from its position in the Universe, receives a less amount of
direct influence from the Electric Circle than other worlds more
happily situated. Were men wise enough to accept this fact, they would
foster to the utmost the germs of electric sympathy within themselves,
in order to form a direct communication, or system of attraction,
between this planet and the ever-widening Ring, so that some spiritual
benefit might accrue to them thereby. But as the ages roll on, their
chances of doing this diminish. The time is swiftly approaching when
the invincible Law of Absorption shall extinguish Earth as easily as we
blow out the flame of a candle. True, it may be again reproduced, and
again thrown out on space; but then it will be in a new and grander
form, and will doubtless have more godlike inhabitants.

"In the meantime--during those brief cycles of centuries which are as a
breath in the workings of the Infinite, and which must yet elapse
before this world, as we know it, comes to an end--God has taken pity
on the few, very few souls dwelling here, pent up in mortal clay, who
have blindly tried to reach Him, like plants straining up to the light,
and has established a broad stream of sympathetic electric
communication with Himself, which all who care to do so may avail
themselves of.

"Here it may be asked: Why should God take pity? Because that Supreme
Shape of Light finds a portion of Himself in all pure souls that love
Him, and HE CANNOT DESPISE HIMSELF. Also because He is capable of all
the highest emotions known to man, in a far larger and grander degree,
besides possessing other sentiments and desires unimaginable to the
human mind. It is enough to say that all the attributes that accompany
perfect goodness He enjoys; therefore He can feel compassion,
tenderness, forgiveness, patience--all or any of the emotions that
produce pure, unselfish pleasure.

"Granting Him, therefore, these attributes (and it is both blasphemous
and unreasonable to DENY HIM THOSE VIRTUES WHICH DISTINGUISH THE BEST
OF MEN), it is easily understood how He, the All-Fair Beneficent Ruler
of the Central Sphere, perceiving the long distance to which the Earth
was propelled, like a ball flung too far out, from the glory of His
Electric Ring, saw also that the creatures He had made in His image
were in danger of crushing that image completely out, and with it all
remembrance of Him, in the fatal attention they gave to their merely
earthly surround