Part 3

In view of the revelations being made on all sides, we may well reiterate Solomon's wise saying: "There is nothing new under the sun." There can be nothing absolutely new. There is only endless iteration and readjustment of powers and forces to fit the need of the day and generation.

Nature buffets her children bitterly and wipes out her surplus of human life as she destroys the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect and reptilian life. She inspires the minds of men with an overmastering desire for possessions. She hides her wealth in inaccessible places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to guard and determinedly hold all possible avenues of approach to them. But this world was given to man to conquer and own and make much of; and the glitter of a speck of useful metal in a stray boulder in the lonely canon; or the chance outcropping of rock which to the practised eye denotes the nearness of the deposit of oil--these, or any of the thousand and one signs, she hangs out along the path in which man is destined to march on his way to absolute sovereignty, set his forces of intellect and will in motion, and he will never rest from his labors until he stands upon the pinnacles of the gods, the crowned monarch of all nature's forces on this planet.

All phenomena are negative, and are only the external garniture of the world of man, the spirit, the child of the Eternal, of the father and mother Creators of him. Thus man is, by absolute inheritance, the king, and the ruler over all nature. But not without effort can he enter and possess and maintain his power over his own. Ice and frosts, and searing sun, and lonely wilds, and trackless wastes, and countless waters, and evil beasts, and horrible reptiles--all, all he must encounter and set at naught in his trackless journey. Carefully must he force the wilderness to bloom, and by his wise efforts "make glad the waste places" of the earth. Wherever the foot of man has been set, there is it "hallowed ground." Whatever may have been his intent or whatever his fate, in his wake shall surely follow the manifest purpose of that ever-ruling Power which led him. Everywhere along the way, Nature trails her loose ends, well baited, with which to catch the unwary, and the whitening bones of the lonely emigrant family lost on the plains, and the snowy hair of the dead mountaineer bleaching on high summits or woven in the nests of birds, or the bodies of dead mariners, or the lonely corpse of the treacherously slain, pulsing with the tide on foreign shores, or the miners in their pits, forced by the deadly "damps" from all visible connection with human life, or the child of a superior race held captive by savages, or the beautiful white girl sold into the harem of a barbarous sultan, or any or all other of such expressions of destiny in the isolated lives of men are but pioneering the way of the race to complete homogeneousness and unquestioned ownership of the whole wide earth.

WORLD GROWTH.

All of nature's processes are slow and always evolutionary. The controlling laws are subtle and secret and can never be comprehended or understood save as they work out in visible results. There is every indication that it has required an illimitable series of ages to evolve even the physical form of man in the unnumbered races of the human family from the first semi-human life to man as we see him now--clever and strong of brain and will, daring and equal to great emergencies, and in inventive, creative and executive gifts a very god of power and might. The laws of evolution refer primarily to the individual planet, Earth, and include all that it contains--in a word, all things in any way related to it. Mineral deposits and crumbling rocks nourish the vegetable world; the vegetable world provides sustenance to the animal kingdom, and it, in turn, with all the others combined, sustains all human life; but its real root, its permanent existence, is in the planet itself. Each and all of these diverse manifestations of law coordinated, constitute the mysterious modes and methods of the evolution of life from the lower to the higher status of being, and it works on, and ever on eternally, till human life finds its completion and satisfaction in the fulfillment of the law which merges the advanced and prepared soul in the Universal Spirit and crowns its final evolution with its at-one-ment with its Creator.

Nature does not duplicate her handiwork, but cunningly sets her sign on every leaf and branch to insure individuality. She throws protecting arms around all her growing life of fruit and vegetable in order that each shall reproduce of its own kind, and thus keep intact the orderly succession, and that there shall be no lack of nourishment for the children of men.

She gives without stint to all the peoples of the earth her world-stuff to be worked over into human flesh, and animal fibre. But no tiniest grain of her possessions has ever, or will ever escape from her hand, and the daily debris from all earth-made bodies is her constant toll. When the forms are set free from the life principle which has pervaded them in their earthly career, the circle is rounded, and when the grave-rite, dust to native dust we here restore to our great mother is uttered, she is the gainer; for the operation of thus passing the material of which the planet is made through the highest created forms of life, brings it into a certain relationship to spirit, and thus the evolution, the spiritualization of the world-stuff of the planet itself is going forward.

DEATH A BENEFACTOR.

Death is a benefactor to the human race. How could we bear the burden of existence if Nature did not somewhere on the march "call a halt" while the angels of dissolution tenderly unloose our burdens of pain and sorrow, and disappointment, and stultifying regrets, and remorses for past ill doings and shortcomings?

WORLD PROGRESS.

It is known only to the lesser gods, who keep the celestial "accounts," how many times the swaggering, bully-ragging, brawling, piratical, and murderous human family has swept around this globe. Here and there relics of their status, their growth in the external, material conditions of life are being exhumed, wrung from the faithful clasp of Mother Earth, to excite the wonder of the day and time. Many of the attributes of these lost races, their arts and their religions, have come to light; but whence they came, and how they perished, is an unsolved mystery. From the processes of disintegration--earthquakes, and widespread volcanic action--now going on, we can readily conceive of the manner in which vast multitudes of humanity have been removed from this planet to make room for still other races and peoples. The great pilgrimage still goes on. Unnumbered hordes following the secret instinct of evolution, unceasingly press forward from the East toward the setting sun. This same army, in a former incarnation, went forth over the land where they lived to slay and exterminate; in this embodiment, here in America, they hew out the rocks, and toil in the mines. They harvest the grain that is to feed the hungry multitude that is speeding on toward this new land as fast as the modern conveniences can fetch them. Thus they serve instead of destroying humanity--a great advance toward civilization.

There has been, there will always be an unvarying round of tearing down and upbuilding in the whole wide realm of nature. Nothing, not the tiniest grain or the most ponderous production of skilled hands, ever stands still. All things are in vibration, and their permanency depends wholly upon the rate of vibratory motion. Here and there all the way along, from the earliest times of which there has been any record, great souls have blossomed out, and have carried aloft the God-given light of intelligence and culture. These inspired minds, great souls, have persisted in announcing their message to a darkened world, often in the face of direct want and persecutions; misunderstood and maligned, they were and are the saviors of the people of this undeveloped planet. Even yet, they are known and valued by but a limited number of supposedly intelligent people. While these inspired light-bringers were seeking to shed abroad in the minds of men the truths that shall make men free, the Church was devoted to closing, and holding fast shut every avenue of the human mind that might have a tendency to teach the people anything outside of their tenets which were the outcome of their weird imaginations. If anything could cause a doubt to arise in the Creative Mind as to the wisdom of letting loose on this small planet the pestiferous peoples that have swarmed over and possessed it, it must have been aroused by their demoniacal performances in the name of religion, that have disgraced the nature of man from the beginning of our knowledge of the world. While a perception of beauty and harmony is latent in the minds of men, it is the last of the attributes of the soul to develop. The figured semblances of God, hewn out of stone or wood by the primitive races, are mostly hideous inventions of the evil thoughts of evil minds. From the terrifying African God, "Mumbo-Jumbo," to the artistic bronze representations of the Deity of the nations of the East all are marked with awe-enforcing ferocity and ugliness, instead of by the soul-inspiring lineaments of love and beauty. Tremblingly the minds of men have groped their way along through the mazes of ignorance and enforced darkness to a degree of personal liberty; and every picture painted, every bit of sculpture achieved in the interest of harmony and beauty is testimony to the persistency of the inspiration vouchsafed to man of the Creator's love of beauty, and of the final state of harmony to be reached by humanity.

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL.

"All evil is only undeveloped good" has come to be the "shibboleth" of not only the Spiritualists, but of many other of the latter-day cults. It sounds fine, beautiful, and is--Praise God!--in a large sense, true. It is a beautiful reaction from the ancient blasphemy taught by the priests and pastors anent hell and the devil. The comforting belief that the above quoted statement settles the whole matter is accepted and believed in. Since the supposed dethronement of "Auld Hornie," as the Scotch named him, as head devil, it has not been thought necessary to give the matter much if any consideration.

Mediums, especially, have gladly ignored the fact of the possibility of there often being in their seances the very presence of potent and powerful evil influences.

Spiritualism has flung wide the doors and given ignorant, and undeveloped humanity an equal opportunity with the refined, and good to express themselves. It is thus the only truly democratic religion ever made known on this planet! It recognizes all human beings, good and bad, as the children of one and the same Father, and that not one can be lost from the hand of God!

The peculiar people who have developed the strange power of mediatorship between this material world and the plane of existence known as the spiritual world have always been helped and sustained in their great work by their invisible friends and appointed spirit guardians, or they could never have carried forward their important mission to the people of this earth.

Regardless of all the efforts of the enemies and traducers of Spiritualism, the spread of the knowledge of the unfolding spiritual philosophy has been and is marvelous; and the establishment of the fact of man's existence, continued after physical death, through varied phenomena, is in itself the proof of its being the work, not of Satan, but of a beneficent God. And why not? The Creator of us all must know his earth-children's needs for their further evolution and growth!

There have been great searchings, at various times, trying to discover the "origin of evil." Vast stores of uncanny legends, and tales of wonders have been handed down to us in explanation of this most baffling mystery.

The destructive force in nature had no "origin." Just as God, the Constructive Force, had none. It was, as God was. It is and always will be, while God and nature are.

It rides the whirlwind and the flood, and differentiates itself through the smallest minutia of the affairs of human life. It is the primeval element, the "pure cussedness" which has to be conquered, or adjusted in every human being. It essays to bar all progress; Ignorance and Superstition are its blinded handmaids. It exacts the fearful penalties of scornfully misunderstood efforts, if not ostracism and persecution, for the use of the diviner faculties. It is the spirit of unconquered ill. It is the genius of the utterly selfish will of man.

But it is when it allies itself with the intellect and will of man, and becomes the motive power, and thus expresses itself in concrete form, as is often the case, that our sympathies are touched and our sense of justice aroused, and we feel our lack of protection from the "powers and principalities of the air." Our only refuge is in growing to and experiencing a perfect at-one-ment with the eternal law of the opposing, the Constructive Force--God. There is no protection, no safety, but in the Divine Love and Wisdom.

VIBRATION.

There was no beginning; there can be no ending. There is a constant, undeviating process of changing and readjustment of all the forces of the universe. All is vibration. None of nature's forces are at rest, at equilibrium. Build you a fine dwelling, and ere it is finished for your occupancy, the disintegrating forces will have made a raid upon the material of which it is constructed. Take notice of the signs of decomposition going on in everything around you--the accumulation of fluff in your rooms, in the innermost of your garments, along the seams. So also do the rocks and mountains yield themselves to dust, and so does all the planet reverberate with the resistless onward march of the law of progress, unfoldment, evolution from the lower to a higher form of expression.

Lands edging the seas and the inland waters, from their constant erosion, slip away and are lost. Continents disappear, undermined by earthquakes and similar convulsions of nature, and new lands arise from the bowels of some faraway ocean to keep the balance even.

LIFE.

From time immemorial the researches of men in the vain effort to discover and make known to the world the origin of life, of all life, on the planet earth and elsewhere, have been most anxiously considered. These efforts of the inquiring minds of men have not been altogether fruitless of results; because through them has been made manifest the most marvelous of all the facts in nature, that "there is no death," that "what seems so is transition." It has also become known and understood of late years, that from the ephemera of life, of an hour or of a day up to the highest archangel, through all the intermediate grades of being, visible and invisible, there are no vacant spaces. Everywhere there is an overwhelming volume of life, actual though not conscious or individualized, until the higher ranges of human life become known and correlated. Comes the man with the scalpel. He dissects the human brain, and is disgusted at finding no clew to the secret cause and source of life. He never suspects, he does not conceive of the fact that there is in everyone, an immutable, invisible power--a spirit germ--nor would he believe in its potency if he knew it were true. Then there is the man with the retorts and the scales, and the "residues." He announces to the world that he can create life without any help from the "Great Spirit" people talk so much about. There is also the man with the bottle full of water, with a handful of mud at the bottom. He is sure he can produce living organisms; might even set agoing a new race of beings, if he only had time, and a larger bottle! Back of every expression of life we know abides the source, the cause of all existence, so hid, so truly an integral part of life as never to yield a knowledge of itself either to the scalpel of the physicians or to the electrical battery of the explorer of mysteries. Into this sphere can no man come. Herein can be no meddling of the human intellect.

Through this searching for the source, the cause of life, man has been brought face to face with law, with a force he can never understand or conquer, or adjust to the demands or suggestions of his will. From ancient expressions of intelligence have been handed down to us the name, the title, God, as a concrete expression of this power that holds dominance over all created beings.