have been favored with a revival of that very spirit of revelation by which
the Church itself was originally founded. There is a complete series of
spiritual revelations in England and the United States, besides mesmeric
phenomena that bear a resemblance to revelation, and thus gradually open
the mind of the philosophical and infidel classes, as well as the professed
believers of that old revelation which they never witnessed in living
action, to a better understanding of that Law of Nature (for it is a Law of
Nature) in which all revelation originates and by which its spiritual
communications are regulated."

Mr. Smith proceeds to say that there are _only_ thirty-five incorporated
churches in England, all formed from the New Testament except five, to each
of which five he concedes a revelation of its own. The five are the
Quakers, the Swedenborgians, the Southcottians, the Irvingites, and the
Mormonites. Of Joanna Southcott he speaks as follows: {58}

(P. 592.) "Joanna Southcott[109] is not very gallantly treated by the
gentlemen of the Press, who, we believe, without knowing anything about
her, merely pick up their idea of her character from the rabble. We once
entertained the same rabble idea of her; but having read her works--for we
really have read them--we now regard her with great respect. However, there
is a great abundance of chaff and straw to her grain; but the grain is
good, and as we do not eat either the chaff or straw if we can avoid it,
nor even the raw grain, but thrash it and winnow it, and grind it and bake
it, we find it, after undergoing this process, not only very palatable, but
a special dainty of its kind. But the husk is an insurmountable obstacle to
those learned and educated gentlemen who judge of books entirely by the
style and the grammar, or those who eat grain as it grows, like the cattle.
Such men would reject all prological revelation; for there never was and
probably never will be a revelation by voice and vision communicated in
classical manner. It would be an invasion of the rights and prerogatives of
Humanity, and as contrary to the Divine and Established order of mundane
government, as a field of quartern loaves or hot French rolls."

Mr. Smith's book is spiritualism from beginning to end; and my anonymous
gainsayer, honest of course, is either ignorant of the work he thinks he
has read, or has a most remarkable development of the organ of
imperception.]

A CONDENSED HIST