"They also are idolaters who understand the things of sense where the things of the spirit are alone implied, and who conceal the true features of the Gods with material and spurious presentations. Idolatry is materialism, the common and original sin of men, which replaces spirit by appearance, substance by illusion, and leads both the moral and intellectual being into error, so that they substitute the nether for the upper, and the depth for the height. It is that false fruit which attracts the outer senses, the bait of the serpent in the beginning of the world. Until the mystic man and woman had eaten of this fruit, they knew only the things of the spirit, and found them suffice. But after their fall, they began to apprehend matter also, and gave it the preference, making themselves idolaters. And their sin, and the taint begotten of that false fruit, have corrupted the blood of the whole race of men, from which corruption the sons of God would have redeemed them." She had received this, also in sleep, as one of a class of neophytes seated in an ancient amphitheatre of white stone, and listening to a lecture delivered by a man in priestly garb, of which they took notes the while. She complained that her notes had disappeared on waking, thus preventing her from rendering what she had heard as perfectly as she could have wished; for she had trusted to her notes for it. The more we pondered these communications, the higher was our appreciation of them. We felt that the "veil of Moses" was at length "taken away" as promised, and we had been enabled to tap a reservoir of boundless wisdom and knowledge. For we found in them the longed-for solution of the purpose and nature of the Bible and Christianity, and the key to man's spiritual history. The method of the Bible-writers, the meaning of idolatry, the secret of the Cain and Abel feud between priest and prophet, as the ministers respectively of the sense-nature and of the intuition, and the process whereby the religion of Jesus had become distorted into the orthodoxy which has usurped His name;--all these things were now clear to us as the demonstration of a proposition in geometry, the witness of which was in our own minds. And we, too, we rejoiced to think, were of the school of the prophets, in that with all the force of our minds we had "exalted the Woman," Intuition, and refused to make the word of God of none effect by priestly traditions. Not the least marvellous element in the case was the faculty whereby the seeress had been able to reproduce, after waking, with such evident faithfulness the things seen and heard at so great length in sleep. In reply to my questionings she said that the words seemed to show themselves to her again as she wrote[67].