For many minds this last century of triumphant Science, of warring Theology, has acted as a kind of proof and purgation of the human spirit. It is strange to look back and to observe with how much of dogmatic rubbish even the strongest minds of earlier centuries were cumbered both in their belief and in their negation. For it was not only the so-called orthodox who suffered; but those also who, revolting against arbitrary doctrine, were yet unable to dissociate such doctrine from any conception which they could form of a spiritual world. Such men would still speak as though the spiritual world, if it existed, must needs be a world ruled by caprice, and overshadowed by fear.

But now in the virtual abeyance of formal creeds the reactions of monks and schoolmen have had time to dissolve and disappear. Vestigial beliefs which still encumbered the spirit have had time to atrophy.

The prospect on which Science gazed has been by comparison a narrow one; but Science at least has "seen it steadily and seen it whole." The material world has taught us lessons of which our conception of the spiritual world stood in no less urgent need. The study of visible Nature has taught us Uniformity, Conservation, Evolution; and these transform themselves in their spiritual aspect into an absolute Catholicity, an inescapable Justice, an ever-ascending Ideal. These great conceptions, I say, were achieved by Science, with her outlook temporarily narrowed to planetary life. And now that Science herself begins to teach us to expand once more the planetary into the cosmic view, we find that principles built up by minute and persistent observation of material law will expand and exalt themselves also to spiritual operation, and will give to the soul's future the stability of their own infinitude, the buoyancy of their own limitless march and assumption into realms higher and hopes unknown.

On one great matter the departed spirits utter, not indeed a halting or a dubious, but yet a somewhat indefinite reply. One and all, so far as I know them, they affirm that the Universe is good: that there is a supreme Power to whom all spirits bow, and who orders all things well. But beyond that they can give no fresh sanction to the tenets of any earthly creed. Rather they seem for a time perhaps to express their new convictions in their accustomed formulae, but soon to lose all thought of creed or formulae in the deep assurance of endless and ever-growing Love. This avowed limitation of their knowledge has caused some disappointment, and they have sometimes been fruitlessly pressed to declare themselves in clearer support of some earthly Church.

Yet must not any elevation of our being imply for us less of claim to formal knowledge, more of participation in an immanent Spirit?

The idea of Divinity among the human race has risen and widened from the Fetish of a family to the Champion of a tribe, and from the Champion of a tribe to the Father of a planet. Must even that be the fixed and final conception of the Infinite God? Nay, surely that conception should expand so as not to lose but to transcend Personality; - retaining for us the Love and Mercy which bring the Divine into fellowship with man, but outgrowing all limiting analogies, all pretence at human comprehension of the Inconceivable Cause of All.

It is noticeable how with each onward step in our theoretical knowledge some false and outworn conception of practical duty tends to melt away. We now know (to Swedenborg belongs the credit of the first emphatic announcement) that this life and the next are morally continuous, - with no mere general dependence of the future life upon the present, - but continuous as though our earthly age melted into the hues of a happier youth. It follows that the earthly life must ethically develop all its faculties in preparation for the heavenly. There must be no arbitrary narrowing of earth's experience under the guise of sanctity; no pretence that something is gained in the next world by refusal of any of the normal duties of this.

There is no place for monasticism in such a scheme as this. There is no place for the puritanical, the ascetic spirit; for any belief in merit attaching to suffering or privation as such. The aim of all will be spiritual, moral, intellectual efficiency; self-preparation for those higher duties which shall follow on the accomplishment of lower duties as the just and inseparable reward.

How far there shall still be place for the priest, for the minister of religion, it were premature to discuss. Sacerdotalism must disappear; no body of men will any longer persuade mankind of their exclusive right to promulgate or to interpret that catholic truth which is bestowed impartially upon all.

And note that if such a claim were afterwards to be put forth, not by priests but by sensitives, - by intermediaries of the new revelation who might claim to be its guardians also, - that claim would promptly carry with it its own refutation. We should not long believe in the authority of communicating spirits who might base their appeal to us on authority, instead of on evidence and on reason. Communicators and intermediaries alike are subject to an ordering wiser than our own. By their fruits we shall know them.