The spiritual life consists of states and conditions rather than locations, places, and those things pertaining to time and sense. The conditions of human life which are here imperfect are not necessarily changed instantly by the transition called death; and he who supposes that he will escape individually from his mental or moral foibles merely by the hand of death, is mistaken.

The conditions of human life present a most singular picture to one viewing them from spiritual existence. Physical infirmities which are often the result of wanton indulgence and appetite, and in nearly every instance as much the consequence of individual carelessness and reprehensible selfishness as are the moral ills, are treated with the greatest tenderness and the greatest skill brought to bear to cure them. But just so soon as you enter the moral realm, as soon as you cross the boundary line between physical infirmity and moral ills, no judgments are too harsh, no censure too bitter; and not only the condemnation and censure, but the hand of physical law, and that which is misnamed justice, are employed to put out of existence the moral malefactor.

There are no forms of physical disease where it is lawful to put a man to death, but the extreme penalty of the law is visited upon the extreme moral infirmity.

In spirit life this certainly is not reversed, but he is considered more unfortunate who is morally blind, morally deaf, or morally infirm in any direction, than he who has the worst form of physical disease; for the physical disease is of the body; the moral disease is of the mind and spirit, and requires, such physicians as are capable of understanding and healing the same. Many of your philanthropists, to their credit be it said, have risen above the trammels of narrow, human judgment and the coldness of narrow, human justice, and have applied the same reasoning to moral obliquity and mental diseases that they apply to physical diseases.

Instead of jails with their startling and fearful revelations on one hand, and the house reared in the name of Christ on the other, there should be moral asylums extending their broad and sunny corridors through the length and breadth of your land, and he who is a moral delinquent should be taken in charge by the moral physicians and healed of his infirmity.

In the realm of the spirit, where physical life and human property are not all in all; where the thief is considered as more important than the thieving, and the murderer more important than the murder; where the laws of society require that souls shall be preserved instead of lands, dwelling and gold, the question at issue becomes not one of property and physical life, but one of moral elevation and the healing or cure of mental or moral maladies that undermine the well-being of society.

Time was in human history when he who had the power to govern, with a sufficient number of men could lawfully, by the might which was called right, take possession of neighboring castles and estates. This was the law of feudal times.

Time was when your forefathers were plunderers by the very right of their physical strength, and each castle was a fortress, and every ruler of a petty dukedom a highwayman. Time is, when under the ban of the law, and under the sheltering care of the judiciary, you are allowed to perform deeds that would seem to the eye of the spirit like highway robbery; but it is a different name, which comes with a license and a permit and through the formula of legal sanction. In the eye of the spirit it is none the less the law of might instead of right.

While petty criminals, suffering an actual disease, are re-legated to dungeon cells, this crime which society permits receives but few restraints, and there are few who stand up in the place of God and censure that which is the basis of the moral obliquity in the world.

The kleptomaniac, who is unfortunately disposed to possess him or herself of small things and trifles that belong to another, if it extends to millions, is not considered a thief nor kleptomaniac, but it is only a natural and lawful extension of business enterprise. When Christians, and in this utilitarian age Christian ministers recognize boards of trade, stock exchanges, as legitimate places for the pursuit of business enterprise, and censure gambling hells and places where men, under another name, practice at games of chance, there is little opportunity for the healer to be abroad in the world who cures mankind of the fondness for extravagance and miraculous fortunes, and the fondness of becoming possessed, at whatever cost, of another's wealth.

The sources of rivers are very small. They are scattered far among the mountains, and rise invisibly; but at last the stream becomes swollen, and in times of deluge the valleys are overflowed and great destruction ensues. Every one deprecates the deluge, but no one pauses to study the unseen and silent mountain stream. In human society that which crops out in crime and startles communities as striking instances of moral obliquity, has its well springs and sources in the invisible. In these little, small springs of love of speculation; in this that is called individual enterprise; in that Yankee thrift that over-rides everything and seeks the almighty dollar at whatever cost; in that Anglo-Saxon ambition that over sea and land seeks to extend its empire though nations perish and though the aborigines are wiped out by the hand of slaughter. Remember there can be no overflow in the valleys without this deluge from the mountain stream. And you who rest securely in your particular work, conscious perhaps that no overflow will come, may be startled by the water-spout that bursts upon your hillside; by the sudden storm that innundates the valley. The neighbor, the brother, the sister, goes astray without seemingly an adequate cause, and you wonder at this; but you need not wonder. The whole world is filled with that which strikes weak natures and expresses itself in them. You may be strong enough to withstand, or clever enough to conceal, or have other methods of evading either the cause or the penalty of the wrong doing. But thieving, as such, under the ban of the law is not any worse, nor can it in the eye of the spirit be viewed differently, than that which receives the sanction of the law, if it be to take that which rightfully belongs to another; and until this is rectified there can be no need for a line drawn between the morally good and the morally evil of earth.