and as if, without wealth, churches could be built and clergymen supported. He fails oftentimes to leave upon the minds of his hearers clear notions as to the difference between the uses and abuses of wealth.

Too exclusive worldliness and love of money is to be regretted and condemned as injurious to the individual who thus gives himself up to its all-absorbing pursuit; but the community enjoys, in a thousand ways, the benefit of his accumulation, though it may be to him but a source of unhappiness. The pulpit should hold up the idea not only that money, that is, the abuse of money, is the source of all evil, but that money is in fact a source of all good, and should inculcate the duty of accumulation as the only means of improving the condition, cultivating all the faculties, and securing the moral advancement of man. This would place the matter in its true light, and do away with a perpetual conflict of duty in the minds of men, who, for want of due discrimination, imagine there is something wrong in the pursuit of wealth, even in moderation; who come to feel they are doing wrong when in fact they are doing right. Their pursuits and their consciences require to be reconciled, by showing them the necessity and importance of that for which they are striving.

The love of money is to be honored and not despised, to be encouraged and not condemned as something unworthy and degrading. It is the main spring

of society, to whose force all its movements are due. It underlies all the good influences to which we are subjected. It is the motive power that bears us along. It is the duty of man to be rich, but not to trust in his riches, to accumulate wealth that others as well as himself may enjoy the fruits of his accumulation; but not to regard the mere possession of wealth as the greatest of all good to himself. He is to regard it as the most important of all means, but not, like the miser, as the great end of his existence. The wealth of the miser, however, contributes to the happiness of his fellow-men, though it may have destroyed his own power of enjoyment. Society will enjoy, in a thousand ways, the wealth which is to him but the source of a morbid anxiety, and who is made miserable by a perpetual fear of its loss.

SPIRITUALISM.

THE great wonder and mystery of our day is Spiritualism. Whence comes this strange apparition to confound and perplex our mortal race? Is it electricity, or magnetism? Is its origin from above, as is claimed by believers, or from the lower regions, as contended by the skeptics? Is it a new phase of witchcraft, or was witchcraft but a species of spiritualism, as is supposed by one of the most intelligent and truthful of its advocates? Was Christ divinely inspired to work miracles, or, as spiritualists say, was he only a superior medium, through whom those works were wrought? These are questions easy to be asked, but not so easily susceptible of a satisfactory answer. This, however, we know, that from whatever source it may come, spiritualism is here, in the midst of us, staring us in the face, and challenging our investigation into its strange phenomena of table-tipping, rapping, writing, seeing, and speaking mediums. It is upon us, and we cannot escape it. We may shut our eyes and it will come through our ears. We may close our ears and it

appears before our eyes, and compels us to look it in the face.

A priori, there seems to be no particular reason why, if, as we have been taught, our departed friends are hovering about us, they should not also have discovered some means of communicating with us. Perhaps much of our incredulity arises from our want of real belief in the actual existence of spirits in another world. Many of us believe, perhaps, much less than we think we do, and mistake a sort of intellectual assent, the result of education, for a firm conviction and undoubting belief. If such spirits do exist in the other world, there is nothing we know regarding the nature or form of their existence which can render the improbability of their intercourse with us so great as that it may not be overcome by a fair amount of evidence, either of our senses or from human testimony. We have not been told that they shall never come to us, but on the contrary have always yearned to hold converse with them, and to ask of them some tidings of that undiscovered bourne from which, in the flesh certainly, no traveller can ever hope to return. For aught we know, except from experience alone, they may have heard our entreaties, and come back to give us that assurance, comfort and consolation we require.

The common objection is, that if God had intended a new Revelation he would not have chosen agents

and means so mean and unworthy.

But this we do

not know, nor does it constitute any answer to the actual facts of spiritualism. What agents he might or might not have chosen it is impossible for us to say, and such a consideration goes not a step to disprove the phenomena, which are matters of investigation, and palpable to the senses. It so happens, however, that spiritualism is not claimed by spiritualists to be a Revelation from God, but that the inhabitants of the other world discovered a means by which they could hold converse with the inhabitants of this, just as Morse discovered the telegraphic process, and Franklin drew lightning from the clouds; indeed, I understand the invention to be ascribed to Franklin himself. Do we know anything of spiritual life which forbids us to believe in such a statement? We are educated in the belief that spirits in the other world, good ones at least, spend their time in singing and praising God, though it is not easy to see what gratification he could derive from an eternity of such praise; but, suppose they should be very differently employed, and, as appears by their statements, if they are to be received, that their time is passed very much as ours is here, that they have like passions with ourselves, that they exist in different states of advancement and probation, that they have never looked on the Deity, nor risen to the exalted sphere of Christ. I saw a communication the other day, in