The power of foretelling the future is yet in its infancy.  Coming events are said to cast their shadows before; and as the barometer indicates to a skilful eye the approach of a storm when no sign is visible in the calm sky above, so the events which will befall an individual are marked upon the delicate spiritual barometer which forms a part of his being, and can be read with unerring precision by the clear and practiced eye of the optimist.

PROFESSOR MITCHELL.

THE PLANETS.

The worlds of light that nightly illume the firmament of earth are not mere spheres of uninhabitable matter, nor are they simply appendages to earth,—­glittering ornaments to attract the eye of man,—­but vast systems of suns and tributary planets, with worlds whose products and inhabitants far exceed in organized development those of this little planet Earth, whose astronomers are just beginning to realize the capacities of the worlds revealed through their telescopes.

Many of these worlds have existed centuries prior to the formation of the planet you inhabit, and their inhabitants have attained a degree of civilization which only time can give to you.

The intellectual development of many of the dwellers of these planets is as far superior to your highest state of culture as your condition is in advance of the first stages of barbarism.

Men of earth erect temples to their God—­their Deity—­which to them are imposing and grand; but compared to the magnificent structures that rear their towers high into space from those glittering points that attract your eye, they are poor and insignificant.

Yet, as being the highest expression of your intellectual unfolding, we look upon them with admiration, even as you regard the rude attempts of the Egyptians and the earlier races in their grotesquely formed images and temples.

The inhabitants of some of the planets attain a life many times the duration of man’s.  One of the causes of this prolonged existence is the great age and refinement of the planet.  While it is undergoing change, and preparing the vegetable for the animal, and the animal for the mental creation, the conditions that ensue are insalubrious, and conducive to disease and death.  But when the perfection of the natural world is attained—­when it becomes, so to say, spiritualized, and its grosser elements are absorbed—­then the human being can live on its surface arid develop his faculties from century to century.

The thoughtful reader will perceive from this statement that the spirits who have inhabited these superior planets must have attained a far greater perfection than those who have inhabited your earth, and the spiritual existence, or heaven, to which such beings migrate, is in advance of the heavens in which the dwellers of earth are born.

The spiritual heavens correspond to the firmament of the natural world, and thus there are myriads of systems of spiritual worlds.