The period required for this dream of material life, embracing its so-called pleasures and pains, to vanish 77:15 from consciousness, "knoweth no man . . . neither the Son, but the Father." This period will be of longer or shorter duration according to the 77:18 tenacity of error. Of what advantage, then, would it be to us, or to the departed, to prolong the material state and so prolong the illusion either of a soul inert or of a sinning, 77:21 suffering sense, - a so-called mind fettered to matter. Progress and purgatory Even if communications from spirits to mortal con- sciousness were possible, such communications would 77:24 grow beautifully less with every advanced stage of existence. The departed would gradually rise above ignorance and materiality, and Spiritualists 77:27 would outgrow their beliefs in material spiritualism. Spiritism consigns the so-called dead to a state resembling that of blighted buds, - to a wretched purgatory, where 77:30 the chances of the departed for improvement narrow into nothing and they return to their old standpoints of matter. Unnatural deflections 78:1 The decaying flower, the blighted bud, the gnarled oak, the ferocious beast, - like the discords of disease, sin, 78:3 and death, - are unnatural. They are the fal- sities of sense, the changing deflections of mor- tal mind; they are not the eternal realities of Mind. Absurd oracles 78:6 How unreasonable is the belief that we are wearing out life and hastening to death, and that at the same time we are communing with immortality! 78:9 If the departed are in rapport with mor- tality, or matter, they are not spiritual, but must still be mortal, sinning, suffering, and dying. Then why 78:12 look to them - even were communication possible - for proofs of immortality, and accept them as oracles? Com- munications gathered from ignorance are pernicious in 78:15 tendency. Spiritualism with its material accompaniments would destroy the supremacy of Spirit. If Spirit pervades all 78:18 space, it needs no material method for the transmission of messages. Spirit needs no wires nor electricity in order to be omnipresent. Spirit intangible 78:21 Spirit is not materially tangible. How then can it communicate with man through electric, material effects? How can the majesty and omnipotence of 78:24 Spirit be lost? God is not in the medley where matter cares for matter, where spiritism makes many gods, and hypnotism and electricity are claimed 78:27 to be the agents of God's government.