The book of Futurity, which has been wisely closed to every mortal eye, now opens its pages to many sons of the earth. Among the workings of the inner life within us, which we may experience but cannot explain, are there any more remarkable than those mysterious moral influences constantly exercised either for attraction or repulsion, by one human being over another? Modern astronomy profits by the works of ancient astrology, and kicks it out of sight. During the dissolution of the Etheric Double the darkness of our ignorance beginning to be dispelled, there are many things we can see. It is through the throbs of dissolution that horizons of vaster and profounder knowledge are drawn on, bursting upon our mental vision and becoming with every hour plainer to our inner eye. The nearer some people approach death, the brighter becomes their long lost memory, and the more correct the previsions because the unfoldment of inner faculties increases as life-blood becomes more stagnant. Modern science and spiritualism are two opposite poles. Life and death are as much of a mystery to the man of science, as they are to the spiritualist and the profane unbeliever. Materialistic scientists keep unweaving the rainbow. Unconscious necromancers reject every other philosophy save their own. Death, before whose majestic tranquillity so many shudder with fear, has no terrors. And yet people make too much fuss over death, and too little over the birth of every new candidate for it.

In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be . . . going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows. . . except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further.