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THE END AND AIM OF SPIRITUAL INTERCOURSE. BY JUDGE EDMONDS.

THERE is no topic connected with this subject less thoroughly understood than this, even by firm believers in the Intercourse, and even my conceptions of it, imperfect as they must necessarily be, can hardly be detailed within the limits of this paper. I can attempt only to refer briefly to a few of the more important

considerations:

1. No man or woman has probably ever lived who has not at some time felt a yearning yet once again to hold communion with some loved one whom death has removed from sight; and this prayer, so instinctive and so universal with the whole family of man, is now, in the beneficence of a Divine Providence, answered more specifically and more generally than ever before known. And the first thing demonstrated to us is that we can commune with the spirits of the departed; that such communion is through the instrumentality of persons yet living; that the fact of mediumship is the result of physical organization; that the kind of communion is affected by moral causes, and that the power, like all our other faculties, is possessed in different degrees, and is capable of improvement by cultivation.

2. It is also demonstrated that that which has been believed in all ages of the world, and in all religions, namely: intercourse between man in the mortal life, and an intelligence in the unseen world beyond the grave-after having passed through the phases of revelation, inspiration, oracles, magic, incantation, witchcraft, clairvoyance, and animal magnetism, has in this age culminated in a manifestation which can be proved and understood; and, like every other gift bestowed upon man, it is capable of being wielded by him for good or perverted to evil.

3. That which has thus dealt with man in all time is not, as some have supposed, the direct voice of the Creator nor of the Devil, as a being having an independent existence, and a sovereignty in the universe of God, nor of angels, as a class of beings having a distinct creation from the human family, but of the spirits of those who have like us lived upon earth in the mortal form.

4. These things being established, by means which show a settled purpose and intelligent design, they demonstrate man's immortality, and that in the simplest way, by appeals alike to his reason, to his affections, and to his senses. They thus show

that they whom we once knew as living on earth do yet live, after having passed the gates of death, and leave in our minds the irresistible conclusion, that if they thus live we shall. This task Spiritualism has already performed on its thousands and its tens of thousands--more, indeed, in the last ten years, than by all the pulpits in the land-and still the work goes bravely on. God speed it! for it is doing what man's unaided reason has for ages tried in vain to do, and what, in this age of infidelity, seemed impossible to accomplish.

5. Thus, too, is confirmed to us the Christian religion, which so many have questioned or denied. Not, indeed, that which sectarianism gives us, nor that which descends to us from the dark ages, corrupted by selfishness or distorted by ignorance, but that which was proclaimed through the spiritualism of Jesus of Nazareth in the simple injunction-"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment; and the second is like unto it-Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.'

6. As by the inspiration through a foundling of the Nile there was revealed to man the existence of one God over all, instead of the many deities he was then worshiping; and as by the inspiration of Him who was born in a manger, there was next revealed man's immortal existence beyond the grave, of which even the most enlightened had then but a faint idea, so now through the lowly of the earth comes a further revelation, confirmatory of those, and adding the mighty truth, what is the existence in which that immortality is to be spent.

Throughout all the manifestations-in every form and in every language-whatever the discrepancies, uncertainties, and contradictions on other topics, on this of the nature of man's future existence, all coincide and harmonize. It comes in broken fragments of scattered revelations, here a little and there a little, part through one and part through another, but forming when gathered together a sublime whole, from which we can surely learn the nature and condition of the life on which we shall enter after this shall have ended.

Much

This, as I understand it, is the great end and object of the movement, all else being merely incidental to it. But it has only begun, and its progress is slow; not from want of power to communicate, but from want of capacity to comprehend. that has already been revealed, has not from this cause been received even by the most advanced Spiritualists, and of course not given to the world. But the work is going on; more is added day by day, and it will not be long before enough will be received by all, to open to their conception a knowledge of our future

existence, whose value no man can calculate, whose effects no man can imagine.

7. Enough, however, has already been given to show that man's destiny is PROGRESS, onward, upward, from his birth to eternity. Circumstances may retard but cannot interrupt this destiny, and man's freedom is that he may accelerate or retard, but he cannot prevent it. He may hasten it, as did one whose life on earth had been devoted to doing good to his fellows, and who said to me that he had passed away in the full consciousness of the change, had found himself surrounded and welcomed by those whom he had aided while on earth, and had paused not one moment in the sphere of Remorse; or he may, by a life of sin and selfishness, retard it for a period long enough to satisfy the vengeance even of an angry Deity-if such a thing can be.

8. Our progress is to be alike in knowledge, in love, and in purity. Alike in all it must be. And any circumstance which causes us in any one of these elements to lag behind the advance of the others is sure to bring unfortunate consequences in its train, though not always unhappiness. So clear, so universal is this injunction to progress in all three of these elements, that the heresies which spring up among us from our imperfect knowledge of them need give us no alarm. While the command is "Love ye one another," so ever attendant upon it is that other, "Be ye pure, even as your Father in Heaven is pure."

Incidental to these more important points are many minor considerations on which I cannot now dwell. By a careful attention they will all be found consistent with these weightier matters. Distorted sometimes by the imperfection of the mediums through which the intercourse comes, and sometimes perverted by the passions of those who receive it, carefully considered and patiently studied until understood, I can safely assert, after nearly nine years' earnest attention to the subject, that there is nothing in Spiritualism that does not directly tend to the most exalted private worth and public virtue.

True, to some it is a mere matter of curiosity, and to others a philosophy; but to many it is now, and to all, in the end will be a religion, because all religion is the science of the future life, and because it never fails to awaken in the heart that devotion which is at once a badge and an attribute of our immortality.

"But we shall never marry, neither one or the other of us; we shall go on apart and alone, till the next world. Perhaps she will come to me then, I may have her in my heart there."-John Halifax, p. 167.

SPIRITUALISM IN THE CHURCH OF THE
UNITED BRETHREN.

By the Author of "Confessions of a Truth Seeker."

THERE is much in the character and history of the Church of United Brethren, or Moravians, which, if considered, cannot fail to excite the interest and sympathy of earnest and thoughtful men, and especially of all those who profess the reformed faith, to whatever Christian denomination they may belong. Mr. Wilberforce, in his well-known work on Christianity, describes the Brethren as "a Body of Christians, who have perhaps, excelled all mankind in solid and unequivocal proofs of the love of Christ, and of the most ardent, and active, and patient zeal in his service. It is a zeal tempered with prudence, softened with meekness, soberly aiming at great ends, by the gradual operation of well-adapted means, supported by a courage which no danger can intimidate, and a quiet constancy which no hardships can exhaust."

The ancestors of the United Brethren had been a church of martyrs for many ages before the Reformation. They gave their testimony against the evils and corruptions of the Church, and maintained it faithfully even unto death. They performed their church worship in their own tongue, and never gave the Bible out of their own hands. Their Church lays claim to Apostolical succession, and certainly exhibits many Apostolic virtues;-and their history proved that they retained many of the Apostolic gifts. Among their confessors and martyrs they reckon John Huss, and Jerome of Prague. So great was their reverence for the Scriptures, that when in the fifteenth century the bloody hand of persecution struck at them to exterminate them, they kindled midnight fires in the thickest forests, and assembled around them to read the Word; and in the deep and solemn silence offer up their heart-felt prayers to God.

About the year 1470, they availed themselves of the newlydiscovered art of printing, to publish in the Bohemian language a translation of the whole Bible, Wickliffe's excepted the first translation of it that we have upon record into any European tongue.

In the year 1722, the Church of the Brethren was raised, as it were from the dead, by a persecution intended to crush its last remnant in Bohemia. Some families flying from thence, found refuge on the estates of Count Zinzendorf, in Lusatia, where they built a humble village called Hernhut, (signifying the Watch of

the Lord) which soon became the principal settlement of the Brethren. Their numbers gradually increased, and they have now various small congregations throughout Germany, as well as in Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Holland, North America, and Great Britain. They were the first Protestant Church to send out Missionaries to the heathen, and they have continued to be emphatically the Missionary Church. Such was the devotedness of their first Missionaries that they had determined to sell themselves for slaves in order that they might have an opportunity of preaching the Gospel to the Africans, should they find no other way to accomplish their purpose. In the same spirit, one of their first Missionaries to Greenland writes, "There was no need of much time nor expense for our equipment. The congregation consisted chiefly of poor exiles who had not much to give, and we ourselves had nothing but the clothes on our backs." Missionaries to Greenland travelled to Copenhagen on foot, and when told that in Greenland they could get no timber with which to build themselves a house, "then," said they, "we will dig a hole in the earth and lodge there."

us,

These

Such were the men among whom occurred the remarkable manifestations we are about to relate. As their historian tells "The congregation, of which the Church then consisted, had for its germ the choice of Bohemia and Moravia. A great part of them were witnesses who had resisted even to blood, and even to tortures; who had seen with joy the spoiling of their goods, and in whom the spirit of their ancestors lived again. With them were united other Christians, who had been previously attached to other Protestant Churches, but who had all felt the need of a more vital religion, and of a closer spiritual union." Of Count Zinzendorf, who subsequently joined them and became their bishop, and devoted his life and fortune to the service of the Brethren and the Church; he remarks that never, perhaps, did a candidate for the sacred ministry undergo, or challenge a more severe examination."

The work from which our examples are taken, is the Rev. A. Bost's History of the Church of the Brethren (the author, I believe, is not a member of the Brethren's Communion). He remarks, "as to the truth of the facts, I think that my authorities may be accounted most respectable. Not to mention that the German nation in general, to which I am indebted for them, as an established character for honesty and solidity; the Moravian Brethren in particular, and their writers, share the same character in the highest degree; and their writings possess every quality that can entitle them to it."

In a general description of the Brethren's Church, (1740) it is stated very simply that "in respect to church matters, there are

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