tage of
existence, entirely free from the trials and sufferings and sorrows of
this. Its mission here is fully accomplished, and it has nothing further
to do with the material. Only that Almighty Power which created it can
restore its association with a perception of matter, and that by
reuniting the broken chord--the silver chord which bound it to its
prison walls of clay. Henceforth it is to deal only with pure spirit and
as pure spirit; it has a nobler destiny before it, and higher and more
glorious objects to employ its powers and engross its emotions and
affections than any that earth can afford; and to maintain that it can
again return and mingle in the affairs of a sordid world is to degrade
it from its new and more glorious eminence--to drag it down from the
sublime, the eternal, and the godlike, to the insignificant, the
ephemeral, and the human.

Yet it is not to be assumed that matter and spirit are _opposed_ to each
other in any other respect than that of constitution--of construction,
if the term is allowable. As in color white and black are the opposite
extremes of a long line of causes and effects, and as one is the
synonyme for utter absence of the other, so, and so only, are matter and
spirit opposite poles to each other; and we frequently use the terms
ethereal, _spiritual_, to denote the strongest contrast to the
substantial, the material. And so, in just the degree in which any
object departs from the substantial and lacks the properties of the
material, do we say that it approaches the spiritual. Yet, even as in
nature we find not only objects, but even forces, of entirely different
and even opposite origin and construction working in perfect harmony, so
matter and spirit may exist together, and work in harmony, though acting
independently of each other, and incapable of producing upon each other
what, for lack of a better word, we may call physical effects.

It was not attempted, in the article referred to, to disprove the
phenomena of spiritualism by the above mode of reasoning, but simply to
deny and disprove the intervention of the supernatural in their
origin--to show, in fact, that disembodied spirit can by no possibility
have anything to do with their production. That the phenomena certainly
exist is not to be denied, and the only question which puzzles the
philosophical mind of the age is whence do they arise. If these
manifestations are due to the tricks of legerdemain, it is certain that