o is
satisfied, the man who refers his salvation to some church or higher
power without steady travail of his own soul, who is in deadly danger.
All churches are good, Christian or non-Christian, so long as they
promote the actual spirit life of the individual, but all are noxious
the instant that they allow him to think that by any form of ceremony,
or by any fashion of creed, he obtains the least advantage over his
neighbour, or can in any way dispense with that personal effort which
is the only road to the higher places.

This is, of course, as applicable to believers in Spiritualism as to
any other belief. If it does not show in practice then it is vain.
One can get through this life very comfortably following without
question in some procession with a venerable leader. But one does not
die in a procession. One dies alone. And it is then that one has
alone to accept the level gained by the work of life.

And what is the punishment of the undeveloped soul? It is that it
should be placed where it WILL develop, and sorrow would seem always to
be the forcing ground of souls. That surely is our own experience in
life where the insufferably complacent and unsympathetic person softens
and mellows into beauty of character and charity of thought, when tried
long enough and high enough in the fires of life. The Bible has talked
about the "Outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of
teeth." The influence of the Bible has sometimes been an evil one
through our own habit of reading a book of Oriental poetry and treating
it as literally as if it were Occidental prose. When an Eastern
describes a herd of a thousand camels he talks of camels which are more
numerous than the hairs of your head or the stars in the sky. In this
spirit of allowance for Eastern expression, one must approach those
lurid and terrible descriptions which have darkened the lives of so
many imaginative children and sent so many earnest adults into asylums.
From all that we learn there are indeed places of outer darkness, but
dim as these uncomfortable waiting-rooms may be, they all admit to
heaven in the end. That is the final destination of the human race,
and it would indeed be a reproach to the Almighty if it were not so.
We cannot dogmatise upon this subject of the penal spheres, and yet we
have very clear teaching that they are there and that the no-man's-land
which separates us from the normal heaven, that third heaven to which
St