Among spirits of the third class there are some who are inactive and neutral, not doing either good or evil. Others, on the contrary, take pleasure in evil and are delighted when they find an opportunity of tormenting men who are doing wrong. Others, again, are frivolous, foolish, fantastic and mischievous rather than wicked, and tricky rather than positively malicious, amusing themselves by mystifying the human being on whom they are able to act, causing them various petty annoyances for their own diversion. They are inclined to evil and make it the object of all their thought and activities. As evil spirits, they give to men perfidious counsel, stir up discord and discontent and assume every sort of mask in order to more effectually deceive the souls in the body, besetting those whose character is weak enough to yield to their suggestions and who they can draw aside from the path of happiness, rejoic- ing when they are able to retard their advancement by causing them to succumb under the appointed trials of Earth Life. Evil spirits are always revealed by their communications for every spirit who in his communication betrays an evil intention may be relegated to the lower order, and every evil thought suggested to our mind comes from spirits of this order.

They see the happiness enjoyed by good spirits and this sight causes them perpetual torment and they experience all the agonies produced by envy and jealousy. They also preserve the remembrance and perfection of the suffering of earth life and this impression is often more painful than the reality, and they suffer both, in fact, from the ills they have thus endured and from those which they have caused to be endured by others, and as these sufferings endure for a long time they believe themselves to be destined to suffer forever, and God, for their punishment wills that they should believe this, and as written above, spirits of this order may be recognized by their language for the trivial expressions of spirits as by men is always an indication of moral if not intellectual inferiority, and their communication through mediums or certain unsophisticated clairvoyants show the baseness of their intentions, though they may try to impose upon the medium by speaking with an appearance of reason and propriety they are able to keep up this false appearance and end by betraying their real quality. These spirits are addicted to all vice engendered by vile and degrading passions, sensuality, cruelty, hypocrisy, etc.

They commit evil for its own cause and are devilish without any definite motive, and form a hatred for all that is good, and generally choose their victim from among honest and worthy mediums who have no knowledge of their powers or existence. In plain words, they are a test of humanity, being ignorant, mischievous, and addicted to mocking them loudly in everything and replying to their questions without paying any attention to the truth. They delight in causing petty annoyances, raise false hopes in petty joys, in misleading clairvoyants and people in mystifications and trickery, and these evil spirits have vulgarly been called devils, etc. In their communications through mediums their lan-guage is sometimes witty and fatuous, and they are quick to grasp absurdities of man, and things on which they comment with sarcastic sharpness. They will borrow distinguished names and are fond of doing it because by this means they can deceive mankind. Again their knowledge is often considerable, but they imagine themselves to know considerably more than they really do, for having made a. certain amount of progress from various points of view, their language has an air of gravity that may easily give a false impression as to their capacities and enlightenment, but their ideas are generally nothing more than the reflections of the prejudice and false reasoning of their earth life, their statements often containing a mixture of truths and absurdities in the midst of which traces of presumption, pride, jealousy and obstinancy from which they have not yet freed themselves are plainly active and perceptible.

Again, they are not sufficiently advanced to take any part in doing good, nor are some of them bad enough to be active in committing evil, for they incline sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other, never raising above the ordinary level of the earth bound spirits, either in point of morality or of intelligence and are strongly attached to things of the Earth Plane, whose gross satisfaction they regret. There are also noisy and boisterous spirits who do not, strictly speaking, form a distinct class in virtue and their personal qualities, as they may belong to all classes of the third order, and often manifest their presence by production of phenomena perceptible to the senses, such as taps, the movement and displacing of abnormal bodies, the agitation of the air, etc., which among the Hindus is termed "Objective Change." Spirits of this nature are more evil than any other class or grade of spirits. They are the particular agents in determining the vicissitudes of the elements of the earth.

They approach the air, water, fire and the various bodies in the entrails of the earth, and when these bodies present certain phenomena of character and intention and intelligence, this phenomena should not be attributed to a mere fortuitous and physical cause as all spirits are able to produce physical phenomena or objective change. Spirits of an elevated degree easily leave this phenomena to those of the lower order, who are more apt for action upon matter than things of intelligence, when they judge it to be useful to produce physical manifestations such as death raps, thundering noises around the bed and in the room of a person whose time of death has already been fixed. Spirits of this grade are employed for this work and while there are many wise people, so-called, who are skeptic in regard to the death raps, warnings, etc., there is absolutely no question of these phenomena as no human soul has ever left the physical body without the writing having appeared somewhere at some time and in some place upon the wall or, in other words, there has been a warning of their death sent and given by these spirits; but if we are too busy or too ignorant to know these things when they come, the fault is our own.

Predominance of the spirits of the second degree over matter; their desire of excellence and their qualities and their power for good are proportionate to the degree at which they have arrived. Some of them possess scientific knowledge, others have acquired wisdom and charity; the more~ advanced among them combine knowledge with moral excellences. Not being yet completely dematerialized, they perceive the traces of their corporeal existence, more or less strongly marked, according to their rank - traces of which are seen either in their mode of expressing themselves, in their habits, or even in some cases in the characteristic eccentricities and hobbies still retained by them, and but for these weaknesses and imperfections they would be able to pass into the category of spirits of the first order.

They have acquired the comprehension of the idea of God and of infinity, and already share the felicity of the higher spheres. They find their happiness both in the accomplishment of good and in the prevention of evil. The affection by which they are united affords them ineffable delight, troubled neither by envy, remorse nor any other of the evil passions which make the torment of spirits of lower degree; but they have still to undergo the discipline of trial until they have completed the work of their purification. As spirits, they infuse good and noble thoughts into the minds of men, turn them from the paths of evil, protect those whose course of life renders them worthy of their aid, and neutralize by their suggestions the influence of lower spirits on the minds of those who do not willingly yield to the evil counsels of the latter.

The human beings in whom they are incarnated are upright and benevolent; they are actuated neither by pride, selfishness, nor ambition; they feel neither hatred, rancour, envy, nor jealousy, and do good for its own sake. To this order belongs the spirit commonly designated in the popular beliefs by the names of good genu, protecting genu, good spirits. In periods of ignorance and superstition men have regarded them as beneficent divinities.

"The Hindu Adepts"

We recognise alone, in the unreal, That Astral power exists,

All matter is at strife, And all material things at war with life, So, quite discarding interest in these, Abandoning the field to those who please, What we call "Spirit Power" seek we to attain, And scourge the flesh with all its fancies vain.

- Dr. de Laurence.

"O death, where is thy sting"? "O grave. where is thy vicforu"?