flour, dust, or other powder; and two mediums sit down at opposite sides, with their hands on the table. A hemispherical basket, eight inches in diameter, is now reversed, and laid down with its edges resting on the tips of one or two fingers of the two mediums. This basket is to act as penholder; and a reed, or style, is fastened to the rim, or a chopstick thrust through the interstices, with the point touching the powdered table.

"The ghost, meanwhile, has been duly invoked; and the spectators stand round, waiting the result. This is not uniform. Sometimes the spirit summoned is unable to write; sometimes he is mischievously inclined, and the pen - for it always moves will make either a few senseless flourishes on the tables, or fashion sentences that are without meaning, or with a meaning that only misleads. This, however, is comparatively rare. In general, the words traced are arranged in the best form of composition, and they communicate intelligence wholly unknown to the operators. These operators are said to be not only unconscious, but unwilling, participators in the feat."

The same writer tells us that in Ningpo, in 1843, there was scarcely a house in which this mode of getting messages from the spirits was not practised. So it would seem that, some five years before the phenomena at Hydesville, Planchette, or a substitute for it, was common in China! *

* In the New-York "Round Table" of Dec. 12th, 1868, we find the following remarks upon the subject of Planchette: "Mr. Kirby is said to have sold over two hundred thousand planchettes, at a profit of fifty cents, cash, each. It need not surprise us that Mr. Kirby thinks well of planchette. Now what does so knowing a young lady as Miss Field think of it? In this neat little volume ('Planchette's Diary'), she tells her own experiences, and, as a conclusion of the whole, admits that she has no theory, is perplexed; and, finally, 'from the sensations undergone while using planchette, I am inclined to believe myself under the influence of a wonderfully subtle magnetic fluid.' To find a name to call a thing by, seems to satisfy most minds; but a name is nothing, 'electricity,' 'magnetism,' 'odic force,' 'vital current,' and so on and on, and we are as much in the dark as ever about planchette, table-movings, hysteria, Spiritualism, demonism, witchcraft, possession of devils, &c. Are these any thing at all but 'derangement of the normal forces of human nature, or a strange and unhealthy action? or are they, in some subtle way, the action of spiritual forces outside of ourselves? Science has not yet settled the question, and we commend it to the attention of our new school of positivists."

DEATH A STEP TO HIGHER LIFE.

399

Seneca compares the birth of man into this world to his birth from the womb of Nature, into "another beginning, another state of things that expects us."

"It will be just as natural for you," says one, claiming to be a spirit, "to become suddenly conscious of the spirit-world, as it is for the infant to be ushered into the material world without consciously experiencing any unusual degree of excitement from the occurrence."

"A form which vanishes," says Gustave Aimand, "is the creation of a new form, a transformation of being. What we call death is a movement in advance, a progressive evolution, an aggrandizement of life. Our past furnishes us a double proof of this assertion; for it is through a double death, a double destruction of anterior forms, that we arrive at our present life.

"Suppose that the ovule which is to one day be a man, had sensibility and intelligence: would it not take for symptoms, premonitory of its end, the painful rendings of its ovulary organization? Error! Vain fears! The ovule becomes a fœtus; that is to say, passes from an inferior life to a superior; for the fœtus has an organization and a life distinct from those both of the ovule and of the infant.

"Suppose now that the fœtus, also sensitive and intelligent, approaching the end of its fœtal life, began to experience the sufferings of child-birth. Would not it, too, believe that the convulsive claspings of the uterus were the very embrace of death and the utter annihilation of life? Error again! Vain fears! For that which it took for its death-rattle of agony, and its last adieu to existence, is the first wailing of a new-born child, its salutation to a new and higher life.

"And so the end of one life is the commencement of another life less imperfect. It is in this manner, beyond a doubt, that by an endless series of evolutions or of deaths, we shall realize more and more the divine destiny which is revealed to us and promised by our aspirations, our infinite desires.

"Unless man is eternal in his substance, immortal in his personality, infinite in his destiny, even as he is in his desires, then there is neither Being of beings, nor Omnipotent Goodness, nor Infinite Love, nor Eternal Justice: God does not exist."

mare.

We know with what suddenness the prevalent fanatical notions in regard to witchcraft passed away from the civilized world. Mr. Lecky has described it in some striking sentences. It was as if people had awakened all at once from a dreadful nightOne day witchcraft seemed a fixed fact, and the next day it was spurned and gone. Unquestionably, with what there was in it fanatical and false, much that was true was repudiated. It will be the work of Spiritualism to point out and re-confirm the true. But the time is not far back, when, to deny witchcraft, • and the construction put on it by the authority of the Old Testament, was regarded as a sort of atheism.

May it not be that our theological systems and creeds, widely but somewhat passively accepted as they now may be, are destined to a winnowing not unlike that which witchcraft has undergone? May not some of our professional religious teachers wake up some bright morning to find that their hearers have very generally outgrown a certain style of appeal to their lazy preferences, their self-indulgent hopes, their nervous fears, or their sordid calculations? Should such a change come, - and the signs are threatening, - we may be sure that Spiritualism, pure and undefiled, will be the unfailing conservator of all that is good and true in human beliefs on the subject of the relations of man to time and to eternity, to the universe and to its Author.

THE END.

GENERAL INDEX.

Büchner, 154, 159, 195, 198, Consciousness, 154, 198,

Augustine, 27, 154, 172, 395. Campbell, Dr. Geo., 53, 54.

Bell, R., 18, 28, 85, 86, 95, Cicero, 172, 255, 256, 340.

Cleveland Convention, 38, Descartes, 339, 364.

Brewster, 9, 18, 19, 109, 289. Coleman, Benj., 18, 19, 57,

England, Spiritualism in, Guay, Wm., 138.

Ferguson, J. B., 235, 236, Hardinge, E., 102.