suddenly here or hereafter. The pious Poly carp said: “I cannot turn at once from good to evil.” Neither do other mortals accomplish the change from error to truth at a single bound.
Existence continues to be a belief of corporeal sense until the Science of being is reached. Error brings its Second death own self-destruction both here and hereafter, for mortal mind creates its own physical conditions. Death will occur on the next plane of existence as on this, until the spiritual understanding of Life is reached. Then, and not until then, will it be demonstrated that “the second death hath no power.”
The period required for this dream of material life, embracing its so-called pleasures and pains, to vanish A dream vanishing from consciousness, “knoweth no man . . . neither the Son, but the Father.” This period will be of longer or shorter duration according to the tenacity of error. Of what advantage, then, would it be is to us, or to the departed, to prolong the material state and so prolong the illusion either of a soul inert or of a sinning, suffering sense, — a so-called mind fettered to matter.
Even if communications from spirits to mortal consciousness were possible, such communications would Progress and Purgatory grow beautifully less with every advanced stage of existence. The departed would gradually rise above ignorance and materiality, and Spiritualists would outgrow their beliefs in material spiritualism. Spiritism consigns the so-called dead to a state resembling that of blighted buds, — to a wretched purgatory, where the chances of the departed for improvement narrow so into nothing and they return to their old standpoints of matter.
