The pathway is not wide, and they who pursue it may find themselves at close of life (I am not speaking especially of old age) almost alone. The energies of the spirit have grown by constant exercise, and the soul has grown strong, imparting its vibrations to the body, which has so responded that, one after another, the magnetic links which have held it to the slower progress of the race have snapped asunder. We are far ahead, and the spirit longs for purer air than it can find on earth. We have anticipated all the pains of death. We have endured them in our struggle for the mastery of ourselves. Death now but sets the seal upon our victory, gives us the freedom we have earned, ushers us into the society for which we have prepared ourselves, crowns us heirs of immortality. Now, whether death shall be this happiness or that misery, in either case it will be remembered as a great fact of consciousness, the greatest ever known, and the doctrine that there is no death will never be able to find lodgment in the minds of those who have experienced it. CHAPTER VII. It may be worth our while to inquire how this extremely modern doctrine came into being, and if we can solve the problem, it may reflect light upon the genesis of other doctrines very much older and equally erroneous. There is something so startling, so unexpected, in the phrase, "There is no death," that we are quite safe in assuming that it did not originate in the mind of a mortal. In fact, one would be obliged first to disown his mortality before he could utter it with any consciousness of speaking the truth. If, then, the words have come from the Beyond, it would appear that some super-mundane intelligence has been promulgating error. But let us not be too hasty. Let us remember that in our grandfather's time the great majority of people looked upon death as the termination of existence. It was an impenetrable darkness. Those who claimed to know anything different were so few, and their evidence was so mysterious, as to have a scarcely perceptible effect on this portion of our race. Death had come to mean annihilation, and when the age-long dictum, shutting the two worlds apart, was removed, those spirit-teachers who were commissioned to scatter the darkness were obliged to use expedients. Laying aside their own understanding of the word death, and taking up the erroneous meaning attached to it by those whom they wished to reach, they sent out this incisive denial, There is no death. The paraphrase would be, There is no such death as you believe in, which was the truth, and had the effect of truth upon the minds of those who heard it, lifting them out of the darkness, flashing upon them, light. The word was a medicine of wonderful effect, but it was not intended as a food, and spiritualists of to-day who make it a part of their daily diet are most seriously injured thereby. Who that has ever attended the average séance but can recall the careless trifling, the