SPIRIT-MANIFESTATIONS. Mr. Merton’s conclusion did not precisely please me, although I had suspected it from the first. Yet it troubled me, and I would gladly have escaped it. The next day, when Mr. Merton called to see me, as he did every day, I told him that I did not like his conclusion, and I wished he would give me his real thoughts on the subject. “Without recurring to the teachings of Christianity, which I have the happiness of believing, I could not,” said he, “explain these mysterious spirit-manifestations, and I should not know what to think of them. I might be tempted to deny them, as does our friend Jack—to believe them produced by some inexplicable jugglery, even against my better judgment; or I might try to acquiesce in the belief of our friend the “udge, that they are the souls of the departed. Most likely, I should treat them simply as inexplicable, and attempt to construct no theory for their solution. “I am unwilling to suppose the supernatural, and will not, where I cannot satisfactorily demonstrate the insufficiency of the natural. The whole history of our race bristles with prodigies, with marvellous facts, clearly divisible into two distinct and even opposite orders. The one seem to have for their object to draw men towards God, and assist them in ascending to him as their last end and supreme good; the other seem to have for their object to draw men away from God, and to aid men in descending into the depths of night and darkness. Man has a double nature, is composed of body and soul, and on the one side has a natural aspiration to God, and on the other a natural tendency from God, towards the creature, and thence towards night and chaos. A supernatural power assists him to rise; a preternatural power assists him, so to speak, to descend. But whether in the ascending or in the descending scale, it is not easy to say where the natural ends and the supernatural begins, for in both cases the foreign power presupposes the natural, and blends in with it, and simply transforms the action.