answer heart beneath its shining.

CHAPTER VI.

There are many, however, who have an invincible repugnance to this method of research, and I would here say for the benefit of such, that while I am on friendly terms with spiritualists generally, I am not indebted to them for what I have to give. My observations of the phenomena of spiritualism, although wide and varied, have all been made since I came to know, independently, that there are intelligences above man, and that there is a world distinctly different from this, where they have their home.

Spiritualistic phenomena, as observed through mediums, have, in a general way, confirmed what I knew in regard to the other world, but I find many of the prevalent ideas which are supposably based on these phenomena to be erroneous in the extreme. For instance, it is taught as a doctrine that there is no death, and those who teach it point triumphantly to the demonstrations of the survival of those whose mortal part has been laid in the grave, not realizing that in so doing they prove themselves to be still in bondage to the old error, that death and annihilation are one and the same, and that consequently whoever has escaped the one, must necessarily have escaped the other.

To prove that a man who has severed his connection with the mortal state has not suffered annihilation, proves nothing whatever as to his acquaintance with death.

Even the passing from one world to the other, which is commonly associated with death, is not the same thing, for many possess the power of so passing while still tenants of the clay.

If death, then, is not annihilation, nor the mere passing from one kind of life into another, what is it? It is the severing of the magnetic bonds which unite the body of the individual to the body of the race as a whole.

We do not often consider what an important element in our lives are these magnetic currents which link us to our fellows.

Silent and invisible as they are, they hold us with a tremendous power. What our friends, our neighbors, our relatives think us capable of doing, that we can do with comparative ease; but anything out of the common, calling for the exercise of ability which they do not suppose us to possess—how nearly impossible it is for us to do it, however conscious we may be of the inherent power!

As a part of the race we are bound to it by magnetic currents so long as our mortal life continues, and the cutting off of these currents by death may be to our consciousness the greatest misfortune or the greatest happiness we have ever known.

Now I am not preaching, I am simply stating that which I know to be true. I know it in the same way that I know anything wherein experience shuts out even the shadow of a doubt.

To speak of the misfortune of death: suppose you were a clock which for twenty-five years had been a part of the world's life, keeping good time and always on duty. Then suppose you were suddenly laid away in the dark and dusty attic of a warehouse until some estate should be settled that would require an indefinite number of years.

The comparison is not perfect. The clock is not only mostly automatic, as we are, but entirely so. That in our nature which is essentially free is not even touched by death, but the bodily activities and associations may be our only field of action, and these are cut off absolutely, while memory recalls every event of the life that is finished, and especially every decision which has had the slightest influence upon our destiny. The positive element in us which has found constant vent in physical action is rendered helpless by the complete paralysis of all the motor nerves. We cannot even think, for this requires some movement of the brain. A consciousness of being left behind while the world travels on, a feeling that this experience had not been foreseen in the least, nor in any way provided against, spite of warnings which now seem to echo and re-echo through the darkness—these are what is left us in place of the sunlight, the breezes of evening, the voices of children, the light of the stars.

But death may be release, it may be happiness, it may be ecstasy beyond the power of words to tell. We may have cast the long look ahead in time. We may have decided that since bodily life is limited at best, it shall not be first in our regards: its appetites, its demands, shall not take precedence above those calls which find their answer in the depths of being, calls to rise out of the mire of reckless self-indulgence, and clothe ourselves in the garb of a true manhood and womanhood, taking for our model those who count not their life dear unto them, but reach out for eternal values.

The pathway is not wide, and they who pursue it may find themselves at close of life (I am not speaking especially of old age) almost alone. The energies of the spirit have grown by constant exercise, and the soul has grown strong, imparting its vibrations to the body, which has so responded that, one after another, the magnetic links which have held it to the slower progress of the race have snapped asunder. We are far ahead, and the spirit longs for purer air than it can find on earth. We have anticipated all the pains of death. We have endured them in our struggle for the mastery of ourselves. Death now but sets the seal upon our victory, gives us the freedom we have earned, ushers us into the society for which we have prepared ourselves, crowns us heirs of immortality.

Now, whether death shall be this happiness or that misery, in either case it will be remembered as a great fact of consciousness, the greatest ever known, and the doctrine that there is no death will never be able to find lodgment in the minds of those who have experienced it.

CHAPTER VII.

It may be worth our while to inquire how this extremely modern doctrine came into being, and if we can solve the problem, it may reflect light upon the genesis of other doctrines very much older and equally erroneous.

There is something so startling, so unexpected, in the phrase, "There is no death," that we are quite safe in assuming that it did not originate in the mind of a mortal. In fact, one would be obliged first to disown his mortality before he could utter it with any consciousness of speaking the truth. If, then, the words have come from the Beyond, it would appear that some super-mundane intelligence has been promulgating error. But let us not be too hasty. Let us remember that in our grandfather's time the great majority of people looked upon death as the termination of existence. It was an impenetrable darkness. Those who claimed to know anything different were so few, and their evidence was so mysterious, as to have a scarcely perceptible effect on this portion of our race. Death had come to mean annihilation, and when the age-long dictum, shutting the two worlds apart, was removed, those spirit-teachers who were commissioned to scatter the darkness were obliged to use expedients. Laying aside their own understanding of the word death, and taking up the erroneous meaning attached to it by those whom they wished to reach, they sent out this incisive denial, There is no death. The paraphrase would be, There is no such death as you believe in, which was the truth, and had the effect of truth upon the minds