nucleus or pivot of a single one. No, no; Spiritualism has not yet produced fruit in the souls of its believers, at all to be compared to those growing on the tree planted on the stony heights of Calvary nearly two thousand years ago! It is, in itself, powerless to supersede a system so infinitely grand and sublime as that founded by the twelve fishermen and their illustrious Lord. Nor is such its mission. Supply and demand wait ever upon each other. The sense of human immortality, in community, the wide world over, had grown dull, vague and indistinct, lulled by the droning music and somnifying humdrum of theology. Churchianity to a great degree had usurped the office and functions of Christianity, and the sense of an hereafter had so nearly died out, that bad advocates of annihilation preached and printed their infernal libels on the corners of the world's highway, and millions began to seriously question wherein man was entitled to what animals were not; while philosophic hucksters still, with quirk and grimace, howled forth "Books proving God a myth, Christ a bastard, the Bible a lie, immortality a lame delusion, and virtue mere nonsense!" And then these peddlers bawled: "What pre-eminence hath a man above a brute? Wherein is he better than the dogs which perish? Who knoweth the Spirit of a man that it goeth upward, or the spirit of a beast that it is blotted out and goeth outward like an extinguished lamp, or downward like a lead to the bottom of—non-entity? Come, buy my books! come, buy my books!"
Surely here was a demand for light upon the tremendous question, 'Are we to be, or not to be, when life's fitful fever is o'er?' Here was a question requiring
