Modern spiritualism is merely another phase of these ancient customs of a superstitious and ignorant people, who were the dupes of the priest, the magician, and the soothsayer. The priests of Egypt, Persia, China, Syria, and Hindostan pretended to bind the gods to their idols, and make them descend from heaven at their pleasure; they even threatened the sun and moon to reveal the secret mysteries and to shake the foundations of the heavens. Vide 6th Book of Virgil's "AEneid."

To the intelligently educated the blind faith with which the priests of China, India, Syria, and Egypt hold the hundreds of millions as slaves to their will and bidding, is hard to be understood. The great mass of the human family never think beyond their immediate necessities. The education received from their teachers is never questioned. "He that believeth not is damned" is the secret of a power the greatest ever exercised by man over his fellow-man. The disbeliever was hurled with all the anathemas into hell, which was painted as a region of misery and eternal torture. The initiation into the mysteries was a deliverance from the living death of vice, brutality, and misery, the beginning of a new life of reason, virtue, and happiness Moral and divine axioms were inculcated and represented by all kinds of shows and allegorical performances.

With those who have perfect faith, a blind confidence, how easily is the brain acted on! Mental hallucination is so powerfully produced, that the delusion is as easily effected on a multitude as on a single individual. Do not at this day the priests of Buddha and Brahma produce miracles on the minds of millions who never doubted? The essential element to success is faith, implicit, blind faith; if the people were to doubt, no miracles could be produced!

There are elementary forces inherent to special forms of matter, which co-exist with it, when matter changes its form or the forces change their condition; so do we find different phases in the forms of organization, whether organic or inorganic. Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, vitality, are associated with matter in various proportions, giving it definite conditions. In organized matter, as exhibited in animal existence, it is these forces which in various combinations contribute to the functions of the animal economy. Does not the attractive and repulsive condition of matter depend on the relative states of its existence? What is chemical affinity but the preference of one body for another under certain conditions? Sulphuric acid (S + O3) will combine with magnesia, and so remain under favourable circumstances; but the moment it is brought in contact with lime or baryta, it leaves the one and combines with the other. The same laws are manifested in organic existences - there are positive inherent conditions, otherwise the particular forms of matter would not exist.

Does not inorganic matter assume definite forms of crystallization? Is not the same principle exhibited in the structure of plants, as seen in the infinite variety of the leaves and flowers? It is therefore not asking too much of living matter that it should, in accordance with its specific character, produce definite forms. Surely that which we are obliged to admit as being the inherent property of inorganic substances, we cannot deny to superior organizations? Does not the same law of attraction and repulsion govern the planets, hundreds of millions of miles distant from each other? Was it not the disturbance of Uranus in its orbit which caused Leverrier to discover Neptune? Is the minutest or protozoic form of life less subject to these laws? Is it not the particular physical condition of the globe, our earth, which determines a corresponding development in organized beings on its surface?

Man, as a product of this planet, must follow and conform to its hereditary laws; it was these which brought him into being; it is by these that he continues to exist from age to age. From the first germ of vitality on the earth, a mere minute globule, through successive periods, gradual developments took place in accordance with the altered state of the earth itself. Until after vast stages of transitions man appeared, no doubt in a very inferior type; until now we find him investigating the composition of worlds, whose distance is incalculable, by means of the spectrum analysis, and with the same certainty as if the body were within his immediate grasp!

The warning star of the Egyptians, Sirius, a body a hundred times larger than our sun, whose distance is so great that its light takes sixteen years to reach our globe or suns twenty times the distance of Sirius, which is 143,000,000,000,000 of miles distant, are brought on the investigator's table and scrutinized. On the earth itself, the fact of holding intellectual intercourse across oceans and continents with greater rapidity than the world itself revolves on its axis, are marvels which put to the blush all the wonderful works of the ancient priests. Science is the great educator of the human race. She never retrogrades; her advance is steady but sure; she is the cause of truth, and must prevail. The veil of error once raised, ever after it remains exposed to the eternal light of scientific truth.