope of a new trial that will 
 liberate him from the noose of barbaric authority ; 
 what more can I say ? Only this : oh ! friends of 
 earth, leave Guiteau with his God on earth, under the 
 bright canopy of the star-flecked heavens, to learn the 
 lessons which come before us all, that deeds are the 
 expressions that judge us for the cultured seat of Godly 
 approval, or place us in the moral desert of worldly 
 litigation, that lasts until conscience crowns herself 
 with a God of principle, that no earthly chalice, how- 
 ever bitter, can sway from its centre of right. This 
 much I say, and leave Parker with his work, thanking 
 him for this privilege to reach the public mind, and I 
 also hope the heart, touched by the force of the world's 
 intellect, will hear the ringing wave call : 'Judgment 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 119 
 
 is mine saith the Lord,' and I will repay good for evil, 
 not that I have changed in purpose, but the world is 
 changing by the force of education, and the new dis- 
 pensation is at hand when the sword will be turned to 
 pruning hooks, and gall offered to no one. Farewell 
 for the time, but further duties surely await me on 
 earth, and thus I rest in hope that the world will heed 
 my wish herein expressed, and cover the criminal with 
 a mantle of charity so long and full that it will sweep 
 from earth the demon of capital punishment, and let 
 the hearts and intellects of humanity find better 
 methods for averting the evils that beset the govern- 
 ment, that the stringency of the hangman's rope may 
 not be necessary, and may not be tolerated in a world 
 stamped with the ten commandments, and carrying 
 those stamps through every pulpit in the land, there- 
 from basing a religion, a charity, a hope and a love 
 that sadly belie in the action of spirit what the words 
 convey to the heart and mind. I would that I could 
 go farther with thought and expression with my friends 
 of time, but must not now infringe on the kindness of 
 another in giving me this opportunity through a sensi- 
 tive and delicate instrument, already taxed to the full 
 of mental and physical strength. Therefore I abide 
 my time. James A. Garfield." 
 
120 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 Sweeter than ten thousand song birds 
 
 Is forgiveness to the soul, 
 Sweeter than the breath of violets, 
 
 Sweeter than loves full control, 
 Sweeter than its mystic breathings 
 
 To the sapphire in the soul. 
 
 Oh ! forgiveness, jeweled seraph, 
 
 Who but Garfield proved thy worth ? 
 
 "Who has shown it in its fullness 
 But the hero gone from earth ; 
 
 Not found wanting, be it written 
 On the walls of heaven and earth. 
 
 He for whom the world is mourning. 
 
 He who done his duty well, 
 Cannot rest beside the mountain 
 
 While the valley breaths a knell, 
 While Guiteau is bent and bleeding 
 
 Let the cross serve him as well, 
 For the guilty and the guiltless 
 
 Must join hands for one and all. 
 
 And so I believe, I believe the mighty forge of 
 spiritual truth will at length swallow up and destroy 
 the spirit of revenge, and man will stand forth in his 
 true nobility of character, and work for the betterment 
 of every human being, let the circumstances be what 
 they may that impels a person to crime. The work of 
 reformation must be done on earth, where all motives 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 121 
 
 find lodgment for doing any deed of dishonor, and let 
 the rewards and punishments take place on earth, 
 formulated under a better system of spiritual athnetics, 
 that surely surround the developement of mind in 
 matter, or the skillful workmanship of man and woman, 
 the truine cause wherein is based the principle of life 
 everlasting. 
 
 We cannot tread the wine press alone. It needs 
 everybody's tread to make good vintage ground for the 
 incoming tide of every generation, and woe be unto 
 our spiritual condition if we skim lightly over the 
 rugged path of earthly discipline, heeding not the calls 
 from the monitor within to stand loyal to those princi- 
 ples of honor, integrity and justice that have crowned 
 the world with its present growth of spiritual enlight- 
 ment. Every generation does not produce a Garfield ; 
 but every generation does produce, or bring to the 
 front of worldly knowledge, an inflow of spiritual truth, 
 an influx of the Godism of love, a deeper insight into 
 the methods of justice, a larger growth of kindly feel- 
 ing one to another, better modes of treatment in cases 
 of violated law, better systems of education, whereby 
 the mind must see that divine principle that surges to 
 the front of progress, and rings its acclaim of " Eureka" 
 — I have found thee, must hold and keep thee, until 
 earth must see the injustice of sending criminals to 
 
122 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 the bar of the infinite for punishment and purification 
 for deeds done in the body, under the jurisdiction of a 
 government wholly under the control of a money 
 autocracy, swaying and verging to the side of popular 
 influence. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 123 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE lessons of each age plainly reveal the fact 
 that God and science are blending for broaden- 
 ing of a grander principle of life, that cannot be 
 smitten or destroyed by the breath of God's anger, or 
 the creedal waves of hellfire that sprouted its purpose 
 to save God and the church in legal power and union 
 of feeling, to destroy those who dared to think, and 
 would not bite at the church bait, but felt willing to 
 try the chances of saving themselves, or to drift into 
 the pool of atheism that always contains a grander 
 God than any church ever welcomed to its sanctuary of 
 worship. 
 
 Let us illustrate, if you please, the infidels' God and 
 the God of the churches. The infidel takes nature, 
 unfolded in all her loveliness ; sees and admits the 
 beauty and mechanism of her wondrous order and un- 
 foldment of principle, how everything conduces to 
 man's comfort, physically, mentally, philosophically 
 and spiritually, for it is all in the bondage of love, 
 swayed by the power of love, and is love itself giving 
 from the God store of its fulness. And the man or 
 woman that sees no farther, not yet being toplighted, 
 says this is good enough for me, all I can digest now, 
 
124 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 but if there is something of more infinite value in the 
 system of God or chance work, why ! I must find it. 
 No church can ever secure that knowledge to me ; no 
 church can find a God large enough to compare even 
 in love with the God love expressed in nature ; and I 
 must let reason work, the church enlarge, and God, if 
 there is such an entity, work in the system of his own 
 progressive laws, while I abide the march of time to 
 find more light if I can. This to me is infidelity to the 
 avowed Christian religion, that ties God hand and foot 
 to the church wing of progress, a mere skull, going the 
 rounds of all mythology, placed in the Bible as the 
 headlight of power, swayed by the treason spirit of 
 earth, and the formulated works of a monarchy ; princi- 
 ple ever ready to take precedence when the devil opens 
 the way through the door of self-sanctified religion. 
 To me infidelity, to such pronounced selfishness, is a 
 rose in the bud of mind promise compared to the 
 Christian God walking the earth in money shoes, and 
 held at money value. But for the bright wing of 
 spiritualism, infidelity would be the cart before the 
 horse, loaded so full of doubt that the church horse of 
 ecclesiasticism would surely balk in attempting to move 
 it on the up hill side to glory. 
 
 Some will say : that is one of Parker's inelegant ex- 
 pressions ; and so it is, but it nevertheless conveys a 
 truth that time is ready to accept, and thank God for 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 125 
 
 its truth ; and thus one generation or era of time builds 
 a staging of a more spiritual tendency for the next 
 advancing minds, that are always crowned with a little 
 more light from off the altar of past experience. 
 
 Why should we murmur at our lack of knowledge, 
 which as surely comes when needed, and when the 
 mind is prepared for it, as the rain comes to the 
 parched and thirsty earth. Each branch of want is 
 under the divine sway of movement, and cannot be 
 hurried on the part of man. What the mind is pre- 
 pared to gain it will never lose sight of. Time and 
 eternity holds the development key to its fullest attain- 
 ments ; £nd what one generation only sees in the dis- 
 tance, the next may welcome by the hand and grasp 
 with the mind, having the lessons of the past to learn 
 from and improve upon, while the increasing power 
 from the angel world, to be understood as still helpers 
 in the vineyard of the Lord, is the propelling motor 
 attached to the wheels of progress, that move under 
 the spirit of natural concordance in nature ; the hollow 
 globe ever full, and being made ready to fill again, that 
 God may keep his own in the rotundity of scientific 
 will, meaning the ability to form and fashion from the 
 principle of elongation. The instellar key used by the 
 God in nature to unlock a door when necessary and 
 compatible with the mind range in worlds. 
 
 To-day children are advancing in the gifts that puz- 
 
126 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 zle wiser heads, puzzle even ministers to know how 
 they are going to fix their theology to suit these minds 
 that seem so large in their small clothes ; where with 
 the growth of the past few years even, and the still in- 
 creasing light of spiritualism, find them in the years 
 that follow on childhood, with the improved facilities 
 for education, not surely in the cramped condition of 
 creeds, where the mind is as sure to dwarf under its 
 cover as a child under the shadows of evil temper, both 
 contingencies of error, are halters around the neck of 
 freedom, and ministers must enlarge their creed, or 
 bottle up their religion, and keep it as a trophy of the 
 past ungodly proclivities of man. 
 
 The lessons of the ages bring us face to face with 
 the naked condition of Adam and Eve, who were in 
 the midst of knowledge and found it not, until they 
 sought freedom, sought to do with the garden what 
 seemed best to their mind, and the tree of knowledge 
 being fair to look upon, supposed of course it must be 
 pleasant to the taste ; and God, seeming to them an 
 autocrat of unholy power, they thought to outwit him 
 and get their just rights, which was the power to distin- 
 guish good from evil, knowledge from ignorance, facts 
 from prejudices, and truth from the combined muddle 
 of orthodoxy and revealed religion, which every soul 
 carries in quality and quantity ; and Adam and Eve are 
 illustrations to every generation that knowledge is 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 127 
 
 power, and no flaming sword of heathen superstition or 
 modern invention can make powerless the mind to ob- 
 tain it. When we are free we can study and profit 
 from our studies ; but if bound reason beats against 
 the barrier, and a collision occurs, and if will is weak 
 the struggle to get beyond is an effort requiring too 
 much courage, and so minds are apt to cling to what 
 other minds have labeled truth, and to settle down to 
 the dogma that God chooses some to look out for the 
 salvation of others, which fact never yet occurred to 
 the entire satisfaction of any one, and never will occur, 
 because mind is a universe of itself, with a polarity 
 above treason. 
 
 We in spirit life sound the tocsin of approval for 
 every free thinker, for every mind cut losse from the 
 shackles of anybody's say so, unless the thought con- 
 veys to the mind evidence of scientific truth, which is 
 ever ready to cope with and illustrate any outreach of 
 principle deducible to reason. We thank God the 
 divine spirit in progress, for the shining light of an 
 Ingersoll, the hero that dares to burlesque a myth, al- 
 though crowned as a God by the moneyed influence in 
 church and state ; dares to claim nature as satisfactory 
 evidence that love is the power of the soul, dearer than 
 a patchwork of fables from minds at the entrance-way 
 to the dome of knowledge, that could only comprehend 
 by the hugeness of detail and monstrosity of verbal 
 
128 THE LESSOXS OF THE AGES. 
 
 show. Who looks at Robert Ingersoll without knowing 
 that his soul life is his true and lasting life ? the life 
 that he works with day after day, and night after night, 
 when thought finds him in the vanguard of the world's 
 reformation, pulling down obsolete theories, to prepare 
 stable ground for a new prince of peace, that will speak 
 to the heart and soul of a living principle, hitherto 
 embedded in the ignorance and superstition that made 
 thrones possible, that made an overflowing mecca of 
 intolerance, the crafty power that submerged the world 
 in the dark ages of doubt and despair, when minds 
 rioted in the flames of an angry God, and saw what 
 little of justice they could comprehend, in the overthrow 
 of nations, and the burning of children as the sacrifi- 
 cial oder of an avenging God. 
 
 A revolting show is the Bible show of peace on earth 
 and good will to man, when it contains more of the 
 dagger spirit than any other book before the world to- 
 day. And Christ's corner must be its apology as any 
 service whatever to the world, and that must serve as a 
 love link in the infinite chain of Godly progress, which 
 moves from the centre light of father and mother secre- 
 tiveness fixed in gestative science, where the mills of 
 the Gods are bringing it in its white purity, before the 
 minds of the nineteenth century. The century that 
 opened its hearing to the voice of the angels, and can 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 129 
 
 never more close up the avenue of communication, 
 while time runs a parallel law line with eternity. 
 
 There is no church wide enough in its import of sal- 
 vation, to hold the liberal spirit of Robert Ingersoll, 
 the pronounced infidel of this era of progress ; the pro- 
 nounced sharp-shooter into the ranks of the world's 
 theological resting place, as dense and morbid as mat- 
 ter without spirit ; when the liberal spirit of the age 
 gets through with its sifting process, the Bible will need 
 another revision, where nothing will be left but the 
 cover, and Christ as the emblematical representation of 
 love bound by honor. Whoever shook the hand of 
 Ingersoll without feeling in better mood under the 
 genial rays of his warm-hearted magnetism ? felt that 
 the man held his God within, as the helper to oust the 
 iron-clad image that figures so conspicuously with the 
 exchequer of church and state. It is safe to here say 
 that there is hope for Ingersoll, but none whatever for 
 the chemical adhesion of the religious element pervad- 
 ing the temple ground of theological Christianity, that 
 will sputter perhaps for a few years longer, and finally 
 go out on the heels of a Thomas, or with the exit of 
 men who dare to be individuals and hold their honor 
 above the tenits that constitute their creed. 
 
 When governments make solid ground for the poor 
 and churches taxable property, and religion not a flower 
 to be sold at any cost, why ministers will come down to 
 
130 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 the level of their own common sense, and not attempt 
 to teach truth until they obtain it, and live it before 
 God and man. When Robert Ingersoll sees the other 
 side of his globe of individualism, he will realize why- 
 he could not stand within the narrow boundary of a 
 creed ; will see his spirit manhood ever the leader to 
 the grandeur of his conceptions, that can never die, but 
 will live in the spaces of God's light, to crown him 
 with their truth and freedom of spirit. And so let 
 jubilanti flow out on the breezes of a more liberal 
 orthodoxy, that the spirit world may join heart and 
 hand in removing the hardening crust of materialism, 
 settling over the heart of the world's nationality. 
 
 Crumbs from the side-board of truth are feeding all 
 liberal minds, or those that dare to investigate in the 
 face and eyes of a more liberal Hades that has swamp- 
 ed the heart and intellect of past times and periods of 
 advancing thought, until minds have cried, Oh ! thou 
 storm-king, with nothing but fire and brimstone, how 
 long wilt thou be usurper over the God rights of first 
 order, and management of purpose ? how long will the 
 churches use thee as the bottomless pit, wherein to sink 
 their responsibilities, and the sins of an overtaxed na- 
 tion struggling to be free, but bound by this power of 
 Satan in league with a financial orthodoxy, sprung from 
 the old world assumption of horned Gods rearing their 
 altars under the sway of might and force. 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 131 
 
 What Lincoln did for the black slavery in the South 
 was done under the pressure of angel wisdom and jus- 
 tice, and Abraham Lincoln being the instrument on 
 which the principle of justice was paramount in his 
 system of reconstruction, could not resist the appealing 
 voices from the summer land heard in his mediumistic 
 soul, could not resist the power that made him sign the 
 release from bondage to 4,000,000 slaves, that had been 
 for years the upas tree of the South, poisoning its vital 
 energies, and flecking heaven with its disgrace. 
 
 Imponderable forces move slowly, but nevertheless 
 they move, and so must this heathen crater of hell-fire 
 torment, fixed as a scarecrow at the entrance way of 
 dogmatic religion, move before the liberal sentiment of 
 free thought, voiced from the angel world and received 
 by minds stamp-marked with honor, and willing to 
 sign a release from the opinionated system of religious 
 slavery. My mind wanders back to my self-asserted 
 right to think for myself, and I knew from that time 
 onward, or until minds grappled the rudiments of truth 
 in science, I should be a muddling stick to stir the 
 waters of a false religion, because purpose was false, 
 and the power of a deceitful purpose is as unstable as 
 the wind, and its fellowship with deep thought is utterly 
 impossible, if truth stands loyal to principle. 
 
 We in spirit life predicate our assertions on the basic 
 ground of a double life, the interior capabilities always 
 
132 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 preponderate for a double showing of accountable ac- 
 tion, which deals with time ever on the outreach to eter- 
 nity's encompassment, and ever impelled by the motor 
 force of education, the mental influx stamp-faced as 
 Deity, and is the Deity in every human soul, self-impel- 
 ling and self-absolving, and belongs to the forensic law, 
 God of Almighty principle. 
 
 Mind is amber hued, and always reflects its bright- 
 ness over surrounding obstacles, wooing an encounter 
 for investigation and completeness of research, to make 
 mastery of Deity in detail to the comprehension of 
 Deity, in the ark size of unlimited principle. 
 
 God grows by the force of the world's education, by 
 the force of spiritual law, governing matter and unfold- 
 ing the circumference of legal science, the adaptability 
 of the social intersexious in nature. Nature is God, 
 the demonstrated evidence of spiritual ability to form 
 on external principle for convenience and use. Do we 
 see with external vision the spiritual law in nature at 
 work ? Do we see with the eye, mountains grow, 
 valleys deepen and widen ? Do we see the process of 
 the trees accumulating grandeur ? and the rose in bud 
 open at the kiss of the sun's bright rays, with the orb 
 of material fungus ? Oh ! no, earth friends, we only 
 see nature as a figment of the great whole, ever in the 
 concreteness of science, and ever giving to outward 
 sensation the fineness of truine cause. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 133 
 
 God is a spirit. Nature is also a spirit, and the one- 
 ness is complete and fixed beyond movement in the 
 womb of spiritual gestation. No harm can come to 
 God, it is nature that suffers — nature that weeps at the 
 mistakes of men ; nature that smiles, nature that we 
 meet year in and out, day by day ; no other power 
 intervenes from the cradle to the grave but nature true 
 and grand, keeping God in her bosom as a harp for the 
 world to play tunes upon, and each tune reflects a God 
 of a more systematic order, and concrete spiritism, 
 that the world may learn that the deluge meant ig- 
 norance, the condition of the world when everything 
 that was hid in principle must be saved in the ark of 
 materialism, or God would suffer in the real estate 
 business, and not be able to reproduce things to first 
 order, and the flood seemed a wonderful water gap to 
 destroy first creation. 
 
 Creation is a term incompatible with reason, because 
 it admits of something before nothing, and that con- 
 dition is untenable, and cannot, of course, be solvable 
 by any method of management. We cannot conceive 
 of nothingness, a great void, as the Bible has it, an 
 unlimitable space, where nothing found nothing, and 
 nothing to begin upon, but God went to work and 
 made something. We don't know what first, for the 
 Bible does not tell us, or anything, how the creation of 
 the world or worlds was managed, but leaves us in 
 
134 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 doubt as regards methods or means ; therefore leaving 
 us on the defensive to test the solidity of a thing con- 
 structed out of nothing. 
 
 My belief, based on knowledge, is that this world 
 and all other worlds have grown from the neces- 
 sity of intensification. Intense motor power must re- 
 flect the solvents that produce matter, causing matter 
 to become as stable as spirit, and both in the bond of 
 unity and friendship, in fact there is no separation ; 
 the spirit ever clings to its portion of matter, intensifi- 
 cation of spirit etherealize the grosser elements of 
 matter and carries into space all that space can deal 
 with, or make use of ; and therefore we are ever sure 
 of as much of our corporeal body as the spirit can 
 assimilate with and take to its fuction of use for the 
 broadening purposes of the instellar life and law sys- 
 tem : the fundamental principle on which rests the 
 symbols of external bearings, preparatory to the spirit's 
 full recognition of its inherent rights as a builder, pro- 
 tector and purifier of so much of gross material in and 
 of science. Science is the most remarkable wheel that 
 ever turned on its axis of accountability, and its 
 rotundity of conception no mind can ever fathom, no 
 God ftan lay a claim to — if that could be, there must 
 come an end, and God and man must cease to grow, 
 which implies death ; rigor strata from which has grown 
 rigor claims that will perish for want of nourishment. 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 135 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 MAN may arrive at the knowledge of world build- 
 ing, be enabled to visit the planets and study 
 equation in its highest sense of utility, and become 
 grand master of etheical science, and yet space holds 
 the unformed secrets that attaches ignorance to man 
 and development in nature. No man hath seen God 
 and lived, because no mind can grasp the ulterior and 
 interior forces of a living principle, balance power is 
 not ranged for so broad a scope, and never can be, for 
 elongation is the method meter by which nature keeps 
 distance from discovery, and keep minds on the qui-vive 
 for something new and fresh to the intellect. Science 
 doubles herself at every turn in the wheel of causation. 
 Cause implies strength in the method of gestation. 
 Science is first acted upon by the cause attaching to its 
 fulmination. Science is deathless and opaque in princi- 
 ple, meeting every want, of the human soul, because 
 soul life is scientific life, ever deepening and reaching 
 for the eternity of motion, which implies causation. 
 We might as well undertake to bottle up the ocean as 
 to hold science by the grasp of human understanding, 
 because the motor key is sunk in the depths of uni- 
 versal brotherhood, and wisdom of purposed order, 
 
135 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 that the soul may learn its lessons of utilization and 
 unite with the harmonical law in nature, to fathom the 
 depth and culture the spirit of love. Love is the 
 essense of divine order and workmanship ; love im- 
 plies equation, centre attraction, centre order and 
 centre honor, and is therefore a principle at work, and 
 must work in concrete science to the fulfilment of the 
 law, which means to the full of its mission as a har- 
 monizer, purifier, protector and God over every other 
 attribute in the human soul, and in all nature as well, 
 for both functions of being have love for the cradle of 
 conceivement. 
 
 What college is there to-day that teaches its students 
 how to live, how to educate their love natures, how to 
 foster the right ambition that will work good in the 
 world, how to study nature, and learn of her varied 
 emblems of loving order the beauty of purity that are 
 speaking sentinels to the human heart, that ambition 
 must first crown herself with love before education can 
 round out the soul to the fullness of natural design ; if 
 we lose in nature we lose in all there is to make loss 
 out of ; if we fail to study, we miss what might have 
 been attained by application, and growth is retarded, 
 time cheated and nature dwarfed. All the lessons we 
 learn are good for something. 
 
 The rag man is as necessary as the merchant. If 
 some of our lessons leave us tattered in principle, 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. IV 
 
 which surely speaks on the external, we may learn 
 from the corrosive marks that waste has begun, and 
 that experience, with the wrong implements of labor, 
 was the teacher leading the way and opening our eyes 
 and mind to the devastation of sin in the practical 
 walks of life, and the deduction from that side of life's 
 issuer is tattered and torn condition, a necessity to 
 grasp a truth from, and obtain depth by decision, 
 which is salt to the character, if framed in weakness. 
 What college to-day teaches the umpire of reason, 
 the graduation of knowledge, the system of thought 
 wound into every department of intellectual, social, 
 financial and materialistic science, from which springs 
 the rubber game that crowns the earthly world of labor ? 
 Colleges teach metaphysics in a certain direction in 
 whatever a student may choose as an avocation of 
 business that he is taught, superficially of course, be- 
 cause the right aims and motives are wanting to make 
 the science of the knowledge sought, a prayer and 
 thanksgiving to the soul. Colleges should go deeper 
 in the line of metaphysical science, and first prune and 
 cultivate the inner temple, where start the principles 
 and aspirations that makes life's work a success or a 
 failure ; must say this institution that offers knowledge 
 to young men and women, offers standard work for 
 future time in the local transaction of every day life 
 and being, must perforce of duty regulate motive 
 
138 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 power ; first see that honor is the corner stone in the 
 temple of education you are about to build ; let us see 
 that you have the right God in your constitution of 
 principles, that can never fail you in any emergency of 
 life ; let us see if virtue holds you by the hand day by 
 day, and makes peace with a conscience ever ready to 
 bar the door against unlawful intruders ; let us see if 
 love is a privilege in the soul that will mount the ros- 
 trum of effort, before the thought of money debases 
 the motive that prompts your systemed work, leaving 
 you a beggar in full sight and reach of material gain. 
 First seek the kingdom of heaven, which is love ex- 
 pressed in works, and all else shall be added thereto, a 
 fact in the science of life, and a pearl never to be lost 
 sight of. 
 
 Who studies from material sight 
 Is lost in doubt, is weak in might ; 
 And all the templed thrones of fame 
 Will only cling to earthly name ; 
 And in the summering of the skies 
 All see the death of earth disguise, 
 And fain would build from new desire 
 A Temple touched with living fire, 
 That would so shine with Godly light 
 That all would see beyond the night ; 
 Beyond the world of earth and and time, 
 Where God and science move sublime, 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 139 
 
 And double in the work of fame 
 Without a thought of what's the name, 
 Or what's the creed ; if nature's right, 
 Mankind must walk by spirit sight, 
 
 And learn the lessons that are needful to all, that mate- 
 rial conditions are the necessities that fit us for the 
 eternity of spiritual motion and co-operative labor. 
 There is no lesson too long that is needful to the 
 human soul, and there is no lesson that comes before 
 the soul with its speaking mission, but what in its 
 synopsis of detail is a benefit to and enlarger of the 
 soul, which learns from experience better than any 
 other way, and more in accord with the status of rea- 
 son. Systems and worlds are moving on, and man is 
 learning that there is no death to the ideal, no death to 
 longitude or latitude, no death to circumference, no 
 death to air, heat, motion, no death to the starry firma- 
 ment that ever speaks grandeur to the human soul, and 
 lifts it to the order of its own systemed laws. 
 
 What God gave me I hold science accountable for. 
 I hold science as my educator and my guide, my pro- 
 pulsive life, my formation and my deflector, my steed 
 that bears the natural and the duplex side of relation- 
 ary lifehood. I cannot part with science any more 
 than I can part with Parker, which I have never at- 
 tempted to do, because the man always clings to the 
 spirit, saying, We are double, and cannot separate. 
 
140 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 God and science working out our part of the great 
 mystery of human life, and its responsible action on all 
 the spheres or worlds, that science may be enabled to 
 develope to our senses. I find that I always need my 
 outside man, need the Parker external, to bear locomo- 
 tive evidence that the interior principle never swerved 
 from the creed of honor, never swerved from following 
 in the wake of spiritual light, and leaving dogmas, 
 superstitions, and all the outside stilts of heathen anti- 
 quity that have flourished as saviors, and true symbols 
 of fitments for eternity, for the rushing tide of reason 
 to bury under its folds of intelligent research, and walk 
 from under a cover of darkness, into the sunlight of a 
 free religion, not inbound by dollars and cents, by 
 church monopoly, by priests purring of clerical power, 
 or any material click w r ork, that will make religion hunt 
 a cover to hide its head of reason under, and reach for 
 a creed to obtain landmark and respectability from. I 
 never went to Jesus with any of my sins, but have often 
 said to Parker : Cleanse your soul from all that your 
 best sense of right cannot hold to, and assimilate with, 
 and I find that when I let go of this bugbear called 
 sin, in whatever shape it may come before me, I have 
 done away with the necessity of any other savior, ex- 
 cept the scientific God-principle at work in my own 
 soul as leveler and purifier of conditional circum- 
 stances. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 141 
 
 Colleges have a broad work to do in the method- 
 house of inductive science, in the promotion of the 
 right principles governing the basic structure of all 
 education, of all departments of business, of all the 
 exigences of life's labors, duties and pleasures. 
 
 God speaks first and last to the soul, but it is the 
 voice of principle to the soul of conscience hearing, 
 and man never can escape the harmony of its sound, 
 be it ever so latent, and seemingly afar off ; it comes as 
 sound to the ear that has long been deaf, and under 
 the paralyzing influence of deadening matter. 
 
 There is a rift in the cloud of time, and spiritualism 
 top-lighted by free thought will save the world from 
 rank infidelity, which has been the trailing ghost since 
 time immemorial, or since the method of salvation took 
 form in book, and offered so much room for speculative 
 theory, which touched everything but the core of the 
 apple, the demonstrative fact of immortality fixed in 
 the globe of science, the hereditary appendage that no 
 amount of theorizing can disturb, or move from its just 
 claim to truth. Why build our spiritual temple on a 
 false basis, on a material foundation, whose shadow is 
 as fleeting as the wind ? Whose every ray of change 
 betokens dissolution, betokens the builder and destroy- 
 er, the umpire of the spirit over the grosser conditions 
 of matter, and the subtlety of its movement proves its 
 scientific origin, its power and truth, proves that there 
 
142 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 can be no death, so long as spirit is at the helm of 
 materialistic duty, the most pungent architect and skil- 
 ful disintegrater. 
 
 Why should man be afraid of law, the integral law 
 that nature deals with continually, and is ever our God 
 and guide, our revelator and broadcast censor, re- 
 flector, and preserver ? Why afraid of death, nature's 
 sleepwalker, that liberates the spirit when danger comes 
 to the body, and it can no longer serve in the work to 
 be done by the spirit ? O ye ! of little faith, when ter- 
 ror comes over you at the thought of dying, when it is 
 but nature at work to liberate the spirit from its bond- 
 age of clay, placing it in the better condition of radia- 
 tion, and freedom of movement. O ye ! of little faith, 
 when you cannot trust your Bible God with the day of 
 your death, that presided at the hour of your birth, and 
 to whom you reach to continually, as a myth in the air, 
 and from whom you never receive a response, however 
 urgent your request may be. O ye ! of little faith, 
 when you cannot trust yourself with the life given to 
 you, through and by the spiritual harvester in the 
 method-house of concrete science, and hold and keep 
 it in so true a light that death will be but the spanning- 
 bridge from the shadowy to the real. Oh ! how glori- 
 ous is the morn of the resurrection from darkness to 
 the sunshine of spiritual truth and light. Never sing 
 psalms at funerals, or dirges to the supposed in prison, 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 143 
 
 but ever jubilanti on the uprising key of a soul's lib- 
 eration and freedom from death. 
 
 O ye prophets ! sages and learned men of the East, 
 teach how to live, and death will come to the rescue 
 most beautifully — the spirit finding its own in the gulf 
 stream of a broader life. 
 
 Spirit life is the only life there is, the only life mani- 
 fested in all the occult forces of nature, the only life 
 that moves for order and circumference, the only life to 
 prove a God in and of the only life that God in nature 
 cleaves to and assimilates with, for procreation and 
 radiation of principle. 
 
 We cannot let go of life ; it is an utter impossibility. 
 Life is encased in nebulous form ; it is the eternal fric- 
 tion force of heat and cold, fire and water, light and 
 darkness, principle and practice, love and hate, God 
 and man, demon and angel, and must perforce work on 
 the endless chain of systematized spirituality, that loses 
 nothing, but changes its form of work evenly and per- 
 petually ; as Dryden says : 
 
 " Deep in the woof of human life, all nature nestles 
 in confiding trust, and finds an undeveloped page in 
 every turning leaf, that will not let us pause, or cease 
 to think, or cease to be, or cease to grapple with proud 
 Deity." 
 
 Let us put death so far away from us that it cannot 
 enter our thoughts, cannot enter a home on earth, can- 
 
144 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 not place a soul in stillness, although it may give the 
 body for the enrichment of nature's soil, to help matter 
 elongate matter, or help nature to elongate the princi- 
 ple of give and take, the method in concrete science 
 whereby the glory of nature is obtained and progress 
 secured without a doubt, through that same process of 
 nature's distilling forces or essences, that always takes 
 step for a more etherealized condition. 
 
 Man is sure to resurrect himself, cannot be avoided, 
 cannot be gainsayed, being a law in the ether house of 
 science ; and man's necessity brings him to the point 
 of accepted terms. The only point of law that God 
 and man have ever split upon, is the issues of life and 
 death, which might have been settled amicably and sat- 
 isfactorily to judgment and the best types of sense, if 
 man had found the right God in the constitution of na- 
 ture, and had studied that God instead of the Jehovah 
 of historical claim, that has been so swayed by parti 
 spitit, and doubled and twisted so many times, by so 
 many minds, that to-day the impress is lost to the best 
 spiritualized condition of humanity, that feels that 
 death has lost its sting, and that God's wrath was but 
 the foam on the vast sea of human ignorance ; which a 
 knowledge of the God principle in scientific nature will 
 sweep to the breezes that usher in the new wave of 
 wisdom gained from spirit power, and seeking, what 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 145 
 
 Christ sought, the hearts of the people to make sure its 
 advent, and bold its stay. 
 
 I am no more prepared to give up life than I was 
 when earth released her claim to my structured form. 
 No more willing to give up study, to give up mental 
 research, for soul enlightment and ingrafting keepsakes 
 than when time claimed my theological assumptions, 
 which were as sounding brass to the truth I now 
 possess, and to the truth that I mean to make manifest 
 and felt in its extremest measure of tangible evidence. 
 
146 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE world is asking as never before for its lost 
 ones, for those that have been laid away under 
 the sanctified redemption of priestly effort, asking for 
 the fulfilment of that hope that went out in almost 
 mental darkness, for the evidence to make sure that 
 the loved live and cannot die, because God lives and 
 cannot die, although history perish by the will and 
 voice of the people. Life is an entity claiming posses- 
 sion and progression ; and man is the standard princi- 
 ple for Godly effort in the universe law of concrete 
 science. Life is a factor whose point of accretion is 
 fixed in the everlasting method-wells of procreative 
 genesis, and man's effort to establish a creed on the 
 fundamental principles of nature, whereby the salvation 
 of the human soul can leak through, is a preposterous 
 fiction that the nineteenth century are feeling ashamed 
 of, and are secretly and openly hugging the advance 
 light of spirit reunion, that says : " I came, I saw, and 
 have conquered," and am the trustee over my own 
 estate of life, that I hold above any spurious title, and 
 am learning its power adjustability to suit all of time 
 and circumstance. 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 147 
 
 Can we ask anything more of God than the principle 
 itself ? which we have always been in possession of, 
 and must ever hold to and develop from. Finding 
 God and losing self in every advance of mental 
 achievement, we are as nothing to ourselves, but can 
 be as a God to every other person, for the principle of 
 self destroys itself, and the bottom land of despair is 
 soon in sight, where the angel of discord bars the door 
 to love and consequent progress. I cannot round out 
 my own nature, cultivate, purify and perfect my own 
 soul unless I come within the love sphere of human 
 life and existence, come into cooperative work, for the 
 broadening of God and the elimination of principle ; 
 come under the bond of friendship with all of ex- 
 pressed life, and do my best endeavor to find the aim 
 and motive in propulsive being, from the standpoint of 
 nature's working, under the sway of a universal wisdom, 
 in the bosom of a universal love, termed God and 
 Science. Love is all there is of God, nature, or man. 
 We cannot go beyond it, cannot stop short of its full 
 attainment, and its expression is ever in accord with its 
 growth of development. 
 
 Do you think there would be a wreck on earth to- 
 day if love stood firm at the citadel of duty ? Would 
 there be a homeless child ? a degraded woman ? a fallen 
 man ? a mourning world ? if love, expressed in works, 
 
148 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 was the standing shield of Godly strength, hoisted over 
 the nation or nations. 
 
 The angels are working as never before for the up- 
 rising of earth, because the minds of earth are turning 
 to the light of spiritual truth, and must be strengthened 
 by the power of substantial evidence, to know that 
 man's life runs parallel with God's, and can only cease 
 when God ceases to express in nature. 
 
 The grandest theme for mind to range over is life, 
 sweet life, the blossoming breath of God ; the fragrance 
 of which the world has yet to feel in its fullness of 
 exhilerating grandeur. What to man if he gain the 
 whole world and lose his own soul in the pursuit of so 
 nefarious a business ? What can the world be to human- 
 ity if its soul-life in the heart pulsing of universal 
 brotherhood be turned to sordid avarice, wearing the 
 cap of mammon, and bowing to the surface king of 
 materialistic shadowing ? What is man but a God in 
 embryo, not capable when full toned in moral and in- 
 tellectual integrity to say, " I own one dollar in the 
 bickering house of worldly finance, that shapes itself to 
 the growth of mind in matter, or the spirituality in the 
 growing heart of a national civilization that cannot 
 place a finger of ownership on anything in nature that 
 belongs in spirituality of a national or broadcast God- 
 ism. 
 
 Man is a fool to take a fool's stand, and weigh a 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 149 
 
 fool's weight in the scales of intellectual science, that 
 always drop bar at the fullness of spiritual weight, and 
 weighs men and women, worlds and systems of worlds 
 with an eveness and surety of natural purpose that 
 cannot leave a doubt in the mind of a thinker regard- 
 ing the truthfulness of cause and effect, and its justice 
 poise in the bosom of a spiritual eliminator — a God if 
 you will — but a God in the love nest of inverse 
 traversing. Man must feel this all pervading love, this 
 well spring of happiness that swallows up all selfish- 
 ness, leaving the mind free and God-like, and in its 
 richness of building talent. God and man are one in 
 love, one in the divinity of purpose, one in the solution 
 of life's mysteries, one in the defence of truth, and one 
 for time and eternity ; at birth and in death the one 
 love cord draws to centre gravity and motion all 
 abiding is love, all cherishing and protecting in its 
 heart-beat of motion, and is the ever filling fountain 
 where sinners loose their guilty stains and find redeem- 
 ing care. 
 
 God bless the world for its missionary spirit that has 
 wrought redeeming grace wherever its love has taken 
 root in the active duties and details of every day life, 
 the only life we are sure of, and the only life we can 
 master to advantage and make sure of its results. I 
 never done a deed in my life, good, bad or indifferent, 
 but what its present status of worth placed my soul in 
 
150 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 the concordant element of agreement or disagreement 
 with its reflex action on growth and approvement of 
 conscience. 
 
 Hudibras steeped his soul in the fumes of never 
 ending doubt and labored to establish truths he could 
 pick flaws with, to protect his genius and absolve his 
 soul from idleness. Hudibras' theory is as old as God, 
 and lives to-day in the demarcation of falsity and truth, 
 good and evil as paramount counters for time and 
 eternity. 
 
 We cannot cris-cross a principle with any degree of 
 satisfaction or hope of covering it up, for God has em- 
 paneled a jury of feelers to detect the synthony of its 
 appeal and the fineness of its touch, and therefore the 
 word of God is less than the principle, which gave light 
 to the word, making a show and glitter over a truth 
 which it is trying to obscure from the light of reason. 
 Geology is a grander study than the word of God, for 
 Geology is a primate from the bosom of a living princi- 
 ple, and cannot be gainsayed or placed in the brain as 
 a doubt, unless we doubt all fundamental principle, and 
 count the world as a shadow, or a myth, before the 
 function of reason and cultured understanding. Geo- 
 logy lifts a head of might and absolute right before 
 Grecian history ; the " I Am " of supernatural pilfering 
 before the Mahomedan zephyr of God in the disguise 
 of solar friction, catering man-like to caste, color and 
 
TEE LESSONS OF TEE AGES. 151 
 
 finance. Geology stands before the upright endorse- 
 ment of man before God found a name in history, or 
 appealed for name or statue. Geology is the base 
 brain where system finds its evolving spirit that presses 
 to the front for progressive unfoldment, as a leaf from 
 a bud, a bud from a twig, a twig from a limb, a limb 
 from a tree, and a tree from the strata house of geolog- 
 ical keepsakes, that holds God as the spirit of elimina- 
 tion, but with any other name would serve all things as 
 well. 
 
 While we seek amidst earth's treasures, 
 
 Find we Ged in fullest measures ; 
 
 find the alpha and omega of all systemed work ; find 
 that God is growing with humanity, is part and parcel 
 of humanity, and never will change unless humanity 
 changes, which must be on the love side of motion to 
 build a temple of human strength with Godly purpose, 
 worthy of the kingdom of heaven, whose base will 
 always rest on the bottom shores of time, where in- 
 stinct and reason cope with the power of inspiration to 
 build Gods Continually, least the old one become 
 obsolete, and no longer serviceable as the top-light 
 guiding humanity to better prospects, from a better un- 
 derstanding of heaven and hell, twin sisters for time and 
 eternity, doing their work evenly, harmoniously and in 
 accord with nature's divine revealments to man. Man 
 is nature's work, and God comes under the same law 
 
152 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 of natural order, and cannot gainsay the equilibrium of 
 united principle and action, that go hand in hand for 
 duty and accountability. 
 
 If amid life's growing mission 
 We are stranded on life's sea, 
 
 God and nature hold ambition 
 For what is, and is to be. 
 
 And, struggle which ever way we will, the bond of 
 forensic law holds us firm to natural order and peace 
 with God. Therefore let us rest in the arc of divine 
 wisdom ; let nature hold us by the firm hand of 
 accountability, and find no flaws in us when we live 
 true to her mission. 
 
 The lessons of each age have taught us more wisdom, 
 have taught us the grandeur of change, the beauty of 
 effort to get nearer to the centre light of liberalization, 
 the fallen star that crowns where it conquers, and leads 
 the mind to willingness and obedience to search for 
 truth in whatever channel it may be found to lead us 
 evenly to the realm of a natural glory which is satis- 
 faction as the result of our labor. 
 
 We see to-day the shimmering lights from off the 
 altar of spiritual harmonies ; and earth must listen for 
 the voicing that follows in the wake of advancing 
 thought, and will seriously disturb the setting hen of 
 ministerial popularity, struggling to maintain the old 
 nest egg of heathen idolatry ; but the whip of common 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 153 
 
 sense, aided by the light of spirit communion, is doing 
 its work most effectually, and the funeral procession of 
 old orthodoxy is passing gradually by, while the mourn- 
 ers take their seats in the new church of Free Thought, 
 with a perfect content and a smile that the old dogma 
 of hell-fire has burned itself to ashes by its corruption 
 of principle and worldliness of methodical dealing with 
 nations and individuals. 
 
 We are told in spirit life that the hour-hand of pro- 
 gress is sadly disturbing the Jesuits, and there is likely 
 to be a war in heaven, but the mustering process must 
 take place on earth, where freedom is lifting her torch 
 for reconstruction, and, if war ensues, every depart- 
 ment of the world's dishonest motive power will be 
 searched out, and its terminus of action shall surely be 
 reached and dealt with according to the growth and 
 force of the world's spirit, aided by the co-operation of 
 spirits out of prison, laboring to establish a monarchy 
 in the freedom and justice of the world's people, that 
 the spirit world so much in expression may be even 
 handed and one in purpose with the workings of earth. 
 
 Spirit communion must at length drift out of its one- 
 handed game, where the dollar fixes the type of its 
 origin, and places the medium by the ghoul of dishonest 
 bickering that loses the sacredness of its mission by 
 its treading on the heels of orthodoxy, with its show of 
 heavenly truths on the basis of a money corruption ; 
 
154 THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 
 
 and thus the world's mediums are forced into this net 
 of money power, and drawn to the shore of rank 
 materialism, where its spiritual spring is almost hid 
 from sight and hearing by the selfishness of the world 
 they cannot beat against and retain the respectability 
 of its monied umpire. 
 
 When will the world protect its mediums with love ? 
 letting the money come as a natural consequence to 
 foster the tru f h which is trying to express itself, that 
 all may be bettered and made happy by the return of 
 the angels under a new bond of friendship and protect- 
 ing care. I have worked largely with mediums of time, 
 for knowing all the truth, I have been anxious to give 
 it to all ; and I have found that the circumstances and 
 conditions surrounding each one have dwarfed my 
 efforts, and made lame my endeavors to give my best 
 thoughts to the world ; but time is more lenient than 
 in by gone days, and therefore hope blends with my 
 every triumph, and I am sure to be recognized and 
 held by the hand of friendship and former love. 
 
 So dear to my heart is my mission of duty that I 
 must claim the right to confiscate individual primates, 
 and unite in harmony the forces that I need to make 
 standard sequence before the bar of the world's judg- 
 ment and truthful approval. I want no squirming to 
 parti spirit or factional gain ground, but I want the fact 
 of my reappearance established on the firm basis of the 
 
THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 155 
 
 knowledge which I obtained in Jupiter to reinstate my- 
 self under the right blending of spirit with matter, with 
 the semblance of flesh and blood, and hold firm to that 
 attitude as long as centre gravity can cling to the ele- 
 ments at work and become a dissolving view, when 
 necessary to the welfare of spirit and mortal, or 
 mortals, as the case may be. 
 
 I must try my skill at reconstruction ; and if I fail, I 
 fail on the road to knowledge, and must therefore beg 
 the world to excuse me for trying to prove my immor- 
 tality in the face and eyes of my olden infidelity, run- 
 ning counter to church fellowship, and placed me in 
 the seething box of public condemnation, to find, if I 
 could, one star of hope to light my weary soul beyond 
 the portals of the tomb. I know that I am a scape- 
 goat from the confines of creed, but I am head and 
 shoulders above creed in my light-house of individual 
 freedom to work for humanity and the indwelling spirit 
 of progress, with the ultimate recovery from sin. 
 
 I challenge any minister on earth to-day to prove the 
 immortality of the soul from the utterings of the Bible. 
 Challenge the wisdom of the world to prove that 
 Christ's mission was anything but a spiritual mission 
 to prove his identity and resurrection under the forces 
 of natural law, and to prove also that flesh and blood 
 could not enter the kingdom of heaven, but that mind 
 
156 THE LESSONS OF THE AGES. 
 
 could formulate a relationary atmosphere by the use of 
 mortal help to reappear in tangible conformity to its 
 past condition of individual materiality, and therefore 
 support by actual demonstration his saying that : 
 " If I go from your midst I will surely come again." 
 Now if it was proved eighteen hundred years ago 
 to the world's satisfaction that Christ stood on the 
 mount of transfiguration, meaning spiritual attain- 
 ment, and proved himself free from death, the cir- 
 cumstance also proves that I am under the same 
 law with Christ, and can use the Christ method, when 
 supported by the right mediumistic element, as he 
 surely was ; and every other returned messenger has 
 found the helping hand on earth to bring the glad 
 tidings of great joy, which is life everlasting and in 
 harmony of divine action to spirits in the bond house 
 of clay. 
 
 I only know that Christ materialized from the fact 
 that I possess the same qualifications myself, and must 
 prove it to make it a truth in history, and therefore a 
 fact in science. Jesus' fact contained the whole scope 
 of Bible service to the world, and is the star crowning 
 the history of Greek mythology ; the illerate literature 
 that proves nothing but ignorance and darkened con- 
 dition from that same cause. 
 
 My hemisphere of action is about drawing to a 
 
THE LESS OX S OF THE AGES. 157 
 
 close in the embodiment of thought in book form 
 with this instrument of control. But I hope the world 
 will enlarge on its basis of friendship, and meet me in 
 materialization, if I still cling to the fact of a natural 
 salvation, primated in God and nature, or divine pur- 
 pose and scientific skill, which holds me beyond the 
 power of any deceptive work, and all the fraudulent 
 designs of earth cannot pinch back my golden medal 
 of spiritual life. 
 
 Therefore, friends of earth, farewell for a time, as I 
 shall surely follow on the lead of these lessons, and 
 claim myself a resurrected man, with nothing but love 
 for humanity and truth for God, nothing but life to 
 return with, circumstance to control, good to accom- 
 plish, and that peace to restore which Christ tried to 
 leave with the people, but failed for lack of confidence 
 on the part of the people ; but now confidence is being 
 restored, and Christ's method of reincarnation is being 
 understood and pinned to the foretop of reason, where 
 its consistency with natural order and intelligent 
 thought must find the mystery of life's workings and 
 harmony of movement. 
 
 So great is God, so glorious and so true, I would not 
 doubt the mission of such grandeured a power. I 
 would not change the death scene ; would not bring my 
 mind to shudder at one single mandate from an all 
 
158 THE LESS ON S OF THE AGES. 
 
 wise potent being that hangs a jeweled hold upon the 
 orb of space, and rocks in cradled mystery the sun- 
 tide beat of love and life. 
 
 I would not rake amidst the embers of the past 
 To find the olden Britton of my future fame, 
 But I would stand again on earth, a spirit man, 
 And claim anew my olden name ; 
 
 And count my work but feebly done 
 Unless I have the whole world won. 
 
 Theodore Parker. 
 
 Earth's finale is to be the golden wedding with 
 eternity. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 IS SPIRITUALISM A REFORM IN ITS TENDENCY OF 
 MOVEMENT ? 
 
 Many are asking : What has Spiritualism done as a 
 purifier and perfector of the human soul after a 
 sourjourn of thirty-four years, in a world whose suction 
 quill of evangelical hope had been attached to the 
 Bible, and found it wanting in strength of demonstra- 
 tive evidence to satisfy the growing need of the nine- 
 teenth century ? What has Spiritualism done to make 
 life better, humanity grander, and God understood with 
 its light of life over the sheer darkness of the past? 
 Has it succored more of the needy than the churches ? 
 Has it broadened a platform of charity, killed the ser- 
 pent of selfishness, sent out the tiger of reform, carrying 
 the love taper of a more spiritual afflatus to delve 
 deeper in the human heart to find the casta deva of 
 immortal worth, the soul function that God and Spirit- 
 ualism are holding before the crib of ancient material- 
 ism ? Has it done all this with its golden medal of 
 truth attached to the key of a broad progressive life ? 
 Has it bound Satan with a bright cord of love, at- 
 tached to the brain-work of common sense, and fast- 
 
160 APPENDIX. 
 
 ened to the growing key of education ? Has it said 
 clown with the traitor, priest-craft, and up with the blue 
 flag of spiritual liberty, which must wave over all the 
 broadening issues of life ; and men and women must 
 join hands and hearts for a work of love, unselfish 
 Christ permeated, holding Christianity out to the world, 
 free and untrammeled, without even the attachment of 
 an ism to stay its progress or cramp its influence ? 
 
 Spiritualism means everything or nothing — means 
 all of God and science as well — means spirit above 
 matter, therefore upholding matter by the shrewd cord 
 of elongation that attaches to both spirit and matter, 
 if indeed there is a separation distinct from a purpose 
 in the science of Almighty law. 
 
 Spiritualism is either a graft of a better fruit on to 
 the old tree of orthodoxy, or it is a finality in the science 
 of life proper, and cannot be gainsayed, overcome, or 
 placed in the pool of the world's unbelief, but must in 
 perforce of its claims become the tree of knowledge, 
 placed in the broadening garden of the human mind, 
 that it may base its knowledge of human life on facts 
 gained from no ism, but from a mastery of science in 
 her vastness of conception and ideality of purpose, in 
 bringing back our loved and gone. 
 
 Spiritualism must not rest as an ism — must not 
 cling to its tests as a finality, in whatever shape or 
 coloring they may assume, but must delve with its 
 
APPENDIX. 161 
 
 lever of living strength to reach all the God there is, 
 ever was or can be — and that is the love God of 
 scientific principle immersed in the human heart, to 
 bring God to a complete understanding when reason 
 studies from cause to effect, and angels bring their 
 credentials of unlimited power, and the world sees 
 the rottenness of its selfishness and ungodlike pro- 
 ceedings. 
 
 The churches have worked under the light of faith, 
 and have done many charitable deeds for the needy of 
 their fold that would put to shame the works of those 
 claiming to have the knowledge of the most beautiful 
 truth that could bless the soul of man, and should 
 from its force of beauty awaken every soul in posses- 
 sion of its great privilege — awaken it to the grandeur 
 of its action and sublimity of a love purpose that must 
 strengthen human hearts, and invite God to witness his 
 works on earth ; and that every soul may realize the 
 fact that beautiful homes are only builded in the at- 
 mosphere of outflowing and unselfish demonstrations, 
 of spirits out of prison, that must eventually make 
 more of reform than a sound, or a piping to create a 
 monopoly for selfish scheming and money encompass- 
 ment. Reform in its true sense is the base principle 
 of God — the mill that grinds slowly but sure, exceed- 
 ingly sure — and will top-light the world when love 
 says to money, you are a usurper if you claim to do 
 
162 APPENDIX. 
 
 anything but God's work — claim anything but your 
 right to liberate, educate and make happy the human 
 heart, which is God's temple for reconstruction, and is 
 an orb in space and a world in motion, and must ever 
 draw on the exchequer of earth to elongate the princi- 
 ple of humanitarianism as broad as God and old as 
 science, or as broad as love and old as equation : the 
 pillar on which rests the science of world building. 
 Love must yet assume the consequence of money, and 
 do the work God intended — foreordained — a fact in 
 the law of justice, and a star in the Galaxy of mental 
 motion, and must shine in its fullnes of glory over 
 every soul-cry reaching for light to make better con- 
 ditions. Spiritualism must mean more than a tune of 
 melody from the angels, to prepare us for a glory that 
 we have never worked out while yet in the form. Oh, 
 no, friends of time, Spiritualism means head and soul 
 endeavor to elongate good by the force of human need 
 through the soul light of revealed religion. I tried to 
 do my work in Boston and elsewhere free from the 
 thraldom of an ism or creed, but found that the black- 
 mail of rampant sectarianism would not let me suffer 
 for my own legitimate folly, but punctured me with the 
 church quill of disapproval, until my soul cried out for 
 more religion, or less of God, as seen in the burning 
 bush of Mosaic reign and heathen tendency. 
 
 I heard my medium say today that if Theodore 
 
APPENDIX. 163 
 
 Parker were to materialize here in Boston, he would 
 find the sentiment and expression of the people very 
 different from what it was when he stood with declining 
 health before the minds he was seeking to feed with 
 the fresher grains of a more spiritual truth, and I said 
 in my soul : " Amen ; your heart of confidence is un- 
 bounded in Theodore Parker's soul of honest purpose," 
 and I feel that I must speak from a newer form, and 
 from a broader platform of knowledge, and feel myself 
 safe within church or out, as the case may be of pre- 
 sentation. So much for the growing liberty of thought, 
 that will open the way for my reappearance, and pro- 
 claim the spirit's mission in its orbit of scientific 
 evolvement. My mind can never capsize or go under 
 a deluge of darkness where God will fail to claim his 
 own. 
 
 Spiritualism has crowned herself with a voice from 
 heaven, and now let us, in and out of the form, work 
 in harmony with the voicings that proclaim the sup- 
 posed dead well cared for, and under the banner of a 
 broadening love principle, while our duty and care is 
 with the sufferers of earth, in their physical and mental 
 disabilities. 
 
 The world holds enough for all, and the unfoldment 
 of the spirit will bring all there is in the earth to man's 
 receptive faculties, and he must see that labor is greater 
 than money ; that money as an end is a devil at bay, 
 
164 APPENDIX. 
 
 ever howling at the, Get more within, without a thought 
 or care of how many may suffer from the unholy gain 
 of the miser spirit that shows to-day in every financial 
 department of the world's dealing. 
 
 How long, oh ! how long will the spirit cry for equal- 
 ity, and for love, — before protector of money — until 
 it can assume the full status and consequence of illegal 
 power, the deadening fetus that creates the worm that 
 never dies, and if allowed scope will eat away the 
 spirit of the living God, established at the forum of all 
 conceivement, bearing its mission meekly, with but four 
 letters to sound its title clear, to work ahead of any 
 other known power in heaven or on earth. Love, like 
 a monarch, will build a larger corporation of individual 
 interest than money ever dare to assume, unaided by 
 the legal responsibility of love, and will assume more 
 territory when men and women say : Get thee behind 
 me Satan, thou money God. I would let the sweet 
 spirit of love speak to my heart and fulminate a pur- 
 pose of labor that angels can voice heaven with, and 
 feel a refrain of approval. 
 
 God sought to do the best with truth, 
 But found old age still clung to youth, 
 And that the power of love's full reign 
 Would be unblessed, till freedom gained 
 Her right to bring the human soul 
 Under the sway of love's control, 
 
APPENDIX. 165 
 
 And make the finance of the land 
 
 Bend at the will of love's command ; 
 
 That will in time see banking schemes, 
 
 The full effect of devils' dreams, 
 
 That had no better work to do 
 
 Than taking one and counting two, 
 
 And felt no shivering at their toes, 
 
 But merely stopped to blow their nose, 
 
 And in an off-hand, careless way 
 
 Says, there's a bonus now to pay ; 
 
 And when you've cancelled all your money 
 
 You'll find you have been caught with honey, 
 
 And we're the bees within the hive 
 
 That do men of their money shrive, 
 
 For fear the miser in the soul 
 
 Might get at last too strong a hold, 
 
 Counting his money as his God, 
 
 And yet not worth one heart-felt sob, 
 
 That reaches to the heart of others 
 
 And loving says : we're sisters, brothers ; 
 
 And God holds justice by the hand, 
 
 Sustained in full by angel band, 
 
 And in the growing light of truth 
 
 Old age must clear herself from youth, 
 
 And in her rough Old money suit 
 
 Must stand a power entirely mute ; 
 
 While love and labor join heart and hand 
 
 For a broadening work throughout the land. 
 
 Spiritualism as an ism is in a bankrupt condition, 
 claiming to do more than it performs — claiming to 
 
166 APPENDIX. 
 
 make hearts happy and homes secure by its great lati- 
 tude of love-talk, that we do not see in any quarter of 
 the globe acted out to make security of living from the 
 principles claiming the ism. I hope in another half 
 dozen of years Spiritualism will popularize itself by 
 doing something worthy of its advent and truth-seeking 
 purpose, if it is nothing more than to colonize for the 
 demonstrations, that are only awaiting the movement 
 of earth to harmonize in band communities for a work 
 and love feast with the angels. The truth, aided by 
 light, will make free and enlarge our spiritual vision 
 that the fact may become apparent to all that there can 
 be no claimship to land, no monoply of money, no 
 starving poor, no ungodly rich that believe in the sur- 
 vival of a democratic money government, that would 
 tread on the heels of Old Europe, causing her prophecy 
 to become true, that America would lean to a money 
 power before the decade of the nineteenth century, 
 but did not see, and therefore could not prophesy that 
 the angel world would lash this money God until justice 
 was restored and men learn the falsity of their position, 
 and were willing to surrender old money bags, at the 
 Sumpter of a nation's honor, that will hold its own in 
 the scales of the world's progress. Spiritualism must 
 reform herself before she is in the possession of the 
 capacity to reform any other ism or set of isms that 
 are trying their best to steer ahead with as little of 
 
APPENDIX 167 
 
 hell-fire as they can save sinners from, and reach 
 heaven with. The churches contain better mediums 
 to-day than the ranks of Spiritualism. You ask how 
 that can be? — simply because they are protected. 
 Their religion claims for them a home. Remember, 
 the Church contains a Beecher, and has covered a 
 Thomas, a Wilberforce, a Channing and a Chapin, 
 and I might cite many a mediumistic light that has 
 gone down under the friendly cover of church and 
 creed — and through that friendship and protecting 
 care have these mediums grown strong and able dis- 
 seminators of the truths entrusted with them. There 
 are but few speakers in the ranks of Spiritualism that 
 can hold firm footing and reliable sequence in the 
 avenues open for their reception : simply because there 
 is no protection in the ism, or the spirit displayed to- 
 wards sensatives or those undergoing development. 
 
 Plymouth Church has made its Beecher — the love 
 element from such a body of disciples gave to the man 
 the power of his bearing and the magnetism of his 
 presence and utterances that have cleared many a soul 
 from the fetich of hell-fire, and through that upholding 
 power of love has he become a disintegrater and 
 leader ; and will eventually stand as free as his ges- 
 tures proclaim him to be. 
 
 The shoulders of time are loaded with errors, sin 
 marks of depraved conditions, that should have been 
 
168 APPENDIX. 
 
 in a measure obliterated, if the churches were doing 
 the best that could be done with their religion at top- 
 mast and above board ; a position that Spiritualism 
 must take to do her work evenly and well. We want 
 no hiding lights — no skimming round this modern 
 glory with eyes half shut, and ears refusing to hear 
 anything about it, if policy is the governing motive to 
 the would be hider from truth. Let us have earnest 
 work, and plenty of it, in the right and true direction. 
 Let us see if the advent of Spiritualism and its pro- 
 gressive unfoldments will meddle with and help to 
 destroy this liquid crater of hell-fire, the intoxicating 
 beverages that are destroying the manhood of the 
 nation. Let us see if women will become leaders, if 
 necessary, and with their mother hearts plead as for 
 their lives for the modification and thorough reforma- 
 tion of this liquor traffic, that needs a scourging from 
 the best efforts of noble men and women, who must 
 see the ruin it is causing from its free and unchecked 
 license, and woe be unto the idlers in the broad fields 
 of the world's commune — be they creedists or free 
 and enlightened thinkers ; all are responsible for the 
 bivouac of a monster so dreaded by mothers, sisters 
 and wives of the land ; and men who are strong to 
 battle against its temptation shudder in contemplation 
 of its increasing strength and power. Will Spiritual- 
 ists lift a voice to stay its ubiquity of motion and legal 
 
APPENDIX. 169 
 
 position, and thereby show something that Spiritualism 
 has done for humanity's benefit, notwithstanding the 
 cry : What has it done to show its heavenly origin and 
 beneficence of purpose toward's spiritualizing earthly 
 conditions, that the love-star of hope may shine with a 
 newer lustre, and hearts be welded together for a work 
 of duty which must ever be a loving and fascinating 
 service, from which the soul grows strong and God-like. 
 Why, in all these years of Church democrary and 
 flooded power, if they possessed the working and true 
 spirit of Christ that their religion is labeled with, why 
 has our police force gained in numbers, and harden- 
 ing of clubs, in every city in the land, whose reaching 
 spires proclaim modern Christianity, and which should 
 be able with its Spurgeon-like strength to lessen the 
 necessity of policemen carrying weapons of heathen- 
 like proclivities, but which do not grace the walks of 
 heathen life, owing to their spirit of frendship and 
 courtesy, two love links that should unite the interests 
 of all nations, making a brother and sisterhood of 
 principles that would in time make whole the human 
 heart, and then people could walk free and unmolested 
 in country and city, in midday or darkest night, for the 
 angel of love would ever be the presiding picket on 
 duty ; and angel forces would be as tangible as the 
 sunshine and rain beats of earthly expectation and 
 reality. 
 
170 APPEXDIX. 
 
 At present there is a wide amount of talk in regard 
 to homes for poor and disabled mediums, that need 
 the protecting care of a home, after serving the public 
 with the best they had from spirit life, and perhaps 
 receiving in return a sneer and pittance that would 
 imply beggary, stamped with a gift mark from heaven, 
 and which the world is doubtful about, and not willing 
 to pay for, for fear they might be classed with the 
 Spiritualists, and felt willing to pay tithes for a peep at 
 the other side of life — or perhaps selfishness stays the 
 current of sympathy, and what seems to be every- 
 body's business finally results in nobody's ; and thus 
 one after another sister or brother goes down into the 
 uncertainty of the world's protection, becoming reck- 
 less, wishing for death, and yet afraid to die. Ah, 
 world, these are some of the conditions you give to 
 your workers, and offer to the angels, expecting the 
 full bloom of spiritual truth shall be offered unto you, 
 which never can be until your mind is willing to act in 
 freedom and love. We in spirit life hope that homes 
 for all of earth's needy may be built on a broader 
 foundation of solid principles than now, and what goes 
 before the public as homes for the needy and unpro- 
 tected may be true in the constitutional principle and 
 effort to be free to those not possessing means or in- 
 fluence. It would seem at the present that all human- 
 itarian objects and reforms in the ranks of the would 
 
APPENDIX. 171 
 
 be liberators and reformers are so shabby and un- 
 reliable that thinking people are wondering why these 
 voicings from heaven do not make people more truth- 
 ful, honest and therefore reliable, more sympathetic, 
 loving and kind, more protecting in their circum- 
 ference of influence and dealings with life's duties. 
 Why are Spiritualists so idle about these all important 
 questions of reform ? Why start institutions implying 
 to the public and the weary hopers for something good 
 and true that will meet and fill their condition of wants, 
 on a near approach to, and familiarity with, find that 
 the public is humbugged, and the sufferers made to feel 
 their dependence and want of a money friendship ? 
 Why is Boston idle in this matter of a spiritualized 
 home ? the hub where isms have flourished, and 
 talk has found embodiment in the classified bond of 
 creed, and many a noble work has found important 
 foothold and elaboration, while thousands have been 
 cared for and benefitted therefrom. What have the 
 Spiritualists of Boston to show with their claim of 
 spiritual enlightment as a free institution of benevo- 
 lence and growing power, supported by an organized 
 interest to do a humanitarian work, and not pauperize 
 the term Spiritualism as in and about the good old hub 
 that winds the spiritualistic element around its shaft of 
 uprising power? Let Spiritualism crown herself with 
 a home that will be a blessing to Boston — a Bethesda 
 
172 APPENDIX. 
 
 of spiritual moment, that will strike every beholder 
 with the truth of its claim, where healing will be done 
 through the power of love, and where sympathy will be 
 the golden shield that will protect the crown of its 
 offering. 
 
 Spiritualists homes, under the government and con- 
 trol of the Spiritualist at work, are too poorly clad 
 with the aura of friendship, and too purse poor in or- 
 ganized ability to form a standard and growing institu- 
 tion, where all branches of industry might be carried 
 on under the significance of healing to mind and body. 
 The mind needs to be in a flourishing and happy con- 
 dition before the body can awaken from stupor and 
 inaction, and take part in its resurrection from decay 
 while yet stamped with life. There should be a band 
 of healers in every institution that offers healing to the 
 world, and the band should throw its force, united with 
 its spirit-force, around the sensitive seeking help; all 
 jealously should be kept at bay ; all feeling of antagon- 
 ism should be stultified and not allowed to grow, while 
 harmony must be the brass band to usher in the pow- 
 er of inspiration — the healing afflatus that makes 
 whole the soul and body. Barking never hurts a dog, 
 but is warning of the dog's presence ; and so this talking 
 of reforms shows that the spirit is in the atmosphere, 
 and must awaken from its talking condition to take 
 part in active duty and work. Every human soul has 
 
APPENDIX. 173 
 
 its mission to perform, and sooner or later it realizes 
 the fact, and also realizes that it is better to do its 
 earth mission while in the body than to be forced to 
 return in spirit and labor through other people's 
 idiosyncrasies. Those in earth life who live in the 
 sphere of duty and accountability of purpose and 
 action live nearest to the equation of science, live 
 nearest to the Deity in embryotic condition, and live in 
 the high-toned atmosphere of purity and Godly endorse- 
 ment of growth and accountability. Of course Spiritual- 
 ism must learn to walk before it can climb, its modern 
 childhood is past the age of thirty years, and we are 
 now looking for its chosen occupation as the result of 
 its educational process and wonderful achievements of 
 mind followers. We hope it will take no long rest, but 
 will be active and strongly imbued with the spirit of a 
 true redeemer, Christ purified, Christ gifted with love, 
 and Christly transfigured before every citadel of want 
 that holds the key of progress ; and we hope that 
 Spiritualism will boast of something besides its tests. 
 Those buds of promise have in a measure served 
 their purpose ; and people on earth must now help the 
 angels to do a broad and beneficent work. 
 
 It is well understood in spirit life, and felt to the 
 heart's core in earth life, that the government of the 
 united umpire of America, and also old Britton's de- 
 vastation of rule, must come under the scathing power 
 
174 APPENDIX. 
 
 of Almighty justice. One soul cry is as good as a 
 thousand heart throbs of anguish to know that there 
 is something rotten in the denmarks, and the stench 
 must be removed, that every soul bearing responsibility 
 may breathe free and pure. Every person must be 
 protected, loved and cared for ; every child educated, 
 fondled, made happy and accepted by the world as 
 everybody's child, to help God with, and thereby re- 
 move Satan, whose power is so keenly felt at present, 
 and which the educated world are ashamed of, and 
 secretly wonder what can be done to stay this marching 
 fiend, treading in all the money marts of the world's 
 corporation. What can be done to bring the angels 
 nearer — humanity more loved, blessed and protected ? 
 God understood and put in the right place, Satan 
 caged and held by the lock of reason, and spiritual 
 growth established beyond a doubt. What can be 
 done to bring about all these good things ? Why, this 
 can be done, must be done, and will be through the 
 ranging of spiritual light, through corporated and 
 individual efforts to hasten God's day of resurrection 
 on earth, when the spirit of man detects the wrongs of 
 a government that can cripple one human soul, and 
 bare its breast of honor to fight to the death the treason 
 foe to a nation's unity and progress. Spiritualism must 
 do God's work, because it is in and of God — the second 
 comming of mediumistic light that will escape the 
 
APPENDIX. 175 
 
 crucifixion of its umpire to save ; and we feel like say- 
 ing, Ho ! ye harvesters and saviours on earth, do your 
 work well, for the hour is at hand when the record will 
 be shown. What has Spiritualism done to make reforms 
 the speaking voice of God, moving to action the soul 
 of the universe — humanity in motion and union of 
 power and purpose ? There is no use of asking God 
 to do the work that has been given unto us to do ; and 
 if we fail to do it we are held accountable for our 
 neglect in complying with the mandate that ye love 
 one another — do good unto those that persecute you, 
 for charity wards off all danger to the spirit, that 
 should be the peace guest in every home and the saun- 
 tering friend ever beside us. 
 
 Let love be the power and might of the soul, 
 
 The true bosom friend that our actions control ; 
 
 The signal to service, the lion in tread, 
 
 Then wherefore, oh friends, can we find aught to dread. 
 
 — Parker. 
 
I