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tial attributes that were needful to give him place among their æons and demigods.

This then being the disposition of the ages immediately succeeding Jesus, to exalt his accidents and to lower his being, it seems no more than just that, in sifting our mixed materials in order to discover the living Christ, we should place his metaphysical nature at the lowest point, and his spiritual being at the highest. We must depreciate his rank to the level of common humanity, and must elevate his character into the region of the divine. In outward grandeur and official dignity, in nobleness of birth, pomp of circumstance, and majesty of physical endowment, we must estimate him as below the Hebrew Messiah. In purity of sentiment and truth of heart, in breadth of conscience and clearness of spiritual intuition, in the human elements of fidelity and love, in the religious qualities of faith and hope, we must allow him to have been far greater than the Hebrew ideal. Had Jesus, by an angelic birth and nature, surpassed the national standard of the Christ, how can we conceive it to be possible that those wild, imaginative ages should have described him as a man at all? Unless he had surpassed this standard in his traits of personal goodness, how can we conceive it to be possible that those bigoted Jews should have represented him as so far above the standard of their law? We see how hard they tried to restrain him within the limits of their rigid ritual and righteousness, to make him satisfy at once the old predictions and the new hopes; how then can they have invented those benignant virtues, and put into his mouth those marvelous sayings, that flash out like stars upon the black firmament of their moral world? How, even, could they have admitted such incongruous excellences, had it been possible to suppress them? A Jewish fancy might easily metamorphose a man into an angel; but a Jewish conscience would find it a difficult task to magnify an orthodox Hebrew into a seer and saint for all the world.

Again, it is manifest that Christ was persecuted and put to death by those who formed preeminently the Jewish party by the adherents of the ancient laws and institutions, the representatives of pure Hebrew ideas- in one word, by the chief priests and Pharisees and scribes, the influential of every class. His friends were of small account in Israel. Peter often doubted and finally denied the Master, who did not satisfy his expectations. Judas for the

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same reason betrayed him. His accusers charged him with a proposition to overthrow the temple. The suspicious and unscrupulous Pilate could find no ground for complaint against him, yet the Jewish multitude clamored, 'Let him be crucified." The fact stands forth boldly in the Gospels, that Christ stood in opposition to the native Hebrew party among his contemporaries. How is this fact to be accounted for, if he did not assail their most vulnerable points-namely, their gross conception of the Messiah, their exclusive claim to the kingdom of heaven, and their arrogant self-righteousness, based on a scrupulous obedience to the Mosaic law? Nor did this antagonism between Christ and his countrymen grow up in the latter stages of his career, as the result of disappointed expectations on their part: it began with his mission, and it gained in strength each year he lived, disclosing more and more fully the entire variance of his thought from theirs, and proving him to have been at issue with his countrymen, nct in his fortunes merely, but in his ideas.

On the whole, then, must we not say that Jesus was a marvel of moral and spiritual greatness? Something more than a teacher, something above an exemplar, a wonderful being, whose virtue went imperfectly forth in words; a reformer, but more truly still, a a regenerator; a king, and yet more justly to be entitled a brother of men; a voice, not of one crying in the wilderness, but of one breathing out the Holy Spirit in creative truths and sanctifying influences, himself an incarnation of the Holy Spirit?

EACH age has its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young people; its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself. But, after a short time, down go its folly and weakness, and the memory of them; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in the horizon with mist a... color. The revelation of reason is this of the unchangeableness of the fact of humanity under all its subjective aspects, that to the cowering it always cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are only venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial; as the sun and stars affect us grandly only because we can not reach to their smoke and surfaces, and say, Is that all?

R. W. E.

THE MAY-FLOWER.

I.

THE snow still lay in shady dells;
Still, nightly, Frost rebuilt his shrines,
And though all day in sapphire cells
Clepsydral drops rang crystal bells,
Chill night-winds moaned among the pines.

II.

Yet through the forest sped a sound,
As if of Dryad-whispering shrill;
A sense seemed crescent in the ground,
As if, awaked from sleep profound,
The Gnomes were working in each hill.

III.

Lo, Spring! with rosebuds in her hair!
Light-gloried Faith! and, as she swept
Along the wood-aisles, all the air

Took from her robes a perfume rare,

And May-flowers marked where she had stepped.

IV.

Dear Flower! I see the Pilgrim maids
First dare the fearful forest's edge:

What music fills the astonished glades,
What long-lost bloom each cheek pervades,
As thee they hail, kind Heaven's fair pledge.

V.

And still, when from Spring's soft'ning skies
The first rays pierce thy branchy screen,
Thy blossoms blush beneath blue eyes;
Still joyous laughter Mails the prize
God sends to keep our memories green.

SPIRITUALISM AND GHOST-CRAFT.

Glendower I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

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But will they come when you do call for them?

WITH respect to the affairs of the other life, a large class of curious-minded persons have been, from time immemorial, like children before a show, longing to peep behind the curtains, and innocently creating in their teeming imaginations visions of splendor and grace, with which the realities forthcoming will compete at a great disadvantage.

It

At last the curtains rise, and the performance commences. is thus with all the treasures of our ideal world, with all the glory and all the terrors evoked from the hours of our most passionate experience: those who have speculated seriously on the after-life of souls, have dramatized it like a romance, carefully excluding those chromatic shades that form the common-place of our present existence, and compose the background, on which a few strong passions and great events plough their rare furrows of glowing light.

But because the humdrum materialism of a very crude state of society outrages in souls of a finer mould the sentiment of art and harmony; because their views of another life, left free to fancy's plastic finger, exhibit an intense reaction from the present into all that is most opposite-from fever into calm, from drudgery into rest, from material interests into sentiment, from barren intellection and coarse sensuality into an incorporeal refinement, -does it follow that the truth must lie at this other extreme, any more than in the false material life of the present? - and, whatever be the allotted destiny of man, is it certain that he is to find it in the other life, before he shall have fulfilled it here in the sphere of material ultimation? Why may there not be already a greater difference in the spiritual development and advantages of two individuals, both in this our present place of existence, than between either of them, as compared with himself, in the two states, before and after death? — and if common sense, analogy and revelation unite in approving this view relatively to individuals, why may not the same considerations apply in the com

parison of SOCIAL PERIODS? May we not pass to some, as superior to our best civilization in their organization, and their influence upon the children born in them, as this summit of civilized experience is to the rudest savageism.

These remarks may serve as a caution to those who are accustomed to condemn bitterly and a priori, from the heights of their ideal, the trivial and often vulgar pretensions of modern Spiritualism. How would the facts of our existing society stand the same tests, of conformity with reason and with beneficent purpose, to which they subject the asserted communications from the other life?

In entering upon this investigation, it may be well to review the range of powers with which we are already familiar, and to consider whether all — or, if not all, how many of the newlyasserted facts, may be grouped under the old principles.

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1st. Mechanical Imposture and Jugglery. This reaches a certain number of the lowest class of facts in rappings and tablemovings. Its range is very limited, and so incommensurate with the asserted phenomena, that only a man who is great enough, like Faraday, to be able to afford to make an ass of himself, or else one who is already an ass without taking this trouble, will зeriously pause at such an explanation.

2d. Subjectivity - Under which head fall dream-creations, reverie and vision, somnambulism, clairvoyance sympathetic and independent, second-sight, prevision or prophecy, and in general those higher operations of the soul, which are performed like the pulsation of the heart and the functions of digestion and secretion, without either the consciousness or volition of our ordinary life, and which, like the ganglionic or organic nervous system and its functions, reveal, as it were, a second individuality bound up in the same skin with the one that we wot of. The higher phenomena of this sphere do professedly embrace, in many cases, sight of spirits and converse with them; and the memoir published by a poor French artisan (Cahagnet) just before the rappings broke out, contains more interesting and worthier-seeming narratives of converse with the great departed, than any we have seen pretended to since. Those whose experience and mental constitution give them faith in the higher phenomena of clairvoyance, will regard these as no longer purely subjective, or "as powers within our tether, no new spirit power conferring," but as forming the step of transition by which we mortals advance half way to meet the armies of the dead on neutral ground.

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