Physical death is the fulfilling of a natural law everywhere prevailing; a change, which the mutability of all material creations renders necessary, and salutary, and, when received without the prejudices engendered by education, pleasing. Religion has nothing to do with it, and more than that it ought to influence every act of life. No more has religion anything to do with the intercourse of disembodied spirits with those in the form. That also is wholly controlled by laws inherent in the nature of things, and will, when the ridiculous hue and cry raised by sensualistic minds has somewhat abated, resolve itself into a fixed fact having no more direct bearing upon human affairs than any other form of social intercourse. It has taught no new code of morals; it has not overthrown, so much as it has revealed the true state of things. It has revived the spiritual teachings of him by whom the world—called from him Christian—professes to be guided and controlled.

Fanaticism is the law of some minds, and it will display itself in whatever arena they are engaged. In politics the man they vote for is almost a god. In mechanics, they have invented a machine which shall ensure "perpetual motion;" in chemistry, the elixir of life, or a cure for all the ills of human life; in morals, the kingdom of heaven is speedily coming through the intervention of their dead friends.

The truest religion is that which adheres most faithfully to nature's laws; for strive we ever so hard, we must return to them. They are God's will made manifest, and the mind most free from prejudice engendered by false education is the one which secures to itself the most harmony, making possible that removal of "mountains" so often quoted—meaning the inevitable obstacles of spiritual life.

Christ said: "The kingdom of heaven is within you" and he might have added that of hell also. Here is the beginning, if not the ending of all growth and reform. There seems to be a universal tendency or wish to escape from one's self, and most so-called reforms begin at the surface—the ultimate—rather than at the centre. This should be an education to children, teaching them that their temptations are to be dreaded only as they are responded to by something within, and that loses all power with them as they gain self-knowledge and self-control.