The blessings of thousands who were ready to perish, and of tens of thousands who love their country and their kind, rest upon those who originated, and those who sustain, this noble work.  Let the people’s heart never faint and its hand never weary; but let it, of its abundance, give to this Commission full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, that, wherever the red trail of war is seen, its divine footsteps may follow,—­that, wherever the red hand of war is lifted to wound, its white hand may be lifted to heal,—­that its work may never cease until it is assumed by a great Christian Government, or until peace once more reigns throughout the land.  And even then, gratitude for its service, and joy in its glory, shall never die out of the hearts of the American people.

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The History of the Supernatural, in all Ages and Nations, and in all Churches, Christian and Pagan, demonstrating a Universal Faith.  By WILLIAM HOWITT.  Philadelphia:  J.B.  Lippincott & Co.

There has been a great change of late years in connection with the science of Pneumatology and with the manner of treating it.  There was a revolution of opinion on this subject in the middle of the last century; there is a counter-revolution to-day.

The superstitions and credulities of the Middle Ages eventuated, during the course of the eighteenth century, in the Encyclopaedism of French philosophy.  The grounds upon which the Church based her doctrine of the supernatural were fiercely attacked.  The proofs brought forward to prove the insufficiency of such grounds were assumed to prove more than lack of logic in the Church; they were taken as proofs, that, in the nature of things, there is no evidence for the supernatural, in any sense of the term; in other words, that there is no knowledge within the reach of mortals, except that which relates to the physical,—­to this earth, as the only phase of existence,—­to the vital body, as the all of the human being.  Emotional and intellectual phenomena were but results of material organization, as heat is the result of combustion:  they exhibited themselves so long as vitality continued; they disappeared when death supervened, as the warmth from a fire dies out with the cessation of combustion.  No hypothetical soul was needed to account for the thousand phenomena of thought or of sensation.  Pneumatology was no science, but the mere fancy of an excited imagination.

Not to the literature and the social life of France alone was this materialistic influence confined.  The mind of Germany, of England, and, more or less, of the rest of Europe, and of America, was pervaded by it.  The tendency, all over the civilized world, was towards unbelief, not merely in miracles, but in all things spiritual.  Science, with her strict tests and her severe inductions, lent her aid in the same direction.

It does not seem to have occurred to the philosophers of the Encyclopaedian school that a doctrine is not necessarily false because an insufficient argument is brought forward to prove it.  It does not appear to have occurred to skeptical physicists that there may be laws of Nature regulating ultramundane phenomena, as fixed, as invariable, as those which decide the succession of geological phenomena and the products of chemical combinations.