f the ethereal medium, and grasp the keys of unlimited
knowledge deciphering every secret wherever they go. The whole
universe may be a palimpsest preserving the inscriptions of all
deeds, and every soul may be a reagent gifted with the power to
recover and read its own.

As each generation is the inheritor of the preceding ones, all of
which from the first prolong their existence into the last in
unbroken continuity of historic conduct and responsibility,
justice may at the ripened period be naturally summed up without
any miracle. We all are projections of our ancestors. They
properly in us suffer and enjoy in accordance with what has flowed
from their lives. The whole of this, lighted up with consciousness
at last, may be the real meaning of the burden of the spirit given
to the apostle Paul, but misinterpreted by him into the mechanico
scenic scheme of the Judaized Christian Church. For when the
mighty influx struck the brain of the persecuting zealot,
revolutionizing his life, it came into connection with all the
inflamed theories and convictions so deeply drilled therein by his
Pharisaic education. These convictions, partly of a mere local and
transient character, associated with legends of Adam and Abraham
and the under world and Christ and the sky, mixed with the true
and universal import of the higher inspiration now given him,
caused his misconstrual of its message, and stamped the purely
human and providential meaning of the doctrine of the resurrection
with the rabbinical die of a politico mythological dogma. If this
were so, it is not the only instance in which the preexistent
discolorations in the mind of an inspired prophet have refracted
the truth of his burden into distorted error and bequeathed the
task of a future rectification when more light shall have come.

In the next place, we come to the fourth reason for the growing
doubts and disbelief of our day in immortality. It is the
remarkable diffusion of the habits of thought engendered by the
study of materialistic science. The authority of physical science
has been rapidly encroaching on and displacing the authority of
the church theology and sectarian creeds. Belief in invariable
laws has undermined belief in miracle and supernatural revelation.
Those who had been taught that the resurrection of Christ was the
only adequate proof of the immortality of the soul, learning to
deny the former, have naturally proceeded to question the latter.
For in