prove a prejudice. Medicine has a good deal to answer for! D.W.]

Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.--I
am not so sure of that. Religion and government appear to me the two
subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of people
who enjoy the blessings of freedom. Think, one moment. The earth is a
great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its axis, receives
fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same number worked up
more or less completely. There must be somewhere a population of two
hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred times as many,
earth-born intelligences. Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge
of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes on soundings. In this
view, I do not see anything so fit to talk about, or half so interesting,
as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our
fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who are hundreds of thousands to one
of the live-living, and with whom we all potentially belong, though we
have got tangled for the present in some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and
phosphates, that keep us on the minority side of the house. In point of
fact, it is one of the many results of Spiritualism to make the permanent
destiny of the race a matter of common reflection and discourse, and a
vehicle for the prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the
subject. I cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations
my friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary,
if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all
that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for the
dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure and lovely women,
ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know the
opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting,
woman-strangling dogmatists.--However, I fought this matter with one of
our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the conversation.

The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more serious
than usual. He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered after the
others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table, found myself alone
with him.

When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine, and
began.

I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
most important class of subje