Subject to the sudden revelations, the breaks in habitual existence, caused by the aspect of death, the touch of love, the flood of music, I never lived, that I remember, what you call a common natural day.  All my days are touched by the supernatural, for I feel the pressure of hidden causes, and the presence, sometimes the communion, of unseen powers.  It needs not that I should ask the clairvoyant whether “a spirit-world projects into ours.”  As to the specific evidence, I would not tarnish my mind by hasty reception.  The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.  Yet it were sin, if indolence or coldness excluded what had a claim to enter; and I doubt whether, in the eyes of pure intelligence, an ill-grounded hasty rejection be not a greater sign of weakness than an ill-grounded and hasty faith.

I will quote, as my best plea, the saying of a man old in years, but not in heart, and whose long life has been distinguished by that clear adaptation of means to ends which gives the credit of practical wisdom.  He wrote to his child, “I have lived too long, and seen too much, to be in credulous.”  Noble the thought, no less so its frank expression, instead of saws of caution, mean advices, and other modern instances.  Such was the romance of Socrates when he bade his disciples “sacrifice a cock to AEsculapius.”

Old Church. You are always so quick-witted and voluble, Free Hope, you don’t get time to see how often you err, and even, perhaps, sin and blaspheme.  The Author of all has intended to confine our knowledge within certain boundaries, has given us a short span of time for a certain probation, for which our faculties are adapted.  By wild speculation and intemperate curiosity we violate His will, and incur dangerous, perhaps fatal, consequences.  We waste our powers, and, becoming morbid and visionary, are unfitted to obey positive precepts, and perform positive duties.

Free Hope. I do not see how it is possible to go further beyond the results of a limited human experience than those do who pretend to settle the origin and nature of sin, the final destiny of souls, and the whole plan of the Causal Spirit with regard to them.  I think those who take your view have not examined themselves, and do not know the ground on which they stand.

I acknowledge no limit, set up by man’s opinion, as to the capacities of man.  “Care is taken,” I see it, “that the trees grow not up into heaven”; but, to me it seems, the more vigorously they aspire, the better.  Only let it be a vigorous, not a partial or sickly aspiration.  Let not the tree forget its root.

So long as the child insists on knowing where its dead parent is, so long as bright eyes weep at mysterious pressures, too heavy for the life, so long as that impulse is constantly arising which made the Roman emperor address his soul in a strain of such touching softness, vanishing from, the thought, as the column of smoke from the eye, I know of no inquiry which the impulse of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue.  In every inquiry, unless sustained by a pure and reverent spirit, he gropes in the dark, or falls headlong.