It is impossible to bring the great body of the people of any age to agree with our Voltarian philosophers—to be genuine Sadducees. In the first place, the writings of the philosophers and academicians do not reach the mass; and, in the second place, there are constantly occurring phenomena which, in their apprehension, give the lie to Sadduceism. At the very time when the philosophers of pagan Rome were losing all faith in their national religion, doubting almost the existence of the Divinity and the immortality of the soul, and laughing at augurs and soothsayers, the people were more superstitious than ever. It was then that magicians from Asia and Africa flocked to the Eternal City, and that Isiac, Bacchic, and other Eastern superstitions, with all their impurities and wild fanaticism, in comparison with which the national religion was pure, reasonable, and moral, were introduced, and spread as an epidemic; and the laws of the earlier emperors show how hard and how ineffectually authority labored to suppress them. The enemies of Christianity may accept the mysterious phenomena, commonly regarded as diabolical, and explain them and the miracles of the Bible and the alleged miracles of the Church on natural principles, and if they cannot explain them on any known natural principles, they may make them the basis of an induction of a new natural principle; or, in other words, invent a natural principle to explain them, as Baron Reichenbach has done—a principle, element, substance, or force, which he calls _od_. They may do this, or they may recognize their real spiritual and superhuman origin, but ascribe them to good, not to evil spirits, or what is the same thing, maintain that what the world has hitherto worshipped as good is evil, and what it has been taught to avoid as evil is good. That is, that Satan is God, and God is Satan. Swedenborg, in founding his New Jerusalem, or New Church, and Joe Smith, in founding the Church of the Latter Day Saints, as Mahomet in the seventh century, virtually adopted the latter course. Swedenborg became, in the later years of his life, a somnambulist, and could throw himself into the state which some mesmerists call sleep-waking, in which he was a clairvoyant, and had the power of second sight. He fancied himself a prophet, and capable of teaching angels as well as men. But he held the power he found himself able to exercise, to be good as well as supernatural.