The doctrine of evolution is not perfected yet, and as to the philosophy of evolution, we are but on the edge of it. The presumptions are threatening, but as yet they are not fatal; conjecture is not certainty.

The vital conviction of mankind is satisfied with itself thus far. It makes no apologies, and few explanations. Its attempts to account for its own existence are not successful; its arguments are commonly weak; its reasonings are so futile that they hardly bear their own weight. You can beat down its guard, and pierce it with deadly wounds, but it will rise with "twenty mortal murders on its crown," and push skepticism from its seat. The more we look into the origin of the belief in conscious immortality, test the supports on which it has been made by its defenders to rest, sift the materials that compose it, scrutinize the characters of the people who entertain it, measure the reach of the anticipation by the minds that cherish it-in a word, sound the reasonableness of the hope, the more we wonder that it should ever have been fostered, that it should ever have taken root. To hold such a belief seems the height of audacity. The visible proofs against it are so numerous and so strong, the improbabilities are antecedently, in the multitude of cases, so overwhelming, and especially in the case of those who hold it most stubbornly,

that its mere existence becomes one of the problems of history. The audacity of the belief favors it; its wildness is its guarantee. Were it more reasonable, it would be more questionable. As the race grows older, more experienced, more thoughtful, the faith seems to lose little of its vitality. The problem retains its interest for the best minds and hearts. It takes on different forms, assumes new phases, presents new aspects, seizes on new materials for its sustenance, but still retains the allegiance of men of all conditions, grades of culture, orders of faculty. It is, apparently, still a cardinal faith.

It asks no special defence, and is self-preserving. It gave birth to Spiritualism, not Spiritualism to it; and it does as much to preserve Spiritualism from the perils that gather about it, perils of delusion, imposture, rant, and cant, witlessness and fanaticism, which set thoughtful minds against it, as Spiritualism does to preserve it from the dangers of skepticism and denial. Men are spiritualists, not because their faith in immortality was dead, but because it was alive. As a rule, it would seem the skeptics in regard to immortality denounce Spiritualism as an imposture. It has given origin to the strangest phantasies-witches, fairies, demons, phantoms, and apparitions; but these, in proportion to their strangeness, attest its power.

They are the frantic efforts to grasp what is intangible.

If there be a religion of humanity, a religion that rests its authentication on the basis which humanity furnishes, draws from humanity its inspiration, consults humanity for its principle, adopts, on the whole, the confession that humanity has most persistently made; if there be a religion of humanity as distinct from a science of humanity, it must make account of such organic beliefs as this, and use them for humanity's welfare. Let science keep them, as far as possible, within the limits of warranted evidence; let philosophy purge them of superstition-make them sober, chastened, reasonable; the time is yet far distant when science will overthrow them, or philosophy take the place of them in the human heart. It is the office of religion to keep them alive, to give them the broadest interpretation, to let their sunlight fall fairly upon the fields of the moral being, to make their animating power felt in all motives to effort, improvement, and elevation. The more we feel the power of the universal moral conviction, the more we believe. The more we identify ourselves with that conviction, the more we have assurance. "Great hopes are for great souls," Martineau teaches. "The noble mind believes in destiny, and admits no doom," Bartol declares. Let us add that the greatest

souls are great through their humanity, and bequeath their great hopes to it; that the noble minds are so only as they express humanity; their nobleness falls back to enrich the common soil from which they grew, and in which every plant and flower of faith has its root.

X.

THE EDUCATION OF CONSCIENCE.

THE

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HE title of this chapter foreshadows its idea. If conscience needs educating it is not the thing that divines have given it out to be. It is not an infallible oracle, "an inward judge," "the voice of God in the soul," "the heavenly witness,' "the eye of God in the breast," "the unerring loadstone,

"Which though it trembles and lowly lies,

Points to the path marked out for us in heaven.”

An infallible oracle needs no instructing; the voice of God needs no articulating; the eye of God needs no brightening. The figure of the magnetic needle, which must be isolated and watched, guarded against foreign attractions, the seductions of the neighboring metal, the local currents of electricity that play around the ship, and can be depended on only when kept true to the magnetic meridian, is beautiful and fascinating as poetry, but inconclusive as argument; for the existence of the magnetic meridian is known as a fact; the properties of the magnetic needle have