You may be equal to one spirit, but you are not equal to all spirits.

The difference between one man's knowledge - which certainly is his own, and he has a right to express it - and the knowledge which may be received by the gift of knowledge is, that the one narrow house of knowledge, - if you shut your door by selfishness and pride to the reception of greater knowledge, that one narrow house is the limit; while in the kingdom of knowledge the greater possession is, that you are receptive to the knowledge of all other intelligences who have it. Do not despise the gift because instead of being the result of self-seeking, it is a bestowment.

In the olden time only the knowledge that was born of this gift was valuable. The knowledge of the schools was only external. The outward wonder-worker was too superficial; but he who had the gift of the spirit, whose knowledge came from within, was revered as authority; was considered final.

In Persia, in India, among nations who turn to oracles and mystics, they being possessed of these gifts, it was the only power that governed and wrought the work of the spirit in their midst.

When Lycurgus, intent upon doing his country the greatest possible favor, departed, having fashioned laws that he considered most beneficial for the welfare of the people, he consulted the Oracles, and the gift of knowledge was there indicated in obedience to the mandate of the Oracle. He departed from his own land, leaving the heritage of justice and beneficent laws. Could he have left the gift of knowledge also; could he have bestowed upon his successor the same power which he had consulted, undoubtedly that land, greatest in moral directions of all history, would have preserved its laws inviolable.

But human nature cannot rise above the level of its inspiration and growth, and therefore however wonderful the law may be, until you have obtained the average height of its possession you can by no possibility dwell there.

But says one, " Do you decry the learning of the schools? Is it not well that we shall have education?" We make no doubt that all sources of human knowledge, though they open by devious paths, though they wander through intricate ways, though they are as shifting as the sands of the sea-shore, though the knowledge which, to-day is final is to-morrow super-seded, that still this is the inevitable pathway of human experience. But do not, therefore, say, when another and superior power sweeps into human life, showing a better and different method, that this is impossible.

The fact speaks for itself, that intuition is stronger than reason; that the light of this knowledge which is born of the spirit supercedes the light of the knowledge that is born of intellect, just as the vision of man supercedes the dull sense of touch.

It is the quickening breath. And we doubt not that if the schools and universities of learning (whose treadmill of daily intelligence grinds off the edges of human inspiration | were but to know that it is the intuition after all that makes the well-spring of knowledge, that there would be less of this dullness in the world and more of true inspiration.

Schools and universities of theology have taught mankind that there is no religion. Step by step, from the beginning of the Christian era to the present time, it has been the inevitable result of theological institutions to wear off the fine edge of inspiration upon the daily grindstone of. intellectual pursuit. And from this weary labyrinth, and .from this process of intellectual formulation, you have the epitome of intellectual unbelief in the nineteenth century.

That kind of liberalism that from Harvard and Yale and all theological institutions of this land, and from the broad Church universities of Great Britain, throws out upon the world the fine, aesthetic, cultivated materialism of the nineteenth century; a theology that, with the Bible in one hand and Darwin in the other, expects of its students intellectual gymnastics that are impossible if religion is to be preserved.

To-morrow, or in that coming time that bridges over the abyss between the past and the present, restoring the inspirations that were genuine and cleaving to the sources of knowledge that are divine, you will learn not to un-teach your children, but to teach them. You will learn that growth is knowledge, and that the child who has quickened sources of knowledge that you may not perhaps understand, is still not the child to pass through the usual regime of intellectual and systematic learning. Some children need only to be led; to to let the intuition that is within them make its own opportunities, and let the gifts of the spirit coin the words in which it shall express its ideas and receive the eloquence from the inspiration above.

And just here is a work which Spiritualists most need. There are those in the world who say, " We must have schools for the training of mediums." We make no boast; but in what school has your speaker been trained that you should wish to take away the influence of the spirit world, the careful culture, the inspiration, the knowledge that is theirs, and formulate it to your own level, and make it the dull and dreary treadmill of intellectual pursuit?

When a child of ten years old, we took her from the training of a master who was bigoted and incapable of knowing the meaning of the work of the spirit; and since that time no work has been touched, no book has been read, no system of training pursued from the external stand-point. Her spiritual and her intellectual culture are our own.

Will you have schools for the training of mediums when, for thirty-five years, the spirit world has reared the teachers in this system of knowledge? Will you have schools when Christ said: " Take no heed what ye shall say"? There is in the whole realm of Christendom, perhaps, but one hundred clergymen who dare to obey this mandate of Christ. Will you have schools when, from the inspiration of Luther, of Wesley, and the fervor and fire of early Methodism, the spirit-moving power of the Quakers, the strong light of the Puritans, and the first word of Christianity in the unparalleled beauty of the Sermon on the Mount, you have the expression of the spirit?