"The preacher lives in comfortable indolence because of the ignorance and superstition of the people. His office is one of hypocrisy and fraud. Hypocrisy, because if he is not a fool, he knows his teachings are not true, and of fraud, because by dissembling he extorts from his parishoners a dishonorable subsistence. When the people grow sufficiently wise they will be taught by the denizens of the spirit world truth and righteousness. Then the mission or office of the sacerdotal gentlemen will be closed, and they can seek employment in the many more honorable occupations. The politician, cunning and subtle, swims along smoothly upon the rolling current of the credulity of the people and his own duplicity. He prospers because you have not as yet grown into full political manhood, and he succeeds in hoodwinking you with the belief that his heart is overflowing with patriotism and anxious solicitude for the public weal. But I must leave this class--the politicians--to the tender mercies of several gentlemen who are waiting the opportunity to contribute their part to your enterprise. "April 28. The coarse food necessary for you in order to keep up the crude materiality of which your physical make-up is composed, is not needed by the denizens of Mars. In the composition of your physical bodies is a representative of all the material elements in nature--iron, calcium, wood, earth, etc.--and it is easily demonstrated by microscopic inspection and chemical analysis, that in every drop of blood in the human system all these varied and numerous elements are represented. Hence man may be safely considered a microcosm, or nature in her vast domain, reflected in miniature. But you still exist in the realm of the crude, and yet you are vastly more refined than in the ages past, and forward, onward, and upward is the line of march marked out for you by the infinitely wise director of all things. On the planet Mars no animal food is used, because among other reasons the physical properties of the body do not require the elements of animal flesh to replace nature's wastes. Thousands of former species of animals have become extinct, swallowed up in the ever surging maelstrom of progression or absorbed in the higher forms. Vegetation in the planet Mars is quite different, both in expression or appearance, and constituent composition from the vegetation of your planet. Here the aroma residing in the vegetable and escaping therefrom, is largely absorbed and neutralized by the grossness of the vegetable itself, while on Mars the grossness has become so diminished that to the senses the aroma has almost become tangibly objective, and this aroma is food strengthening and invigorating, is nearly sufficient of itself to support existence in the form without the assistance of the more substantial fibers of the parent vegetable. Yet in a certain prepared form the substantial material is used. The time is not very far distant, as I am assured, when the people