child will be taught from within, external
methods being employed only as aids, but never as dictators of thought.
Society will be the flowing out of spiritual truths, taking shape and
substance as the expression of the soul. Governments will be the
protecting power of a parent over loving children, instead of the
dictates of force or tyranny. Religion will wear its native garb of
simplicity and truth, the offspring of the love and faith that gave it
birth. Modern Spiritualism is as great a solvent of creeds, dogmas,
codes, scientific sophisms, as is the sunlight of the substances
contained in earth and air, revealing by the stages of intermediate
life, from man, through spirits, angels, archangels, seraphim, and
cherubim, to God, the glorious destiny of every soul. There is a vine
growing in the islands of the tropic seas that thrives best upon the
ancient ruins or crumbling walls of some edifice built by man; yet ever
as it thrives, the tiny tendrils penetrate between the fibres of the
stone, cutting and cutting till the whole fabric disappears, leaving
only the verdant mass of the foliage of the living vine. Spiritualism is
to the future humanity what this vine is to the ancient ruin."

There was another paper coming on "Compound Consciousness," but the
title did not attract me. After my four days' patient waiting for ghosts
who never came and spirits that would not manifest, I felt, perhaps, a
little impatient, put on my hat and left abruptly--the fair secretary,
of whom I shall evermore stand in supreme awe, scowling at me when I did
so. As I passed into Gower Street--sweet, serene Gower Street, sacred
from the wheels of profane cabmen, I was almost surprised to see the
"materialized" forms around me; and it really was not until I got well
within sound--and smell--of the Underground Railway that I quite
realized my abased position, or got out of the spheres whither the lofty
periods of Mrs. Tappan's paper, so mellifluously delivered, had wafted
me!

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

AN EVENING'S DIABLERIE.

Mr. Spurgeon a short time since oracularly placed it on record that,
having hitherto deemed Spiritualism humbug, he now believes it to be the
devil. This sudden conversion is, of course, final; and I proceed to
narrate a somewhat exceptional endorsement of the opinion which has
recently occurred within my own experience. There was a time, how long
ago it boots not to say, when _I_ considered Spiritualism humbug; an