Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 43237-h.htm or 43237-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/43237/43237-h/43237-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/43237/43237-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/spiritland00emmo Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). [Illustration: THE SPIRIT LAND.] THE SPIRIT LAND. by S. B. EMMONS. Philadelphia: John E. Potter and Company. Nos. 614 and 617 Sansom Street. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by L. P. Crown & Co., in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts TO THE READER. This volume is intended as an antidote to a species of errors that have been rife in every age of the Christian church. Notwithstanding the disclosures the Most High made of himself to his ancient people, they were yet prone to turn aside from the worship of the true God, to follow the lying spirits of the prophets of Baal, and other deceivers, from the days of Moses till the destruction of Jerusalem. So, likewise, under the Christian dispensation, there has been a succession of Antichrists, until their name is _legion_, whose teachings have clouded the understandings and blinded the moral perceptions of men, subverting the faith of many whose mountains stood strong, and who had been counted the chosen people of God. The present is viewed as an age of _isms_. Men have run mad, and are chasing phantoms. They are roaming round to find some fulcrum to overturn the church and the Bible; they are imagining they are receiving utterances from heaven, when nothing is uttered but the vain fantasies of their own minds and hearts. It is the grossest fanaticism--fanaticism in its most frightful form, leading its unhappy victims, not unfrequently, to flagrant crimes, and to the most horrid of all--that of self-destruction. These pages are submitted to the public with the counsel of the wisest and best of all ages, that, amid the wily arts of the adversary, we should cling to the word of God, the Bible of our fathers, as the only safe and infallible guide of faith and practice. NOTE.