Nature wields her powers of fire and flood and devastating epidemics mercilessly; she constantly rids herself of her superfluous offspring, and forces them to a new environment in her invisible realms, through which they pass, gaining more or less by the experience and from which each must emerge, and continue to evolve and grow according to the law of his own being.

SUPERSTITIONS.

Fear of the unknown has given birth to all the superstitions that have afflicted the minds of ignorant and unthinking people.  Few people escape some form of superstition.  For instance, the silly sayings, anent the moon, “Fair Priestess of the Night.”  It is unlucky to see it in its newness—­so and so—­when the real fact is, it is a merciful Providence that permits us to see it in any of its phases, over the left shoulder or over the right, or through the glass, or in any way at all.  There is nothing more “lucky” or glorious than to have good eyesight of one’s own, with which to behold this and all the other beauties of nature.  The man who chanced to be passing under a ladder just at the moment when a workman half-way up let fall a bucket of paint which struck and deluged him, had some reason for thinking it “unlucky” to go under instead of around such an impediment to travel.  But not once in a lifetime would such a thing happen to any one, and it is impossible to imagine what going under ladders or meeting loads of barrels, or funerals, or opening umbrellas in the house, instead of outside of it, or any of the hundreds of silly, puerile, fool superstitions that have sprung from no one knows where, and that have no scientific meaning, and no earthly bearing upon the realities of any life have “to do with the case.”  These are all the offsprings of minds tinctured by fear of they know not what, and which are peddled around and handed down religiously from one generation to another, to keep alive a sensationalism whose tendency is to blind those who accept them to the great living fact of God’s providence which is and has ever been ruling the lives of his earthly children.

SELF-JUSTICE.

While self-abnegation is a valued experience in the spiritual discipline which goes to the formation of a perfect character, the reaction where the ego posits itself upon the law of justice to self, is in reality the beginning of salvation to the individual.  But preachment from any source cannot avail with any soul deeply immersed in work for others.  There is too much in array against it.  The established heredity concerning the first duty of woman is of itself alone a formidable influence to be overcome; then either the real needs, or the selfishness of others, present obstacles beyond the power of loving, sensitive souls to resist.  The change must come from the consciousness of the individual of her own needs along these lines, which alone can arouse one to sufficient will, and purpose to be true to one’s self if the heavens fall.  This is first, and above all other considerations.