as a Divine revelation, and the existence of a God, and as gross sensualists, and immoral in their conduct, in all the relations of life." "These are grave charges; and it is not to be supposed that a brother would prefer them in a foreign land without a cause. What, then, is the cause? If the charges were true, even, it is contrary to the genius of the new dispensation to magnify delinquencies in the neighbour, and much more to do this in a foreign land, where there is little or no opportunity for the accused to be heard in defence. But the great body of Spiritualists in America deny, severally and singularly, the charges preferred against them by Mr. Harris. Each one claims for himself the same right to investigate and determine whether the scriptures are plenary or partial revelations of Divine Truth which Mr. Harris has exercised for himself; but they do not recognize Mr. Harris's proclivities to dictate for their acceptance his peculiar views as Divine Truth; and here is the rock of offence, and the sole ground of his charges. "The Spiritualists' creed, if they have any, respecting the Divine rights and duties of man as to faith, knowledge, and conduct, is that each person shall be permitted to observe, experience, reflect, reason, and judge of the truth for himself. Truth, rather than man, is their oracle. We can conceive of no objections to this, except by those aspiring to be oracles. Spiritualists of America have no inquisitions to try men's faith and conduct-to accept or reject men; but each person who believes that spirits communicate with mortals is called a Spiritualist. Consequently, there may be Spiritualists who are otherwise Pantheists and sensualists, as they may be otherwise grocers or blacksmiths; and so, perhaps, there may be some persons who do not believe in Divine revelations precisely as Mr. Harris teaches them; but what authority does a man derive from these facts to denounce the great body of Spiritualists in America as Pantheists, sensualists, and deniers of Divine revelations? We only put the question, and leave others to answer. "These accusations against Spiritualists are but a duplicate of those the same brother has often preferred against the Universalist denomination, to which he is indebted for the insignia of Reverend, which he cherishes and even uses to sanctify his denunciations of them. "While Brother Harris was settled over the Universalist Society in Elizabethstreet, in this city, some fourteen years ago, more or less, he became infatuated with the revelations which were then being given through Andrew Jackson Davis, and when these revelations were published under the title of "Nature's Divine Revelations," Mr. Harris asked leave of absence from his society to go to Europe for his health, which leave the society generously granted; but instead of going to Europe, Mr. H. went to Ohio and other Western States, lecturing, not for the Divine Revelations of the Bible, but for "Nature's Divine Revelalations," by Andrew Jackson Davis. The society continued to him their leave of absence, and subsequently replaced him by the Rev. E. H. Chapin. Brother Harris subsequently relinquished his order for "Nature's Divine Revelations," and has since denounced it and Mr. Davis as cordially and fully as he has the Universalists and Spiritualists. "Brother Harris subsequently tried to build up a society to sustain his preaching in this city. His meetings were held for some time in the Coliseum. He preached in the Socialists, and afterwards preached them out; and his erratic preaching caused a constant change of hearers, and the meetings there were not sustained. He subsequently commenced preaching in the Stuyvesant Institute, and while laboring here he tried to acquaint himself with the dynamics of matter and mind, and to show the possibility of spirit intercourse. During this time, one Dr. Scott, who had been a baptist minister, discovered that singular phenomena occurred in the presence of a Mrs. Benedict, then residing in Auburn, N. Y. In the presence of Mrs. Benedict slight raps occurred, and St. Paul purported to communicate. The idea that St. Paul could and would condescend to speak through a mortal, much excited Mr. Harris, and arrangements were made for Mrs. Benedict and Dr. Scott to come to Mr. Harris in Brooklyn, and deliver the oracles of St. Paul to twelve chosen persons, and, if possible, that St. Paul should develop or re-model Mr. Harris, so that he should be henceforth Paul's oracle to the world. Dr. Scott also became infatuated with the ambition of being a medium for some of the Apostles, and they fancied that St. John accepted his offer; and they supposed that St. Paul and St. John and other Apostles henceforth commucated through them. "It would make this article too lengthy to give the minutiae of the dramatic performances to which these men subjected themselves to secure these mediatorial offices. It is sufficient to say that they worked themselves into the persuasion that they had been chosen by God and the Apostles as the mediums for their oracles to mankind, and under the flattering unction of this persuasion, they set about gathering together the elect, and travelling westward to a land sufficiently pure for the influx and efflux of Divine wisdom. They induced a small company to take up their beds and follow them to Mountain Cove, Virginia, where they made purchases and settled. Here they established the Mountain Cove Journal, and through its columns they gave, as they supposed, supernal wisdom to the world; and it was very generally conceded that it might be supernal wisdom, since no mortal could comprehend it. In about two years or less, we believe, this community broke up in great confusion, amidst the criminations, and recriminations, and denunciations which have generally attended the various changes in Brother Harris's enterprises and views. Mr. Harris then returned to this city, and the Spiritualists received him as it becomes a father to receive a prodigal son, and invited him to lecture for them, and procured the hall in the Medical College for that purpose. Here he delivered sume of the most scorching discourses on the Scriptures as a Divine revelation, and the Christian church generally, to which we ever listened. They were quite too strong for those whom he now denounces as rejecting the Scriptures as a Divine revelation. Nevertheless, we heard him gladly, not as an oracle, and not for his censoriousness, but for his acknowledged eloquence and zeal in what he appeared to think was right and true. After a few months had elapsed, and the mortification from the failure of bis apostolic enterprise to Mountain Cove had subsided, he seemed to come more and more to himself, and preached some excellent discourses to the Spiritualists at Dudworth's Academy. Finally, his prevailing ambition to have a church began to pester him, and grew into an open demand, to which the Spiritualists did not accede, and the Mountain Cove persuasion again took control of him, and he concluded that the Divine love and wisdom could not penetrate the cloud of evil spirits and fow down even through him to the reprobate minds, as he alleged in some of his last discourses, in the plainest terms, and at the same time called then to be, which congregated to hear him at that place. This he said to them on the few pure minds to go out and follow him and help to build up the kingdom of God. Mr. Harris and some others, thus separated themselves from the main body of Spiritualists in this city, and they met afterwards in the chapel of the University, under the assumed name of The New Church,' and in his teachings he even out-swedenborged Swendenborg himself, much to the annoyance of many of his disciples, who feigned to know something of the philosophy of the Swedish seer. He continued to speak there to a small company of admirers until he became persuaded (and so said), that he had been developed above their plane of comprehension, and that the Lord had prepared a man to receive the mantle of that plane of teaching, and that he had been instructed to soar aloft and go to Europe, and disseminate the supernal wisdom there. Subsequent to the time when he withdrew himself from Dodworth's Academy, he took the persuasion that the higher spirits were constantly around him warding off the evil ones, and that they were trying to develop him into a higher plane; and that to do so, it was necessary that he should keep his bed, and he did so. He ate but little, and that little was brought to his bed; and in hed he wrote, or rather dictated to his amanuensis, what appeared in his publications. He was persuaded that he acted in accordance with the dictation of the apostles, Christ, and the very God, and only got up when he thought they so impressed him, which was only on Sundays, to preach. "Thus we have, with pain and sorrow, responded to the demands of the article from the London Critic in giving a very brief history of Brother Harris, during some fifteen years. We have not done this to injure him, far from it, but in the defence of truth, and as an illustration of a prevalent psychical phenomenon which is often mistaken for spirit-influence, and to call Brother Harris's attention to the changes which have come over his mind, to the end that he may be less positive in his opinion as to the divinity of his persuasion; and, above all, be less censorious of the brethren who are not able to follow him in his sudden changes and chimerical enterprises. If also this narrative shall suggest to his friends the injury they do him by falling into his persuasions, and thus binding him more strongly in psychical chains, we shall be thankful. "Mr. Harris is not to be blamed for his unfortunate organization. He is impulsive, and often speaks without consideration. He has the virtue of thinking at the time that he is right, and that he does and says all in the service of God. "In a self-consecrating spirit, Mr. Harris has, as it seems to us, sacrificed his manhood for a supposed Divine influx, and he is reaping the consequences of that error. It is a gross mistake we think, in Mr. Harris to suppose that he is a living proof of the danger, mentally and physically, of cultivating the science of Spiritualism. On the contrary, he is a living proof of the danger of a too prevalent hot-house process of making mesmeric subjects, and of the practice of women magnetizing men. We have been acquainted with several cases of this kind, and the uniform result shows the practice to be a disorderly one. By it the feminine qualities are engrafted into the masculine, which sooner or later unmans the man. It excites the sensor nerves at the surface, by which physical impressions are permanently fixed upon the brain, deranging its normal functions, and ruling the whole man. Will and judgment are subjugated to mere sensation, and the man becomes like a tender, sensitive plant, which expands or shrivels up at the approach of the slighest influences. Man is thus unfitted for ordinary duties; his mental and physical energies are overcome by these sensational influences, which often cause the unfortunate subject to become censorious, complaining, whining, and pining away, as by some fell disease. And yet Spiritualism has suffered, and is daily suffering, from the lack of discrimination in these matters. 'Mr. Harris has never examined spirit facts to any considerable extent through different mediums, but has confined his spirit-investigations chiefly to himself, and has subjected himself to these disorderly influences, and accepted their results as a boon from the highest and sweetest angels. This, with his peculiar organization, accounts for his censoriousness, and for his speaking in favor of Spiritualism in one lecture, and against it in the next. True spiritmediums are seldom, if ever, made by artificial processes. Mesmerism, we believe, always defiles them. "What, then, is the answer to our question as to the cause of Mr. Harris's denunciation of Spiritualists in America? First, the cause is subjective rather than objective. It is in himself rather than in those whom he accuses. He assumes to say that those who do not accept his interpretation of and teachings concerning, the Bible, reject it. He also assumes to say that spirits and mortal who do not indorse his disorderly fantasies, are sensual and evil. "We answer finally that the cause is inherent in Brother Harris's organization, but aggravated by the blending of incongruous spheres or influences through a disordered magnetization, excited by censorious indulgence against rivals and sceptics. His judgment is thus impaired and subject to impulses, with an indomitable self-will and lust for leadership. "It has pained us much to write this article relating to a Brother with whom we have long been intimate, and one whom we have ever cherished and highly esteemed, notwithstanding his idiosyncracies, but the accusations have made it imperative that we should thus write, or yield truth and duty to personal regards, which we cannot consent to do." INSTANCES OF THE DYNAMICS OF PRAYER. WHEN one of Count Zinzendorf's children lay on her deathbed, her mother was absent; and the servants apprehending that the babe would die without her mother again beholding her, the Count asked the Saviour to keep her alive; expressly adding, however, that he knew not what he asked, and that he was resigned to the event, whatever it might be. At the same instant the violence of the symptoms ceased, and the child remained till the first of December, the day when the mother returned, in a state that no longer appeared at all alarming. The moment, however, that the mother arrived, the child relapsed into its former state. The day after the mother's return the child died. When the Count arrived at St. Thomas, the missionary brethren there had been in prison three months. The interposition of the Count obtained the brethren's release; and, when they were brought to him, he kissed their hands on receiving them, and that, before the officer who conducted them, to testify his respect for these pretended culprits. "The day of my arrival," wrote Zinzendorf to his brethren in Europe, "my brethren, who knew nothing whatever of my voyage, but thought they stood in need of me, had prayed the Saviour to send me to them. To us there is nothing extraordinary in such occurrences, we are pretty well used to them." frame. It Jean de Watteville had a childlike confidence in our Saviour's promise to hear his children's prayers. Of this he often had experience: one example we will here offer. A married sister became extremely ill at Hernhut. The physician had given up all hope, and her husband was plunged in grief. Watteville visited the patient, found her joyfully expecting her removal, and took his leave, after having encouraged her in this happy was, at that time, still the practice for the unmarried brethren, on Sunday evenings, to go about singing hymns before the brethren's houses with an instrumental accompaniment. Watteville made them sing some appropriate hymns under the window of the sick sister; at the same time praying in his heart that the Lord would be pleased, if He thought good, to restore her to health. He conceived a hope of this, so full of sweetness and faith, that he sang, with confidence, these lines: Cross, upon Calv'ry lifted high, When, at the last, I pant for breath, My voice returns to praise the Lord. What was the astonishment of those who surrounded the bed of this dying sister, when they saw her sit up, and join with a tone of animation, in singing the last line: "My voice returns to praise the Lord." To his great amazement and delight he found her, on reascending to her chamber, quite well. She recovered perfectly, and not till five and thirty years after did he attend her earthly tabernacle to its resting place. Luther attributed his recovery from severe illness, in several instances, to the efficacy of the Church's prayers, and the prayers of his friends in his behalf. Thus, to the elector, John Frederic, who had sent him medical aid, he writes, thanking him, but attributing his cure to the prayers of Pomeranius :-"I could gladly have seen that our dear Lord Jesus had graciously removed me, for I am now of little use on the earth. But Pomeranius, by his persevering intercession in the Church, defeated my expec tation, and I am now, thank God, better." Luther's friend Myconius, lying apparently at the point of death, wrote to Luther a farewell letter. Luther wrote a letter to him in reply, in which he says, "May the Lord never permit me to hear of your taking your passage while I remain behind, but make the survivor. So I ASK, AND SUCH IS MY WILL, AND MY WILL BE DONE. AMEN. Because this will seeks the glory of God's name, certainly not my own pleasure or advantage." you Ι Myconius so fully believed that his life was restored by the prayers of Luther, that six years after, when again at the point of death, he wrote to Luther not to detain him by his prayers. I pray him," he says, to dismiss me with his blessing, yet so, that the Lord's will may be done." The following is from Fuller's Church History: Speaking of Edward VI., he says, "When crowned king, his goodnesse increased with his greatnesse, constant in his pri vate devotions, and as successfull as fervent therein, witness this particular: Sir John Cheeke, his schoolmaster, fell desperately sick, of whose condition the king carefully enquired every day; at last my physician told him that there was no hope of his life, being given over by them for a dead man. 'No,' saith King Edward, he will not die at this time, for this morning I begged his life from God in my prayers and obtained it,' which accordingly came to pass; and he soon after, against all expectation, wonderfully recovered. This was attested by the old Earl of |