even the rudimentary laws of Being, as courses in
your colleges; and guessed-at spirit knowledge from your bounded
view must always fail in accurate wording."

It will be perceived that the answers to these questions are, from the
beginning, evasive; but the real idea entertained clearly shines through
the thin veil drawn over to conceal it. The questions pertain to the
source, or authorship, of the "laws of spiritual life;" and this would
generally be understood to be God. But on a technicality the spirits
refuse to answer. The question is made plainer, and the answer is that
"spirits are not bondaged by _persons_;" that is to say that spirits have
nothing to do with personalities, and that no personal being has anything
to do with those laws. There is therefore no God who formulates and
promulgates them. No wonder the question followed, how they came to know
these laws; and it was a very convenient answer that we will know when we
get there and have lost all physical perceptions. A desire for some
explanation of those laws is met with the not very satisfactory
information that they (the spirits) would have to give those in our sphere
a course of teaching, like a college course, before we could understand
even the rudimentary laws of Being. The only thing clear in all this is
that there is no God; at least no personal God such as the Bible reveals.
To the "grand whole," whatever that may be, they give the name of the "All
of Being." In answer to a question concerning "personalities," they are
called "atoms emanating from the same source--parts of the great All of
Being, partaking of the general characteristics of the grand whole."--_Page
149._

Reader, how does all this compare in your own mind with the God of the
Bible, the Creator of all things, the loving Father of us all, who has for
his creatures more tender regard and pity than a father can feel for his
own children, whose very name and nature is Love, and who has purposed
infinite good for all men, and will carry it out unless they, as free
moral agents, by their own sin, prevent his doing for them what he desires
to do? The Bible is not responsible for the aspersions cast upon God by a
false theology, which misrepresent his character and give occasion for the
charges of vindictiveness and vengeance and awful tyranny, so freely made
by fallen angels and wicked men. They do not belong to him who is the
source of all goodness and mercy; and we would lab