them to forecast a really final and satisfactory form of religion.
In fine, we must notice a feature of the very first importance, which is too rarely noticed by historians; indeed, I know of no writer on Spiritualism who has realised how large a share it had. Cardinal Newman has in one of his works a dissertation on the reasons why Christianity superseded Paganism. One of the chief reasons was, he says, because it offered to a sceptical world a very dear and confident message about a future life. The ancient Greeks and Romans were almost as vague and indifferent about the future life as the Babylonians. There is, in fact, only one of the older civilisations—that of Egypt—in which men concerned themselves materially about their life after death, or tried to frame a clear conception of it. Newman is wrong in supposing that this troubled the Romans, or that the very definite Christian idea of heaven was one of the chief reasons of its success.
But the argument illustrates one of the great advantages of Spiritualism over the Christian Churches, and it is far sounder in this connection. The genuine Christian doctrine of heaven, the theological doctrine, was never in the minds of the uneducated millions of Europe. They really believed in a material heaven: in winged and radiant angels, in the glorified forms of their dead, if not in streets of gold and houses of topaz. The spread of education and criticism in the nineteenth century had a curious effect here. It purified the popular conception of heaven; it restored
