of the swelling and retreating land- | motion, as if each leaf were a transscape with its splendor. 2 And now looking to the left I saw, seemingly very near me, a grove of tall trees, which were in form and structure like our aspen or poplar trees, but far surpassing them in height, luxuriance, and luster. 3 And with a basis of deep green, the glossy leaves, as they trembled in that blessed sunlight, reflected "the rich hues of all glorious things," rapidly changing meanwhile like the colors of the kaleidoscope. 4 And behold, these trees rose to an immense height, and were grand in assemblage, forming a fit temple for the heart's joyous adoration. 5 And, directly in front, an open landscape stretched away into the distance, in which I could discern a lake with its silver tide of softly flowing waters. 6 And beyond this lake I beheld castellated dwellings, with crystal domes, nestled amid surrounding hills. 7 And between me and the lake the green-sward rolled gently down to the margin of the water; and I could see the taller grasses near the lake glisten in their wavy parent emerald, diamond-crowned. 8 And behold, the dwellings beyond the lake were very far off, but I could see that they were all grouped about a Central Building, large, dome-crowned, beautiful and graceful in outline and proportion; 9 And so harmoniously arranged were the adjacent homes, with regard to this central building, that all seemed like one vast edifice with numberless architectural and artistic variations. 10 Yea, most ethereal and delicately beautiful seemed this castellated group-these palaces of a Brotherhood; and over them hovered the atmosphere of eternal peace. 11 And the lake was large; at the left I could not trace its whole extent. 12 But how pure and sweet were its waters; how peaceful and melodious their flow; and how marvelous the beauty of their sky-reflecting depths. 13 In one place something caused an eddy, and a slight tossing of spray. And lo, how lustrous the sheen of those limpid waves; how resplendent the feathery crescent which leaped from their depths and fell again like a shower of liquid light. 14 Fain would I have lingered and gazed forever on this sacred realm of immortal beauty; 15 But, now, darkness gathered upon my senses like a pall; my eyelids drooped wearily; a sound like the rumbling of chariot wheels rang in my ears; and, with a shudder, I returned to my bodily consciousness. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING то ST. SELDEN. CHAPTER I. Selden Johnson Finney is an inspired philosopher and preacher of this century. The Arabula moveth his tongue to marvelous eloquence, and filleth his mind with prophecies and farreaching revelations of truth. From his numerous utterances the following passages are selected. creation on the planet. The idea of man is rising. He is no longer to be controlled by institutions. They are made for him, not he for them. It is the age of spiritual and political liberty, because it is the age of spiritual inspiration. 6 Let us no longer distrust our spiritual powers. Let us no longer I SOMETIMES tremble when I be enslaved with these external contemplate the vastness of the possibilities of mankind; tethered as they are to the world that was, to the world that is, and to the endless future. 2 Man is a myriad-stringed instrument facing every point of the infinite radius, and able to receive and repeat all the harmonies of the universe. His bosom contains the germs of all conceivable grace, personal perfection, and spiritual beauty. The glory of sun and star is eclipsed by the glory of that reason, of that soul that can weigh and measure sun and star. 3 The way of life is wonderful; it proceeds by abandonment to the currents of eternal power. Tendencies are streams of power setting into us from the eternal deeps of Spiritual Being, and indicate at once the duties and destinies of the times. 4 I would fain turn away my mind for a few brief moments from the glittering revel of this phenomenal world, and in spirit stand uncovered and serene beneath the boundless expanse of absolute liberty, justice, love, law, light, and beauty. things; let us use them, and not let them use us; and remember it is only when in the higher moments of our interior life we do consciously feel the surges of the everlasting nature, that we can realize the sweet and holy significance of immortal life. 7 The rays of man's selfish intellectuality fall on the soul like moonbeams reflected from an iceberg; only to freeze the germs of our spiritual affections, which yearn to be ingulfed in divine love and beauty. 8 Divine truth proves the unity of Nature, and shows that our hells are kindled here by our own hands, in our own breasts. 9 All substance and power is ONE, or no universe could arise out of them. Hence man is the autocrat of creation. He carries, sheathed within his flesh, the potent secret of all things. 10 Man fronts two worlds at once; with something of the animal and something of the angel in him. He belongs to substance, yet lives amid the shadows; he lives in the world of forms, while the eternal perfec 5 Man is found to be the divinest tions of which these forms are symbols live in him; he sees the symbols with his eyes, but he feels the divine verities signified, with his spirit. 11 Not only is man the culmination of all the kingdoms that have preceded him as phenomena, but he is more he is causation itself in both law and substance. ration and the great spiritual idea, The farthest star sends its beams down into our world, and celestial chemistry picks them to pieces, and ascertains thereby the constituents of distant suns. So with the light of immortal life. Its idea, an intuition in us, is the eternal recognition of the far-fallen beams of celestial 12 All the powers of dead gene-being--of Spiritual life. rations are transmuted into the fresh activities of the present. Even the experience of all ages is living in the brains and blood of this generation. 13 The ganglionic centers of the race have received and will yield all that is lasting of the very life of the thought of the dead; so that if all books of history and all art and all law were destroyed to-day, we could rebuild to-morrow the age, and improve upon it, too. For the world is alive. 14 But there is no permanent element of wealth but truth, justice, love, wisdom-the eternal verities of the soul and of God. 15 The records of eternity flel, are wrought into the structure of his spirit, so the great function of his immortal life is, to remember to bethink himself. And this shall be our worship, far above the "starry floor of heaven." And this is the unutterable prayer: Let us possess ourselves. 16 It is not what we do, it is not our history, that makes us divineit is what we are, and what we are to be forever. 2 Intuition of the spiritual and divine is the spontaneous spiritual chemistry of the soul. There are no "discreet degrees in nature between "matter and “spirit;" there is no qualitative chasm or vacuum over which, from either side, influences cannot pass. 3 The same energies of Nature which hardened the Azoic rocks, which grew the vegetation of the carboniferous era, and which has crowded whole epochs of wonderful life into the crust of the world, are to-day operating on the surface or within its depths. 4 The expanded earth and unfolded heavens are manifestations of an Eternal Spirit. The rocks, hills, valleys, rivers, ocean, and stars gleam with the white splendors of the Divine Reason. 5 The Spiritual idea of substance is arising from science. All bodies are now proved to be only petrified forms of force; all forces are proved, by their mutual transformability, to be only modes of the action of some common, simple, homogeneous, invisible or spiritual Power; and all power is eternal, infinite and divine. 6 For how could man receive life, power, substance, light, heat, gravitation, electricity, beauty, and wisdom, if he were not composed at bottom of substance, and power, and law, one and identical with these? 7 If man did not stand connected THERE is no middle ground be- in this sympathetic and actual retween natural religious inspi-lationship with molten fires in the bosom of the globe, which shoot out in volcanoes, and crack the solid continents, man never would have had a revolution. 8 If the solid rocks we tread had not, by the laws of disintegration and organization, ascended into the composition of the human structure, geology would be a sealed book, an impossible study to man. 9 If the star-beam had never been wrought up into the composition of your baby in the cradle, he would never in his manhood see these glimmers through the midnight air. If the sunlight had never kissed itself into the structural intelligence of your boy, he never would know of its existence, or feel its warmth, or recognize its beauty and power. 10 How can that which is spirit, if it be totally different from matter, as some have supposed, be connected with matter? What law exists between two unlike and opposite substances, which, as a chain, can unite these two extremes ? 11 It is utterly impossible for God to make an eye unless he has the medium to do it through, and that medium is light. 12 Suppose light is one kind of stuff, governed by one kind of laws, and the eye another kind of stuff, governed by another law, totally different from the light, can you get them together? There could be no sympathy between them. The eye would never know that there was any light, nor would the light make reflections on the eye. 13 So I say of the eye, it is light gone into structure, on its road to consciousness; that is to say, it is the function of light worked up into structure, in such a shape that the next step inward is consciousness itself. 14 Therefore I say unto you, the substance of the world is the in telligence in the world; and that intelligence is revealed primarily, not to, but in man. Wherefore revelation is of two kinds-objective and subjective; or external and phenomenal, and interior, and substantial. 15 Now what is inspiration? Is it not the cognition by the personal soul of the existence and flow of the Eternal? It cometh from the relation of the personal to the impersonal, of the relative to the absolute, of the dependent to the independent, of the shadow to the substance. 16 The painting on the canvas, or the musical composition, is man's effort to reduce his intuitions of perfect beauty and of perfect harmony to expression. 17 Is not consciousness itself selfcognition by substance? What is pure intelligence but simple self-apprehension by substance? Existence is not being-being is existence, apprehending the fact of existence, as also the qualities of such existence. Pure intelligence is pure substance, knowing itself in Beauty, and Perfection, are every- | where present. They are in Nature. For what is so natural as that which is eternal-the uncreated? 3 The aim of science should be to fathom those hidden, secret, invisible spiritual forces of which the suns and stars are the merest precipitations and residue. If there be a God, then "matter" is but spiritual sediment; suns are only shadows of eternal Reason; so that the spirit in Nature and in man is the only permanent, solid, and enduring substance. 66 4 Nature gives us no beginning of love, law, light, or wisdom; nor do we see, or perceive, either in the world of forms or in the world of Ideas--of Reason-any actual starting-point in the absolute order of things. True, special individualities seem to appear from a certain point of local career; and, indeed, the present forms of such appearance do begin; but when we look for the connections and relations of these special forms, we at once get swept into the vast cycles of universal career, and by induction remount upward through geological and sidereal epochs, until we find ourselves contemplating the eternity of Spirit, of pure Reason, and the logical order of Ideas. 5 The fraternity of souls and the paternity of God rests at last on the identity of the original substance of each being. If human spirits are the children of God-if the idea | of the fatherhood of God be not a delusion-then the substance of the Creator is the foundation of each soul. Yea, the identity of the primordial essence of the human and the Divine Spirit, is the only logical basis; and it is on this foundation alone that religion itself is possible. 6 Infinite Spirit cannot be bounded or limited. It cannot take cogni zance, therefore, of any thing different from itself, for it is "all in all." It cannot be a personality, because infinite individual is a contradiction in terms. 7 For if God be Spirit and Infinite there is no room for any other substance than spirit. Spirit is the primordial Power at the center, and the original substance at the foundation of the world. 8 Personality, therefore, cannot be predicated of a Boundless Being, of the Infinite Beneficence. 9 Individuality is, necessarily, relative and dependent, and pre-supposes the absolute and independent, which is Infinite Spirit, eternal law. But Infinite Spirit is absolute, not relative; is independent, not limited. CHAPTER IV. After his preaching, he sendeth an epistle to the people; and by it some were persuaded, and some believed not. He openeth his subject to the wise men and chief priests; but they hear him not, neither answer they him. He rebuketh the foolishness of false philosophy. He denounceth superstition, and openeth eternity to man's mind. THE first effort in the history of man is to unite science, philosophy, and religion into organic form, under the auspices of associative action, such that all great reforms growing out of them, and out of the needs of man, can be united together into one body and method, animated by one spirit, and aiming at one end-the whole good of man. 2 Science cannot exhaust us; objects cannot, therefore, exhaust us. We have within us still the unsung powers of this Infinite Perfection, which will make us live and grow through all the rolling centuries of the great hereafter. 3 Like Nature, our philosophy is |