Will it be impertinent if I say that I am no advocate of the spiritualistic doctrines? Will it be less out of place, if I add that I am no direct opponent of that wonderful creed,—new creed, some people call it; but, in fact, as long established as the first death,—as old as man’s first doubt, or his first impulse to worship the unseen, or investigate the first difficulty? I assume no dictatorship of judgment, adhere to no prejudice or formula of education, or habit of social or sectional condition, but place myself in that grand philosophic pause of suspended opinion. There have been good Turks, there are good Turks; there have been good Jews, there are good Jews. One of the latter, leaving his old traditions, rules now the destiny of a great so-called, and properly so-called I believe, Christian Empire; but because in our youth we have been led to think hard of bloody Mahomet, and the Jewish unbelievers of the first Christian era, when mysteries assumed the prerogative of logical religion, and faith was not as quick to conceive as it has been since, we are not justified in believing that the Turk and the Jew are beyond the pale of our sympathies, and, for old deeds done under peculiar pressure, are to be anathematized from our human charities. There are members known, of the spiritualist belief, to be as pure and spotless as any equal number of any other God-believing sect; and while we cannot but look with feelings akin to pity at some of the phases of their peculiar practice, it behooves no man, limited as we all are in our claim to exact knowledge, to condemn the whole because some of their people do certain things, that, in the performance, border upon the absurd. The mystery of life is more mysterious than the mystery of death. In the first we would, if not governed by the subjection of judgment to certain rules and discipline of faith, be led to believe in a thousand things that appeal to us daily by the miraculous condition of their nature. Science, while it reveals, establishes materiality; and the farther it advances into the realms of air, the more it fills that air with material substances. Dare it go higher yet, and rob the firmament of all its poetry, its vague spirit of religious spirituality, and, sweeping away the dreams of the tenderest imaginations, build up the steps of the Eternal throne with granite boulders, and form of the Almighty a statue of specific gravity, with needs like our own, and humanly dependent on the vegetation and the atmosphere of these terrestrial regions which astronomy with its supernaturally endowed telescope has established as fact?