Perhaps it may be as well to forestall any misapprehension by stating plainly that I utterly disbelieve, and even regard with intense dislike, all so-called “Spiritualist” manifestations and attempts to recall the dead; and that I have never found any sufficient testimony for stories of ghosts or apparitions of the departed beheld by men and women still in the midst of life. Only at the very moment when we are passing into their arms does it seem to me that the law of our being may permit us to recognize once more the beloved ones who are “not lost, but gone before.” The lines of W. J. Fox precisely express my thought on this subject:-- Call them from the dead! Vain the call must be; But the hand of death shall lay, Like that of Christ, its healing clay On eyes which then shall see That glorious company. FRANCES POWER COBBE. JULY, 1882. CONTENTS. PAGE I. MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM, 11 II. HYGEIOLATRY, 77 III. PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS, 89 IV. ZOOPHILY, 125 V. SACRIFICIAL MEDICINE, 151 VI. THE FITNESS OF WOMEN FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION, 179 VII. THE HOUSE ON THE SHORE OF ETERNITY, 235 VIII. THE PEAK IN DARIEN: THE RIDDLE OF DEATH, 245 MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM. “Be of good cheer, brother!” said John Bradford to his fellow-martyr while the fagots were kindling: “we shall have a brave supper in heaven with the Lord to-night!” “Be of good cheer, everybody!” cry an army of modern confessors, seated in library chairs: “there is no heaven and no Lord, and when we die there will be an end of us all, _in saecula saeculorum_; but the generations who come after us will be greatly edified by our beautiful books and our instructive example.”