“Man, great in intellect, powerful in mind, gifted with reason, and having within him a spirit that is immortal, proud, glorious, aspiring as he is, falls very far short of perfection in every attribute of his nature.  To say, therefore, that the prescience, the creative power of the Almighty, reached the limit of its achievements in the creation of man, is to impeach the omnipotence of God himself.  Will any man insist that the ingenuity of the Almighty is exhausted?  May it not be, then that the time will come when some sentient beings, as far superior to man, as man is to the animals of the era of the lizards and the amphibia, shall, like the geologists of the present day, be delving among the rocks and rubbish of vanished ages, for evidences of the existences of our own proud species at, to them, some remote period of the world’s progress?

“If these questions cannot be answered by the learned and the wise, if science makes no response, and philosophy furnishes no solution of them, who dare say that the world is not, even now, entering upon a new era of progress, taking another step in the forward movement?  May it not be, that the time is coming when the barrier between the living, and the disembodied spirit is to be broken down?  When that viewless essence, that mystery of mysteries, the spirit of life, the immortal soul, shall be permitted to come back from the unknown country, to impart to the people of this world, the wisdom, the mysteries, and the glory of the next?  May not this be the new era that is about opening in the progress of all things?  It may be asked, is it not possible that a new principle is about being evolved, that will admit of communication between the living and the physically dead?  May it not be that the world and its surroundings, have become so changed, that what was impossible thousands, or even hundreds, of years ago, may have become, or be about to become possible now?  That the same process which carried this earth forward from the beginning, that so changed the atmosphere of old, rendered it fit to sustain animal life in its rudest structure, that so changed it again, as to make it capable of sustaining a higher order of animal organism, that kept on changing, and improving the whole face of the earth, that so arranged organic matter, as to make this world, at last, a fit residence for man, may be going on still; approaching all things nearer, and nearer to perfection, until we have arrived upon the threshold of an era, when living men may commune with the spirits of the physically dead?  An era as yet but in its dawn, when the stupendous future can be seen only as through a glass darkly?

“Remember, I do not assert my faith in a theory which is indicated by an affirmative answer to these inquiries, for I have none.  I give the record of the earth’s progress in the past, as it is written upon the rocks, standing out upon precipices, brought to light by the researches, and translated by the energy of science from forgotten and buried ages.  The deductions to be drawn from it, I leave to those who have a taste for the speculative, neither believing in, nor quarrelling with the theory which they may predicate upon it.”