the cause is subjective rather than objective. It is in himself rather than in those whom he accuses. He assumes to say that those who do not accept his interpretation of, and teachings concerning the Bible, reject it. He also assumes to say that spirits and mortals who do not endorse his disorderly fantasies are sensual-evil. The cause is inherent in brother Harris's organization, but aggravated by blending of incongruous spheres or influences through a disordered magnetization, excited by censorious indulgences against rivals and sceptics. His judgment is thus impaired, and subject to impulses with an indomitable will and lust of leadership."

In this lucid and admirable article we have the key to the whole character of Mr. Harris, and the history of his life since the very commencement of the modern advent of Spiritualism in America. Mr. Partridge dates back in 1860 the appearance of Mr. Harris in the ranks of the Spiritualists some fourteen years which carries us to the earliest events in the Fox family, which took place in the beginning of 1848. We think we have, therefore, by the aid of Mr. Harris's most intimate and most intelligent friends during his principal career amongst the Spiritualists of America, fully borne out our statement which Mr. Robson treats as such absurdity, namely:--"That if Spiritualism be the diabolical system which Mr. Harris now proclaims it, it is at the same time a system and dispensation through what he has himself passed from beginning to end, and by which he has arrived at the ground, whatever it be, on which he now stands."

That Mr. Harris during his connection with the general body of Spiritualists threw himself with the same impetuosity into the enjoyment and defence of the doctrines he now condemns as he does at present into the hectic vision of the highest heaven, of the lowest hells; of atomic, aromal, and attributal men, is also shewn. In a long speech delivered by him at the New York Tabernacle in 1855, previous to his departure for New Orleans, he, Mr. Harris, ranged enthusiastically over the arguments in favour of Spiritualism now in use amongst its votaries everywhere. "Much as spirit-rappings, so styled," he says, "are spit upon by the dress-makers of literature, who deal in the haberdashery of rhetoric, ideas of thrilling significance and epic strength have been, and are communicated through spirit rappings," etc. "Ye great and splendid empires of the free and happy dead, ye fathers and ye mothers, ye sacred and endeared ones, that live for ever in our hearts, ye deem it practical to comfort the broken-hearted; with sunlike shafts to slay the python Materiality; to span with an arch of light the sea of desolation; to fill the atmosphere with voices chanting

'Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, and goodwill towards men.' 999

Such was the strain in which Mr. Harris then invoked those spirits whom he now denounces as devils and damned souls, seducing by lies, through spirit-mediation, our souls to damnation with them. But we must stop. Whole volumes of the wheelings and turnings, the eccentricities and extravagances of Mr. Harris are extant, which our readers may refer to, if they find it at all attractive. For ourselves, we can only ask to what we can compare this soi-disant Apostle of the Most High? To a reed shaken by the wind? To a weathercock, or a kaleidoscope, full of motion, but destitute of stability? To a mystical serpent, continually casting his slough, but never freeing himself from his venom? To a theological harlequin, besmirked with dashes of white lead and vermilion, with parti-coloured dress and a sword of lath, with continual springs and bounds, and, in Lord Castlereagh's phrase, perpetual turnings of his back on himself? To Proteus, ever-changing, and ever-slipping out of our hands in fire or water, in reptile or in monster shapes? Certainly we find in him no resemblance to the grave and dignified theologian, the profound and consistent psychical philosopher. It is curious that Mr. Partridge, in his closing lines, assigns as one great cause of Mr. Harris's repeated gyrations and escapades, the very same as had impressed ourselves, "An indomitable lust of leadership."

A few more words only are necessary to dispose of Mr. Harris and his advocates. Mr. Robson says that "Mr. Harris's career reveals a new Spiritualism." We are at a loss to conceive in what this consists. It cannot be the discovery of the inner breathing; for we have shown that it was known to Swedenborg long before, and to Jacob Böhme still earlier. In many places, besides those noticed by us, Swedenborg speaks of it. (See White's Life of him, Vol. I., pp. 263 and 293.) It cannot be the ability to pass into the interior world, spiritually beyond the influence of any spirit below that of the Divinity himself; for this is nothing new. It has been the asserted

condition of prophets and saints in all ages. It has always been claimed by Parsees, Buddhists, and by Christian saints of all churches and denominations. It is exactly what Swedenborg laid direct claim to. But if Mr. Robson imagines that because a man lays claim to such a privilege, we are to believe all the trash which as an insane rhapsodist he pleases to pour out upon us, as wisdom from the Holy of Holies, we beg to dissent from him absolutely. Mr. Robson says truly, "that in celestial Spiritualism the domain of the human faculties is extended to the spiritual world, as part and parcel of their own proper sphere." Exactly so: we

must retain the sound and deliberative action of our understanding in whatever spiritual spheres, however high and sublime, into which we may be introduced. The reason with which God has endowed us is permanent and inalienable under all conditions of existence. There is, as Swedenborg has truly inculcated, a fundamental correspondence between the entities, conditions, and manifestations of this world and the spiritual world. As everything here is a development from the spiritual world, the reason which is our measure of things here, is our measure of things there. It cannot be otherwise, or all our moral and religious experience here would be lost there; and our probationary condition would be a trial without an object, a waste of existence, instead of an initiatory process of advance towards it. Without this perpetuity and unchangeableness of our intellectual nature and faculties, the divine thread which must guide us though the varying phases of existence would be lost, and we should be the prey of every madman who sets up pretences to be a dispenser of God's recondite mysteries. To assert this truth, to guard our readers against follies which are put forth under pretence of being "new truths," was the object of our criticism. By their fruits shall we know them." In the revelations of Christ we have the most divine moral, and the most sublime truths communicated to us in language perfectly unique in its transparent simplicity. This, to our mind, is the most striking proof of its Divinity. It is an astonishing marvel of spiritual power. The philosopher, when he attempts to probe the depths of interior truth, becomes obscure; the visionary, when he would herald fresh revelations, becomes wild, fantastic and bewildering, Christ stands at once simple as light and profound as the heavens in His revelations of the most spiritual and essential doctrines of the life which leads to God. Here lies the broad and luminous distinction betwixt the genuine herald of God and the mere dreamer of dreams. Mr. Robson will find in the concluding portion of our criticism of Mr. Harris's new poem, an answer to every essential objection which he now raises. That is our serious opinion of Mr. Harris's present condition, and of the necessity of protesting against the introduction of delusive visions as sober and celestial truth. We are bound to deny that there are two kinds of genuine Spiritualism. That the two kinds which he points out are different" both in kind and degree." The difference is only in the degree. The Spiritualism which is connected with spirits of different degrees is essentially the same in kind as that which has reached the phase of direct communion with the Spirit of God. God developes himself through the descending series of His agents, in order to bring up from the lowest depths of moral degradation those who are

grovelling there, and to adapt this agency to every ascending degree. In the very lowest depth, and though the very lowest spirit employed, it is as truly the direct agency of the Divine Spirit as in the highest. All are ministering spirits, ministering to His human creatures. Without God and his spirit animating them, they can do nothing. In the words of Swedenborg, " The angelic ministry is wholly the Lord's." We speak of the good spirits of all degrees who are manifestly, and with most beneficent effect, now communicating with men. It is their business "to develope that which is highest:" it is "the pursuit of the right end through the right means," to use Mr. Robson's languagefor God thus adapts his means to the various conditions of the souls he seeks to educate and lead up to Himself. These various grades of spirits manifesting themselves, are the various steps of that Jacob's ladder, on which the angels of salvation, filled with the spirit and power of God, are always descending in order to ascend with the souls that they are sent to raise and refine. It is one of the worst errors of Mr. Harris that he seeks to break down this divine ladder-to denounce all the patient and God-commissioned spirits, who are endeavouring to instruct and strengthen men in their lowest estate, as devils from the hells, just as the Jews denounced Christ as sent of Beelzebub. His attempt is simply to break down this graduated scale of God's work on earth, and tell men to leap at one frantic spring, from earth to the infinite height of heaven. The result of such teaching, if there were no better, would be, to poor debauched mortals, clogged and loaded with the slime of earth-life, despair and madness. Happily there is no such violent and impossible attempt necessary in God's world. His word and work and wisdom are different. As in nature, so in spiritual life, all is easy and upward gradation. He no more acts in the life of the soul than He does in the life of outward nature, without his delegated agents. As earthly husbandmen go forth daily to second the influences of his sun and rain and dew and wind, so He sends out his heavenly husbandmen to sow the good seed of the Divine truth in the fields of the human heart, to train up the tenderly aspiring stalk, to mature the nascent fruit, and to gather the ripened harvests into his celestial garner: and they do their respective duties in the spirit of their sender, and teach their pupils to look up, not to them but to Him. To seek that direct communion with His omnipotent spirit which, according to Mr. Robson, and according to our own conviction, is the highest reach of true Spiritualism. In this true Spiritualism, there is no cleft, no hiatus, no dissonance, it is one, and indivisible. It is God, working through his ministering spirits, as He worked through Christ, to reconcile the world unto himself.

In all the action of these spirits, it is God operating to bring us to himself; and, as He sees fit to employ such agents, the worst enemies of true Spiritualism are they who brand these Divine servants as servants of the devil.

But the most satisfactory thing about Mr. Harris's successive metamorphoses is, that though Mr. Partridge asserts that "his indomitable will and lust of leadership," have been the causes of them, they never have drawn much of a following. This is creditable to the common sense of his successive hearers. Had Mr. Harris achieved his grand desire of founding a numerous sect, we may presume that he would have been at rest. Not succeeding, he has struck out schemes, prophecies, visions, and theophanies in prolific repetition, in the desperate hope of succeeding at last. What is the result? He dedicates his Poem of the Sun, to "the Brotherhood of the New Life in Europe, Asia, and America," and immediately before our imagination rises a view of a vast and world-wide extended Church. his advocate, M. J. H., abruptly dissipates the delusion, by telling us in her article of February, that this wonderful New Church yet only consists of "half-a-dozen people!" Parturiunt montes!

But

OCCASIONAL NOTES.

A BAD SPECIMEN OF HUMAN NATURE.

WITHOUT at all entering on the question of the total depravity of Human Nature our attention cannot fail to be occasionally arrested by startling instances of its moral obliquity. For example, who would have expected to find in what has hitherto been regarded as on the whole a respectable though erratic periodical, and under the guise of a "review" a series of aspersions of the grossest kind of the character, aims and motives of the conductors of this Magazine generally, and of the writer of the recent pamphlet- What is Religion? in particular? Yet so it is. The February number of Human Nature assures its readers that they are "scurrilous and highly irreligious;" "jackals of the lions of priestcraft and ecclesiasticism," who cry "let us wear the lamb's fleece, let us start periodicals, narrate phenomena, write books, utter critiques, deliver lectures, and make more noise than the Spiritualists. And thus people ignorant and unable to discriminate, will happily follow us instead of the new idea."' They are further accused by this representative of "Progressive