The age is indifferent, syncretic, and disposed to accept all religions and superstitions as true under certain aspects, and as false under others, and to pronounce one about as good and about as bad as another. The spirits, therefore, make no direct war on any of them. In some places they teach that the Catholic Church is the truest and best of prevailing religions, but that Protestantism is nevertheless a safe way of salvation, and that the spirits do not, in the other world, think so much about differences of churches and creeds, as they did when in this world. In other places they teach that the Catholic Church is false; that it is wicked, the enemy of moral and social progress, and that effectual means should be taken to prevent its extension in the United States. They do not deny the Bible, nor affirm its inspiration, but take, to a great extent, the neological view of it, conceding it to be truthful in many respects, but maintaining it to be unreliable in others. It was very well when men had nothing better, and no surer means of information in regard to the spirit-world. Such is a brief outline of the new religion, which was intended to supplant Christianity, and to open the way for that “good time a coming,” for which all our philanthropists and reformers are looking, as any one may satisfy himself by reading the _Shekinah_, the _Spiritual Telegraph_, or Judge Edmands’s work, from the prolific press of Partridge & Brittan, New York. This new religion, which, indeed, contains nothing new, and which it certainly needed no ghost from the other world to teach or to suggest, would amount to very little if promulgated on mere human authority, unsupported by any prodigies, mysterious or marvellous facts; but, communicated mysteriously from alleged denizens of another world, bearing the imposing names of William Penn, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, assumes in the minds of the vulgar a high importance, and can hardly fail to be regarded as overriding Moses and the prophets, our Lord and his Apostles. It strikes at the foundation of Christianity itself, and once accepted, it will seem to have a directness and a completeness of evidence that will entirely set aside, in the minds of the spiritualists, that in favor of the Gospel. This is what I intended, and what I hoped.