I don’t think the other profession is an exception.  When the Reverend Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished scientific brother,—­he was burned with green fagots, which made it rather slow and painful,—­it appears to me they were in a state of religious barbarism.  The dogmas of such people about the Father of Mankind and his creatures are of no more account in my opinion than those of a council of Aztecs.  If a man picks your pocket, do you not consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any authoritative opinion on matters of ethics?  If a man hangs my ancient female relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood a little while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any other barbarian.

Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the ideas of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of Christian love, could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial duelling, and murder for opinion’s sake, I do not see how we can trust the verdict of that time relating to any subject which involves the primal instincts violated in these abominations and absurdities.—­What if we are even now in a state of semi-barbarism?

Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.—­I am not so sure of that.  Religion and government appear to me the two subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of people who enjoy the blessings of freedom.  Think, one moment.  The earth is a great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its axis, receives fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same number worked up more or less completely.  There must be somewhere a population of two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred times as many, earth-born intelligences. Life, as we call it, is nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it comes on soundings.  In this view, I do not see anything so fit to talk about, or half so interesting, as that which relates to the innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living, and with whom we all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for the present in some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep us on the minority side of the house.  In point of fact, it is one of the many results of Spiritualism to make the permanent destiny of the race a matter of common reflection and discourse, and a vehicle for the prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the subject.  I cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my friend and myself have reported, that it would be very extraordinary, if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for the dear people whom we love best,—­noble men, pure and lovely women, ingenuous children,—­about the destiny of nine-tenths of whom you know the opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting, woman-strangling dogmatists.—­However, I fought this matter with one of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the conversation.