But admitting, as all must do, that there is in each individual human organism an intimate and mysterious connection, through the nerves and brain, between the spirit and the senses, the fact that this is the only known connection, direct or indirect, between matter and spirit, seems to me to argue that there is no other perceptible one. For, if there were any such, designed in any way to affect our perceptions, mental, moral, or physical, would it not, in some one of its phases, have been made manifest through all the past ages of the world? That such a connection has never been discovered is proof sufficient that no such was ever intended by the Supreme Being to affect mankind in any way, _unless_ we admit that the spiritual and religious necessities of mankind, and, in fact, the very constitution itself of human spirit, are entirely different from what they have been in the ages gone by, and require not only a different pabulum, but also a different mode of dealing at the hands of the Almighty: in a word, that the very essence of religion is progressive. If these positions be correct, the discussion is narrowed down to the consideration of the relations of the spirit as connected with the organized frame. And this brings us to another very natural deduction. Every schoolboy knows the story of the wonderful clock whose inventor was blinded by the order of his sovereign, that he might not be able to repeat his work for any rival power; and how, many years afterward, when the memory of his person had passed away from those who had known him in his younger days, he groped his way back to the scene of his former labors, and, guided by a lad to the tower which enclosed the already famous work of art, under pretence of listening once more to its chimes, he suddenly, with his scissors, severed a single small wire, and the wonderful performances were closed forever. No artist thereafter could be found to restore the work, for none other than the inventor was acquainted with its mechanism, or could discover the secret of its operation. And so it remained a silent monument to the ingratitude of a sovereign and the revenge of a victim of the most barbarous cruelty. And yet the principle was still there uninjured, and as capable of operation as ever before, yet forever dead to that complicated mechanism, since the single connecting rod was severed which bound the idea to its only means of action--the immaterial to the material--the soul to the body. The mechanism too was as perfect as ever, in all its constituent parts, but forever silent and inoperative from lack of connection with the idea upon which it depended. Side by side lay the principle and its means of manifestation, separated only by the infinitesimal portion of space which divided the parts of the broken wire, yet as effectually separated as if worlds had rolled between them. Unite again these slender fragments, and both would again spring to life, unimpaired in their