felt by the conscious being, and
its future destinies depend upon the manner in which it has been
exercised and exalted. When it has been misapplied and assumed the forms
of vague curiosity, restless ambition, vain glory, pride or oppression,
the being is degraded, it sinks in the scale of existence and still
belongs to the earth or an inferior system, till its errors are corrected
by painful discipline. When, on the contrary, the love of intellectual
power has been exercised on its noblest objects, in discovering and in
contemplating the properties of created forms and in applying them to
useful and benevolent purposes, in developing and admiring the laws of
the eternal Intelligence, the destinies of the sentient principle are of
a nobler kind, it rises to a higher planetary world. From the height to
which you have been lifted I could carry you downwards and show you
intellectual natures even inferior to those belonging to the earth, in
your own moon and in the lower planets, and I could demonstrate to you
the effects of pain or moral evil in assisting in the great plan of the
exaltation of spiritual natures; but I will not destroy the brightness of
your present idea of the scheme of the universe by degrading pictures of
the effects of bad passions and of the manner in which evil is corrected
and destroyed. Your vision must end with the glorious view of the
inhabitants of the cometary worlds; I cannot show you the beings of the
system to which I, myself, belong, that of the sun; your organs would
perish before our brightness, and I am only permitted to be present to
you as a sound or intellectual voice. _We_ are likewise in progression,
but we see and know something of the plans of infinite wisdom; we feel
the personal presence of that supreme Deity which you only imagine; to
you belongs faith, to us knowledge; and our greatest delight results from
the conviction that we are lights kindled by His light and that we belong
to His substance. To obey, to love, to wonder and adore, form our
relations to the infinite Intelligence. We feel His laws are those of
eternal justice and that they govern all things from the most glorious
intellectual natures belonging to the sun and fixed stars to the meanest
spark of life animating an atom crawling in the dust of your earth. We
know all things begin from and end in His everlasting essence, the cause
of causes, the power of powers."

The low and sweet voice ceased; it appeare