Experience is at the same time the surest and the slowest teacher of men.  Wisdom, the crowning glory of humanity, is but an enlarged perception of man’s needs, and how to meet them, based upon individual experience and observation of the effects of natural law upon all.  An individual is an epitome of the world—­society.  Discipline is everywhere considered indispensable to the individual.  Far more is it so to the world of society.  Anarchy and revolution are no more efficient for the body politic than for the individual.  Growth, slow and gradual, aggregation of power and wisdom through the education and enlightenment of its individual members, is the only safe and sure way to permanency and enduring life.

SPIRITUALISM.

In Spiritualism alone is to be found an expression of the religion of Jesus of Nazereth.  It is truly democratic, giving to saint and sinner alike both here, in this life, and after death, an opportunity for redemption.  Its first mission to the world is the proof it gives of a continued existence in which is still experienced all the idiosyncracies which marked the individual in earth life.  This fact has either been ignored by certain classes of minds, or has been taken by them as proof positive of the hellish origin of its phenomena, whereas in this very expression of characteristic life lies its wonderful power and potency.  From long-continued educational influence people out of churches, as well as inside of the influence of their superstitions, have come to idealize death, its awe-inspiring mystery and its strange variety.  It is thought, by them, to be a sudden translation from a lower condition to a higher, wherein, through some divine hocus-pocus, the members of certain so-called “Evangelical” churches, no matter how worldly-minded, and selfish, or however false to their teachings they have been, or how false their lives to the divine ethics taught by the Lord, whose name they assume as their prerogative, that their through tickets to the supernal spheres are assured.  It is believed that death purges them of all their sympathy with and attraction to mortal life, and that they are forever absolved from all their responsibilities, and freed from dependence upon the inter-relationships between the two conditions.  Exactly the reverse is true.  Multitudes of souls only begin their true living, their comprehension of life’s meanings, after death has sifted them out of the ashes and lifeless embers of their mistaken ideas, or vicious indulgences.  Shall these, then, be brought beneath the ban of limitless darkness, and exiled from the “many mansions” of our Heavenly Father’s and Mother’s house?  A tiny rap, untraceable to any material source, a table moved by invisible force, a closed and locked piano skillfully played upon by unseen hands; these were the first links in an endless chain of eternal benefits pouring down from the smiling heavens upon