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THE

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Spiritual Magazine.

JANUARY, 1869.

THE PASSING YEARS.

THE Earth and the Spiritual Magazine have again completed their annual revolution. As they have spun

Down the ringing grooves of change,

each, it is hoped, in its own way and measure, has added something to our knowledge and experience, and aided the good cause of progress, widening the thoughts of men with the process of the suns.

The past year has been an eventful one, with its reforms and revolutions-its changes and indications of coming change in every sphere of life-social, political, and ecclesiastical. It has sent forth its stormy petrels, warning us of coming tempests: it has, like a beneficent angel, troubled the stagnant pools of thought, that those who step in may be freed from their infirmities and made whole: it has taken from us many dear and valued friends-taken them, it may be, only that they may be more really, truly, intimately with us than before.

It is a foolish conceit that Spiritualism tends to deaden our sensibilities to all or to aught that pertains to the true interests of the present life, or that it diminishes our care and active participation in its concerns. On the contrary, it gives to them a higher significance-a deeper interest. It makes us feel the intimate blending of the two worlds; that the future life is the inevitable outgrowth from the present, that the great Ygdrasil tree of human life reaches into eternity, and touches the very heavens. Spiritualism gives us higher motives, purifies the affections, and strengthens the springs of action, for it invests with larger meaning the needs and duties of the hour; it enables us to realise the momentous issues, the privileges and responsibilities of earthly existence as those cannot do whose horizon is bounded

N.S.-IV.

A

by the present life, or whose faith in the life beyond is faint and dubious, or whose vision of its true character is dimmed by the films of conventional theology; it strengthens us to bear the heaviest burdens of the present, and amid our deepest sorrows and afflictions to look forward to the Future with a serene hope and joyous assurance impossible to those who feel that the vigour of youthful life, and the strength and joys of manhood, are slipping from them with no prospect but a dry and withered age, and then-" a leap in the dark-"

To die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbéd ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling.

To the Spiritualist, the years as they sweep by but carry us on their waves to that farther shore-that "land of pure delight" where age shall bloom into immortal youth; where, in restoring to us all we love, and realising to us more than all for which we hope, we shall gain infinitely more than the years for a season have taken from us, only that with " more excellent glory" they may be ours for ever; where-"The gates shall not be shut at all by day, for there shall be no night there; and there shall be no more death; neither sorrow nor crying; neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.'

"For those people who do nothing, for those to whom Christianity brings no revelation, for those who see no eternity in time, no infinity in life, for those to whom opportunity is but the handmaid of selfishness, to whom smallness is informed by no greatness, for whom the lowly is never lifted up by indwelling love to the heights of divine performance, for them, indeed, each hurrying year may well be a King of Terrors. To pass out from the flooding light of the morning, to feel all the dewiness drunk up by the thirsty, insatiate sun, to see the shadows slowly and swiftly gathering, and no starlight to break the gloom, and no home beyond the gloom for the unhoused, startled, shivering soul,-ah! this indeed is terrible. The 'confusions of a wasted youth' strew thick confusions of a dreary age. Where youth garners up only such power as beauty or strength may bestow, where youth is but the revel of physical or frivolous delight, where youth aspires only with paltry and ignoble ambitions, where youth presses the wine of life into the

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