industrious. Bring fuel to the fire of reform, therefore, and work to burn up your own evils. Set your alcohol on fire. Destroy all your noxious weeds of vice. Let the furnace of private redemption burn hotter and hotter, until every personal discord is consumed. Fix your whole heart firmly upon what your higher faculties admire, and do their bidding.

СНАРТЕR XIV.

MIND AND MATTER.

Men are necesThey make it the

EARTH's powers and principalities exclude most men from the society of poetry and eternal principles. Matter is a pow. erful and controlling God; it is the "prince of darkness to millions of our throbbing humanity. Matter clings and clusters heavily about man's interior Life; it is the dead freight of his perilous voyage from the cradle to the coffin. sitated to worship at the shrine of Matter. chief object both of masterly effort and spiritual contemplation. Thousands reverence Matter incessantly. before its altars. They bring to it many offerings-tithes of mint, anise, cummin, and lip-service—covering its temples with everything within the power of man to bestow; with scientific art and the works of genius, with developments of the noblest talents with everything, even life itself.

They bow down.

Mammon is but the servant of matter; matter is but the servant of soul; soul is but the servant of spirit; but, in this lower world, it happens that spirit, and soul, and matter, are the servants of Mammon. No human soul is independent of its material surroundings. All human “Life is real" bondage to matter. Individual "life is earnest "in overcoming this bondage. But "the grave is not its goal," because the soul is not destroyed by its environments. The physical circumstances

of the spirit are negative at last; but they are absolute and positive in this sphere. Matter is the mind's jailer. Want is the overseer who lashes the prisoner into his daily labors. 'Tis the mandate of matter which the mind obeys nine-tenths of earthly time. The sight of objects, the taste of flavors, the smell of odors, the cognition of sensations, the hearing of sounds-thus the spirit looks out and lives through the grated windows of its prison castle. A defect in either sense is so much subtracted from the liberty and capacity of the mind. Deficiency in blood or brain, and misplacements of either material, or the slightest excess in any department, are recorded mathematically upon the ledger-pages of the life book.

The universe, with its beauties, and laws, and harmonies, is nothing to the idiot mind caged in matter. The gorgeous heavens, with their unnumbered systems of suns and stars, are nothing to a soul bowed down by the daily drag of material necessities. The ponderous globes of space, so attractive to the uplifted mind of the philosopher, are nothing to my brother who makes a God of gain. Matter and money surround him on either side. He drives through his surroundings, and then they drive through him; and so goes his daily life, "to the last syllable of recorded time."

The fair sky of heavenly truth never covers the earthly mind. Angels do not dwell in the shades of pandemonium. Matter is the raw material of Heaven and of angels. Strange paradoxes! The world of matter is the region of discord. The myriad forms of evil originate in the realms of Matter. The history of our beginning is a salutary history, because it teaches the lessons of progression and imperfection-how chaos precedes order; Matter, mind.

But it is a pleasant thing to die! Why? Because the countless shades of matter, like storm clouds and dreams of

prison life, begin to move off and forever away. Matter, the soul's prison, is abandoned. The spirit in quiet looks upon the dim substance stretched and cold on the earth below. The dark broad mountains of matter, where the thunders of earthly discords rave both day and night, are forsaken or exchanged for flower-clad hills, “eternal in the heavens."

It is a pleasant thing to die, and to join the peaceful brotherhood of the upper realm. The Divine Mind, whose infinite powers and principles fill all the temple of immensity, is seen by spirit. Matter is incapable of contemplation; yet it is the deep-hewn valley in which soul is cradled. The soul is the chariot of the golden spirit; but alas! in this world, Matter is both the driver and the steeds. Matter is molded into shapes replete with grandeur and sublimity; but the power to cognize and enjoy is inseparable from spirit.

away.

It is a pleasant thing to die, because, by a natural going forth of the spirit, at the appropriate period of its history, the evils of matter are more readily comprehended and overcome. The music of spiritual waters floats into the new-born soul. The sickening shadows of terrestrial ignorance and misunderstand ing depart among the broken urns, behind the curtains of time. The principalities of falsehood lose their power. They fade The pure light of a measureless firmament shines down into the reasoning faculties. Whirling globes, supporting innumerable forms of life and beauty, fill the immensity with the glory of God. Harmonies of the affections, touched by the awakening love of celestial fingers, come up and down like the breathings of truth, causing the immortal hills to sing like birds of a thousand voices. Outspreading landscapes become vocal with an abundant harvest of eternal love-lessons, too pure for earthly language to embody. And thus, the unearthed soul is sent

school among the angels of truth and the Titans of wisdom.

It is a pleasant thing to die, when the death is natural, because the soul "makes a Sabbath day's journey" toward Deity—gets nearer to the central Fountain of everlasting life— nearer in the sense of realizing more love and acquiring a higher knowledge concerning the spiritual laws of the universe. The kindling fires of infinite life light up the trans-mundane pilgrim with a larger and diviner comprehension. The great cycles of the world's progression appear like changes in the performance of an operatic drama. The rise and fall of empires seem not more important than the shifting of scenes in a theater-the lights and shades of an immortal picture.

It is a pleasant thing to die, and to get out of the prison of engrossing and heavy matter, because its chemical transactions emancipate the spirit from the imperative besetments of hateful appetites. Although the soul retains the effects, sad and many, arising from the multifarious transgressions of the principles that are indispensable to its progression; yet, by the fact of chemically altering the relations subsisting between soul and body, the spirit is measurably empowered and inspired to rise above its ruling earthly passions. With the body goes tobacco, alcohol, stimulants, &c.; and with death comes the power to be larger and happier. Some minds are vicious because of physiological defects. Brains sometimes are imprisoned by a malformed skull, and spirit is embarrassed by a hampered brain, and character is deformed as a consequence ; so that, in contemplating our common humanity, it is wisest to put down a large amount of evil to externals, which, in this life, are positive in begetting personal manifestations. An accident has been known to jar into life certain portions of a long-slumbering brain, whereby the prosy person was at once converted into a poetic genius and partial musician. Imperceptible alterations in the cerebral polarities will be followed by special