broken; that fleshly counterpart that rendered us subject to the laws and conditions that acted upon, and controlled, the material, has rent asunder, and has gone back into the common stock and elements of the material world.

"And, my brother, well 'tis that 'tis so. For if we, though in this most exalted and beatified State and Home of the Soul, could be at Earth, and being there could see, and hear, and know, the always woes and sorrows of that groaning sphere; could feel the miseries and know the faithlessness of the ones we cherish; we ourselves would so travail in pain and sympathizing suffering that a second death, did God not prevent, would fall upon our souls!

"Wherefore, I taught you that should we be at Earth this instant, you could not know your dead body, nor know why you are hither.

"In this argument to you I do not mean to teach you that we may not study the material elements, learn their laws and forces, and unravel them to our minds' content, in the endless æons here. That which our thought has garnered from the material sphere is the seed which will increase and mature into the full-ripe harvest."

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Then, Brother Ariel, you mean to teach the cheering, helpful thought, that what we learned about matter and its laws while we were associated in it, will make us able to carry on in our interchange of thought with our brothers assembled from other spheres, our crucial, clear investigations, until we arrive at a perfect knowledge of matter and its laws?"

"Yes, that is what I mean. The material is the lowest sphere in creation.

"Mind can comprehend the elements and forms and phenomena thereof only by direct association and experience in it. Mind thus converts the gross elements, and God's thoughts which have been expressed in them, into the forms of our thought. While we cannot again associate in matter,

we can study it, and arrive at its perfect knowledge. Having its elements, we deduce fully its laws, combinations and results."

"Then, do you mean to teach me that underlying and directing the material manifestations of Earth and its phenomena there were mind and purpose?"

66 Of course so. Beneath matter and force, those so-called ultimates of physical science, were the abiding power and guidance of Mind and Purpose. These gave unity, wholeness and completeness to all the material processes and carried these processes ever onward to intelligent consummation. We cannot even interpret Nature aside from underlying Purpose. In all our investigations of Nature we were compelled to assume not only the mere persistence of force, but the greater, deeper fact of that uniformity of purpose which could only find a basis in Mind. For the mere persistence of force unguided would, as soon, and as often, work towards destruction and ultimate chaos, as towards processes of higher development and uniformity. Such force would persist as much in reverting the accomplishments of one of its impulses as it did in partially perfecting the process of that impulse. The tide of persistence that brought to the shore of being and development one process or form, would in its ebb carry it back into the waves of chaos, without even a chance of such process taking root on the shore of permanence. Under the operation of such a force one process accomplished would more often be utterly destroyed than carried over to a form and stage of higher development; for under the doctrine of chances (and chance must be where there is no mind or purpose) that one chance for a higher development to follow in keeping with that uniformity and nature of the form-being thus far developed, would be as one against unnumbered trillions!

"And when we come to consider the countless forms of being and phenomena that exist, and persist, in perfect uni

formity and in keeping with their uniform environments, we are compelled to conclude that the ratio of chances, for purposeless forces to have happened to produce this almost infinite equation of accomplished results, would have been in the problem of chances as O to Infinity! Think of any scientist presuming to explain the contents of Earth's enveloping Cosmos, including life, intelligence and even Man's Self-Consciousness from the bare premise of the persistence of force, and the premises having neither a 'major' nor a 'minor' of Mind or consciousness. I tell thee it is illogical! It is unthinkable! It is impossible! The very statement is a reductio absurdum. It is

"

"Stop, Ariel, stop, enough; don't waste your thought further with me. How could any mind do otherwise than accept your conclusions ? But-Ariel-you see-that is—I want to know this, when I think of all those woes and trials and sufferings and despairings and partings and evil and sin, and finally that death; when I think of all these things that racked and tormented us on earth, I ask myself, why were we not placed in a world of happiness and joy and eternal life and brightness and purity, like these intelligences about us here from Sirius and Orion and other celestial spheres as I see here? Why were we thus on earth circumstanced, Ariel? Why did our good God thus serve us?"

What earnestness and intentness and sympathy and attention I noted among all this resplendent throng about us as I thus interrogated Ariel! How they seemed suffused with all pity and tenderness!

How can I ever forget Ariel's reply, as he answered thus: "It is not strange, my brother, that such inquiries should well forth from your mind. I think I can joyfully allay them. Have you never conceived the truth that all the mere physical infirmities, the bodily pains, and that death, of our earthly existence were only the concomitants and, incidents of the material? This is true. Matter is a temporal, limited,

circumscribed thing. In its very nature it is a travailing element, a shifting, disintegrating organism in all its forms. Our material selves were a part and parcel thereof. Even our Earth is a cooling planet that sooner or later must pass back into formless void. It itself was sent forth for a purpose. We-the Self-Conscious Personality that we now are -were that Purpose. We were given being in matter, that out of matter might be conserved that Purpose. The grand Purpose of the material creation could not have been attained by the Supreme Mind without us. When our old Earth shall have been rolled back into its former niche, where and what will be the net result born of all its groanings and travailings and bringings-forth? We. Those sufferings and labors and travailings and woes, as you term them, which we endured in common with our Mother Earth and all her children in the flesh, were not in themselves evils. Why? Because they were necessary to bring us forth. For otherwise, wethe free, personal Will and Character that we find ourselves -could not have been. Is it not conclusive and self-evident to you, that that character which is stronger than adversity must have come out of, and triumphed over, adversity? That that character which is more powerful than all evil, must have done battle with evil and vanquished it forever? That that character and personality to whom sin is no longer even a temptation, much less a hindrance, must have had their 'wager of battle' with all the hosts of sin,—such as lusts, and revenge, and hate, and falsehood, and pride, and corrupt passions, and selfishness, and self-indulgence, and cruelty, and hard-heartedness, and avarice, and greed,—and have not only vanquished, but annihilated, them, so that they cannot even draw a sword upon the battlefield of the Soul? That that will, the supreme arbiter in our personal kingdom, in order to dictate its perfect decrees to our active Self-Consciousness and commit no more error in its supreme rulings, but be forever in harmony with the Supreme Will

from which it came, must have had many contests to decide, many causes of right and wrong to sit upon; many varying interests of our inner selves to adjudge; many sacrifices of evil to good to decree; and many of all but self-exterminating judgments to enforce?

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But, you ask, why was there any Sin? I answer, we were free moral beings, therefore there was sin. Sin was no creation of some positive power without the soul, sent upon us as outside warring furies to torment us to destruction. Without freedom of our personal will there could have been neither moral nor immoral act, but only the impersonal activities of some automaton. And, therefore, there could have been no character.

"Sin was not a positive power in human nature, but developed there into a tendency. So far as we on earth knew, this tendency to sin may have been first induced through ignorance in our remote ancestors and from thence passed on in their posterity into voluntary transgression. But what we did know was this, that as the result of the transgression of the order of our moral development and perfect growth, there arose a tendency, a propensity, to sin in the human soul. As consequences of this violation of our moral order,—which violation was sin, there came wrong action, evil in all its phases, suffering, trials.

"Man then no longer warred, as the beasts of the fields, with only his physical environment for the survival and sustenance of his physical being; but we see the scene of his struggles transferred to his moral nature, to his spiritual environments. The spiritual war with sin and evil began. Here then dawned a new purpose in man's destiny. What? That he was placed in material environments not only to subdue matter and convert it into the eternal forms of thought and character, but, he became in the environments of sin, that he might subdue it also, and in so doing develop in himself a character, a will, forever stronger than all the