29. At tables, moreover, conferences are held, contracts and deeds signed, and decrees, statute-laws, and ordinances are written. Treaties, also, are made at tables, on which not the fate of individuals merely, but of nations, depends. 30. Is the renown of the “knights of the round table” tarnished by their being only known in connection with the word in question? Is any director or trustee ashamed of being, with his colleagues, designated as a “board?”—a humble synonym for table. 31. It was at a table the Declaration of Independence was signed; and in Trumbull’s picture of its presentation to Congress a table is made to occupy a conspicuous position. Our tables should be at least as much objects of our regard as the vicinity of our fireplace. 32. The sarcasms founded on the use of the table in spiritual manifestations proceed, inconsistently, from those persons who would bring their deity through all the stages of human life. 33. The human body of Christ must have gone through all the stages from the embryo to maturity. It was worshipped in a manger, and lived thirty years in obscurity and inaction. Why all this delay, when the angel, armed with the power of God, might have addressed Herod, the Roman emperor, and every other potentate on earth in a single year? The Almighty softening their hearts, as he hardened that of Pharaoh, the conversion of mankind had been the inevitable consequence. 34. Alluding to his second advent, Christ used these words:—“They shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory.” Mark xiii. 26. Wherefore did not his first coming take place in this conspicuous, glorious, and unquestionable manner? 35. It is often inquired, Wherefore were not these efforts to communicate with mankind at an earlier period of the world’s duration? but it may be demanded in return, Wherefore did not Christ come until the earth had been peopled, even according to Scripture, about four thousand years? 36. Why was not the use of the compass, of gunpowder, printing, the steam-engine, steamboat, railway, telegraph, daguerreotyping, electrotyping, contrived earlier in this terrestrial sphere? Let orthodoxy take the beam out of its own eye first. 37. Had Christ taught these arts, they would not only have had a more general influence during the era of their accomplishment, but have left a durable and irrefragable proof of a towering mental superiority. As they would have gone into use, there could have been no question as to their accomplishment; so that every intelligent being might have become intuitively cognizant of their wonderful results. 38. The invention of gunpowder, the telegraph, and the mariner’s compass might have been the means of preventing the inroads of the Goths and Vandals, and, subsequently, the success of the Mohammedans; since the Arabians would hardly have availed themselves of these inventions at the time the Mohammedan conquests were commenced.