man from the beginning of our knowledge of the world.  While a perception of beauty and harmony is latent in the minds of men, it is the last of the attributes of the soul to develop.  The figured semblances of God, hewn out of stone or wood by the primitive races, are mostly hideous inventions of the evil thoughts of evil minds.  From the terrifying African God, “Mumbo-Jumbo,” to the artistic bronze representations of the Deity of the nations of the East all are marked with awe-enforcing ferocity and ugliness, instead of by the soul-inspiring lineaments of love and beauty.  Tremblingly the minds of men have groped their way along through the mazes of ignorance and enforced darkness to a degree of personal liberty; and every picture painted, every bit of sculpture achieved in the interest of harmony and beauty is testimony to the persistency of the inspiration vouchsafed to man of the Creator’s love of beauty, and of the final state of harmony to be reached by humanity.

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL.

“All evil is only undeveloped good” has come to be the “shibboleth” of not only the Spiritualists, but of many other of the latter-day cults.  It sounds fine, beautiful, and is—­Praise God!—­in a large sense, true.  It is a beautiful reaction from the ancient blasphemy taught by the priests and pastors anent hell and the devil.  The comforting belief that the above quoted statement settles the whole matter is accepted and believed in.  Since the supposed dethronement of “Auld Hornie,” as the Scotch named him, as head devil, it has not been thought necessary to give the matter much if any consideration.

Mediums, especially, have gladly ignored the fact of the possibility of there often being in their seances the very presence of potent and powerful evil influences.

Spiritualism has flung wide the doors and given ignorant, and undeveloped humanity an equal opportunity with the refined, and good to express themselves.  It is thus the only truly democratic religion ever made known on this planet!  It recognizes all human beings, good and bad, as the children of one and the same Father, and that not one can be lost from the hand of God!

The peculiar people who have developed the strange power of mediatorship between this material world and the plane of existence known as the spiritual world have always been helped and sustained in their great work by their invisible friends and appointed spirit guardians, or they could never have carried forward their important mission to the people of this earth.

Regardless of all the efforts of the enemies and traducers of Spiritualism, the spread of the knowledge of the unfolding spiritual philosophy has been and is marvelous; and the establishment of the fact of man’s existence, continued after physical death, through varied phenomena, is in itself the proof of its being the work, not of Satan, but of a beneficent God.  And why not?  The Creator of us all must know his earth-children’s needs for their further evolution and growth!