the best gifts, let her strive to occupy such walks in society as will befit her true dignity in all the relations of life. No fear that she will then transcend the proper limits of female delicacy. True modesty will be as fully preserved in acting out those important vocations, as in the nursery or at the fireside ministering to man's self-indulgence. Then in the marriage union the independence of the husband and wife will be equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.-Lucretia Mott.

SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS.

Man is a myriad-stringed instrument, facing every point of the infinite radius, and able to receive and repeat all the harmonies of the universe. His bosom contains the germs of all conceivable grace, personal perfection, and spiritual beauty. The glory of sun and stars is eclipsed by the glory of that reason, of that soul that can weigh and measure sun and star.

The way of life is wonderful; it proceeds by abandonment to the currents of eternal power. Tendencies are streams of power setting into us from the eternal deeps of Spiritual Being, and indicate at once the duties and destinies of the times.

Man is found to be the divinest creation on the planet. The idea of man is rising. He is no longer to be controlled by institutions. They are made for him, not he for them. It is the age of spiritual and political liberty, because it is the age of spiritual inspiration.

Let us no longer distrust our spiritual powers. Let us no longer be enslaved with these external things; let us use them, and not let them use us; and remember it is only when in the higher moments of our interior life we do consciously feel the surges of the everlasting nature, that we can realize the sweet and holy significance of immortal life.

-The rays of man's selfish intellectuality fall on the soul like moonbeams reflected from an iceberg; only to freeze the germs

of our spiritual affections, which yearn to be ingulfed in divine love and beauty.

-All substance and power is ONE, or no universe could arise out of them. Hence man is the autocrat of creation. He carries, sheathed within his flesh, the potent secret of all things.

Man fronts two worlds at once; with something of the animal and something of the angel in him. He belongs to substance, yet lives amid the shadows; he lives in the world of forms, while the eternal perfections of which these forms are symbols live in him; he sees the symbols with his eyes, but he feels the divine verities signified with his spirit.

-But there is no permanent element of wealth but truth, justice, love, wisdom-the eternal verities of the soul and of God. It is not what we do, it is not our history, that makes us divine-it is what we are, and what we are to be forever.

-There is no middle ground between natural religious inspiration and the great spiritual idea. The farthest star sends its beams down into our world, and celestial chemistry picks them to pieces, and ascertains thereby the constituents of distant suns. So with the light of immortal life. Its idea, an intuition in us, is the eternal recognition of the far-fallen beams of celestial being-of Spiritual life. Intuition of the spiritual and divine is the spontaneous spiritual chemistry of the soul. There are no "discrete degrees" in nature between "matter and "spirit;" there is no qualitative chasm or vacuum over which, from either side, influences cannot pass.

The expanded earth and unfolded heavens are manifestations of an Eternal Spirit. The rocks, hills, valleys, rivers, ocean, and stars gleam with the white splendors of the Divine Reason. The Spiritual idea of substance is arising from science. All bodies are now proved to be only petrified forms of force; all forces are proved, by their mutual transformability, to be only modes of the action of some common, simple, homogeneous, invisible or spiritual Power; and all power is eternal, infinite and divine. For how could man receive life, power, substance, light, heat, gravitation, electricity, beauty, and wis

dom, if he were not composed at bottom of substance, and power, and law, one and identical with these?

If the solid rocks we tread had not, by the laws of disintegration and organization, ascended into the composition of the human structure, geology would be a sealed book, an impossible study to man. If the star-beam had never been wrought up into the composition of your baby in the cradle, he would never in his manhood see these glimmers through the midnight air. If the sunlight had never kissed itself into the structural intelligence of your boy, he never would know of its existence, or feel its warmth, or recognize its beauty and power. How can that which is spirit, if it be totally different from matter, as some have supposed, be connected with matter? What law exists between two unlike and opposite substances, which, as a chain, can unite these two extremes?

Therefore I say unto you, the substance of the world is the intelligence in the world; and that intelligence is revealed primarily, not to, but in man. Wherefore, revelation is of two kinds-objective and subjective; or external and phenomenal, and interior and substantial. Now what is inspiration? Is it not the cognition by the personal soul of the existence and flow of the Eternal? It cometh from the relation of the personal to the impersonal, of the relative to the absolute, of the dependent to the independent, of the shadow to the substance.

-The aim of science should be to fathom those hidden, secret, invisible forces, of which the suns and stars are the merest precipitations and residue. If there be a God, then "matter" is but spiritual sediment; "suns" are only shadows of eternal Reason; so that the spirit in Nature and in man is the only permanent, solid and enduring substance.

-The fraternity of souls and the paternity of God rest at last on the identity of the original substance of each being. If human spirits are the children of God-if the idea of the fatherhood of God be not a delusion-then the substance of the Creator is the foundation of each soul. Yea, the identity of the primordial essence of the human and the Divine Spirit,

is the only logical basis; and it is on this foundation alone that religion itself is possible.

-For if God be Spirit and Infinite there is no room for any other substance than spirit. Spirit is the primordial Power at the center, and the original substance at the foundation of the world. Personality, therefore, cannot be predicated of a Boundless Being, of the Infinite Beneficence. Individuality is, necessarily, relative and dependent, and pre-supposes the absolute and independent, which is Infinite Spirit, eternal law. But Infinite Spirit is absolute, not relative; is independent, not limited.

• The spiritual philosophy has facts by the million-facts which appeal to every possible condition of mind, from the most sensuous to the most spiritual-minded; while for the deep and intuitive thinker it has the most transcendent and spiritual ideas. The unlettered can be surprised by the movement of a table without contact of visible power; while under the inspiration of the gifted seer and poet, the great fields of eternal day break on our wrapt vision. It opens on the one hand the great question of physiological psychology, and on the other, the profound questions of transcendental theology. Hence it promises to reach all the world and every soul thereof. It is the democracy of religion and of philosophy combined. It is the Catholicism of Rationalism, with a fact, an idea, a reason, and a symbol, for every possible mood of man. In bridging over the grave, it connects the poorest barefooted, ragged child of earth-whose kindred watch him from the homes of the pure and the free, weeping when he strays, and rejoicing when he returns to the true path-with the highest archangel of the Summer Land.

-Demonstrate the naturalness of spiritual forces and laws, and the realm of the divine is brought within reach of science. Science may then push its discoveries up into the immortal world; may, must link the two worlds together in the bonds of a scientific as well as sacred fellowship, and so banish all hob

goblins, all ghosts, all superstitions, and all senseless religious fanaticism from the world.

-When we perceive the unity of nature; when we regard the mutual transformability of bodies, and of all forces; when we discover in the analyzed sunbeam and star-beam the elements which have been precipitated and hardened into rocks, and coal, and iron, and other metals; when we behold everywhere the reign of the same invisible power, ever changing in form, but ever the same in esse-the soul is carried on and on in the tide of inspiration, up to the same great central conception that spirit "is all, and in all."

Substance is necessarily eternal; phenomena necessarily limited in time and space. Induction deals only with shadows; deals only with form, not substance; deals only with phenom enalities. The universe swings between these two vortices : First, downward and outward, into forms of appearance; second, upward and inward, into thought, into consciousness, into eternal Light.

Does any one suppose that men first inferred that there was such a thing as love by induction? No! the human heart loves as spontaneously as the the bird sings, because it cannot help it.

-Nature is a unity-an undivided empire; and to him who affirms the God in it, there is no escape from the spiritual fraternity of all things, and of all spheres of being. Spiritual Communion is the glorious flower of all religious experience; the answer to all prayer; the ultimate of all study, the goal of all science and scholarship. Spirit is the foundation of all things; continued inspiration from God the one condition of all life, high and low, and hence communion with Nature, universal. There is no world too fine for the spirit in man ; no angel too pure to work for us earthlings; and no spiritual aristocracy allowable in this God's world.

Believe me, brethren, there is a grander world than that in which these shadows dance across the sensible horizon; there