Whatever has constituted man's highest pleasure on earth, that he has hoped to find again in heaven, and whatever he has most dreaded, that he has imagined as forming the retribution of guilt hereafter. From this point of view the Christian idea of a serene empyrean, wherein saints and archangels for ever cast their crowns before the great White Throne, and worship the thrice Holy One who sitteth thereon-affords singular evidence of the spiritual altitude to which those souls had attained to whom such an Apocalypse opened the supremest vision of beatitude. The attitude of Adoration-of sublime ecstatic rapture in the presence of perfect Holiness and Goodness, is assuredly the loftiest of which we have any conception, and to desire to enjoy and prolong it for ever can only genuinely pertain to a soul in which the love of Divine goodness is already the ruling passion. Wider thought and calmer reflection may teach that not alone on such mountain peaks of emotion, but on the plains of sacred service, should the faithful son of God desire to spend his immortality. But the modern American poet who has taken on himself to sneer at the notion of angels "loafing about the Throne," has given curious evidence of his incompetence to understand what sublime passion it was which inspired that wondrous vision of Patmos.

Accepting then the Heaven and Hell of each creed as a natural test of the characteristic sentiments of its disciples, we turn somewhat inquisitively to discover what sort of a future existence the new faith of Spiritualism proposes to give us. Of course it affords every facility for such an inquiry; for, while other religions teach primarily concerning God, and secondly, and with much more reserve, about the life after death; Spiritualism teaches first, and at great length, about the future life, and frankly confesses that it has no light to throw on the problems of theology. What then, we ask, has Spiritualism told us respecting the state of the dead, or rather (as a sceptic mustinwardly pose the question)What do its narratives betray concerning the ideals of existence which Spiritualists have created out of the depth of their own consciousness? Do they prove an advance upon those of earlier creeds; or, on the contrary, do they mark a singular and deplorable retrogression towards the materialistic, the carnal, and the vulgar? Of course such an enquiry would be met at the outset by a Spiritualist with the vehement assertion that it was not he who devised what the spirits say of themselves, but the spirits who have lifted the veil of their own existence, for whose ignoble details he is in no way responsible. As, however, every Pagan and Buddhist, Mahometan and Parsee would say as much on his own behalf, and maintain that Elysium and Nirvana, Paradise and Gorotman, had each been revealed by such "mediums as Orpheus and Buddha, Mahomet and Zoroaster, we must be content to pass by this argument and treat the phase of immortality discovered (or invented) by Mr. Hume and his friends, as no less significant of the moral ideals of Spiritualists and the general level of their aspirations.

Let it be granted cordially that there is nothing in the spiritualistic

Hades akin to the "Hell of the Red Hot Iron," the "Hell of the Little Child," the "Hell of the Burning Bonnet," and the "Hell of the Boiling Kettle" set forth with such ghastly circumstantiality in these latter days in Dr. Furness' Books for the Young, and in older times by numberless Calvinistic and Catholic divines. Theodore Parker went, indeed, so far as to say that "there was, at all events, one good service which the Spiritualists had done, they had knocked the bottom out of Hell." Considering that the peculiarity of that terrible Pit has been generally understood to be that it is "bottomless," the achievement would seem rather difficult; but in any case we may candidly agree that on this side no exception need be taken against the spiritualist doctrine, save that perchance it fails to afford indication of any sense of how profound must be the mental anguish through which it is possible for a soul, stained with vice and cruelty, to recover its purity and peace. Spiritualist remorse seems almost as colourless as spiritualist beatitude is vulgar and inane.

On the other hand, when we ask to be informed (beyond the testimony of sweet smiles and assurances of felicity), of the nature of the happiness of virtuous departed souls, we are confronted with narratives much more nearly realizing our notion of humiliating penance and helplessness than of glory and freedom; of Purgatory rather than of Paradise. The dead, it seems, according to Spiritualism, have not (even after vast intervals of time) advanced one step nearer to the knowledge of those diviner truths for which the soul of man hungers, than they possessed while on earth. The Hope of Immortality is bound up, in religious minds, with the faith that though no actual vision can ever be vouchsafed of the all-pervading Spirit, yet that some sense beyond any which earthly life affords, of the presence and love of the Father will come to the soul when it has gone "home to God," and that Doubt will surely be left behind among the cerements of the grave. But Spiritualists cheerfully tell us such hopes are quite as delusive as those of the material crowns and harps of the New Jerusalem. "Nothing," says Dr. Wallace, " is more common than for religious people at séances to ask questions about God and Christ. In reply they never get more than opinions, or more frequently the statement that they, the spirits, have no more actual knowledge than they had on earth" (p. 805.) There are indeed, Dr. Wallace assures us, Catholic and Protestant, Mahommedan and Hindoo spirits, proving that the "mind with its myriad beliefs is not suddenly changed at death," nor, seemingly, for ages afterwards. Thus from our estimate of the Spiritualist state of future felicity, we are called on to make, at starting, the enormous deduction of everything resembling religious progress. The Spiritualist is perfectly content with an ideal Heaven wherein he will remain in just as much doubt or error as he happens to have entertained upon earth.

Further, as regards his personal and social affections, Does he at least image to himself that he will be nearer and more able to protect and bless his dear ones after death? Or that he will pass freely hither

and thither, doing service like a guardian angel to mankind, strengthening the weak, comforting the mourner, and awakening the conscience of the wicked? There is (so far as we have followed the literature of Spiritualism) no warrant for such a picture of beneficient activity. Good spirits, as well as bad-the souls of Plato and Fénélon, as well as those of the silliest and wickedest "twaddler" (as Dr. Wallace honestly describes many spirits habitués of séances)—have seemingly spent all the centuries since their demise humbly waiting to be called up by some, woman, or child precisely, as if they were lackeys ready to answer the downstairs' bell. In many cases we are led to infer that the dead have been striving for years and ages to make themselves known, and now for the last quarter of a century have very clumsily and imperfectly succeeded in doing so. Let us conceive for a moment a grand and loving soul-a Shakespeare, or Jeremy Taylor, or Shelley, who once spoke to mankind in free and noble speech, a man among men, fumbling about the legs of tables, scratching like a dog at a door, and eagerly flying to obtain the services of an interpreter like Miss Fox, Mr. Hume, or Mrs. Guppy,—and we have surely invented a punishment and humiliation exceeding those of any purgatory hitherto invented. If Virtue itself has nothing better to hope for hereafter than such a destiny, we may well wish that the grave should prove indeed, after all, the last home of " earth's mighty nation."

Where Oblivion's pall shall darkly fall

On the dreamless sleep of annihilation.

In conclusion, Is it too much now to ask that we may be exonerated, once for all, from the charge of unreasonable prejudice, if we refuse to undertake the laborious inquiry into the marvels of Spiritualism which its advocates challenge,—an inquiry pursued by methods bordering upon the sacrilegious, and terminating, either in the exposure of a miserable delusion, or else in the stultification and abortion of man's immortal Hope?

Leih-tsze.

We hold in our hand a volume printed on thin yellow-brown paper, almost exactly the same size and thickness as a monthly number of the Cornhill Magazine. Though equal in bulk, its weight is hardly one-half that of the magazine; and so thin is the paper, that the foreign book, although printed only on one side of the sheet, contains about seventy pages more than the English one. The writing runs from top to bottom of the page, as is shown by the dividing lines between the columns. Neither the arrow-headed inscriptions of Ninevite marbles, nor the hieroglyphics of Egyptian papyri, present such an intricate puzzling appearance to the uninitiated eye as do these complicated characters; and yet they are more familiar to our English vision than any other oriental writing; indeed, we may venture to say, than any other foreign language whatever. For there can hardly be man, woman, or child in the British isles, certainly there can be none among the four millions of London, who have not frequently gazed at this strange character where it stares them in the face in every grocer's window upon the sides of tea chests. Owing to its extreme dissimilarity to all other forms of writing, possibly the majority of these gazers never imagine that what they see is intelligible written language, but take it to be grotesque ornamentation, congruous to the willow-pattern piate style of beauty. Yet these queer-looking pages, with their endlessly diversified combinations of crosses and squares, straight lines and flourishes, curves and dots, picture forth to the instructed eye the thoughts and feelings of a heart that ceased to beat thousands of years ago, and a brain long since decomposed to join the dust of a land ten thousand miles away, and that with no less precision than the columns of the morning's Times, still damp from the press, reflect the ideas which passed through the editor's mind last night. If thought be but a mode of matter in motion, our brain has been just now agitated by vibrations first set in movement about two thousand three hundred years ago within the skull of a black-haired, yellow-skinned Mongolian, who pondered the mysteries of existence while he cultivated his rice-field, somewhere not far from where the impetuous Hoang-ho turns its turbid rush from a southerly direction eastward. It is curious to review the strange and various media along which the vibrations must have passed from his brain to ours. In his age pen, ink, and paper were yet unknown. Either he himself, or more probably his disciples after him, painfully scratched with a knife's point rude figures on the smooth surface of slips of split bamboo, to record the memories of thoughts they would not willingly let die. As the

centuries rolled on, woven silk was substituted for the wood, and a brush of hair took the place of the graving-tool. Later still this costly material yielded to coarse paper made from the inner bark of trees, ends of hemp, or old fishing nets, and by and bye of the fibre of the very bamboo plant which had afforded the earliest writing-tablets. Centuries before Guthenberg, Faust, and Caxton, this book of tea-chest symbols was once more graven on wood, but now cut in relief on a block of pear-tree wood, from which copies were printed off with ink made of lamp-black and gum. Multiplied by the press, the book held a more secure tenure of existence, though in a country where book-worms and white ants rapidly devour neglected libraries, new editions must have been frequently issued to preserve the work for posterity. Originally the outcome of a human mind, thinking and teaching amid poverty and obscurity, its author could hardly have expected it to be remembered beyond the third or fourth generation, yet here it is, after more than two millenniums, a standard book among millions of reading men in Eastern Asia; and at present it is putting in motion the brain cells of a red-haired stranger on the banks of the Thames, and perhaps, by means of these pages, may awaken some interesting and not altogether valueless trains of thought in the minds of English readers.

The catalogue of the imperial library of China, commenced by the erudite Lew Heang, and completed by his son Lew Hin about the commencement of the Christian era, enumerated and described upwards of eleven thousand sections* by more than six hundred authors. Three thousand of these contained the classics and their commentators. The remainder were classified under the heads of philosophy, poetry, the military art, mathematical science, and medicine. Of this respectable amount of literature by far the larger portion perished ages ago; the imperial library itself, with nearly its whole contents, being reduced to ashes during an insurrection in the generation succeeding the completion of the catalogue. But this library of the two Lew was only a collection of the scattered and charred fragments of a much larger antecedent literature; a restoration by means of new copies of half-legible tablets disinterred from their hidingplaces in gardens, or dug out of old walls, in dilapidated houses. Midway between Leih-tsze's time and the labours of the Lew family, occurred the infamous attempt of that Chinese Vandal, Shih Hwang Te, the first Emperor of China, to annihilate all literature, with slight exceptions, that existed in his dominions, that is, throughout what was to him and his people the whole civilized world. Leih-tsze lived in the feudal age of China, when the area drained by the Yellow River, was divided into a hundred petty kingdoms, dukedoms, and baronies, nominally owning allegiance to one Suzerain, but practically independent. Two centuries after his death, a Chinese Alexander the Great issued from the extreme

• The meaning of peen, translated "section," is uncertain. Originally a slip of bamboo, it came to mean a chapter of a book, or a book. Probably it stands for section, or chapter, in the catalogue above referred to, as the authors hardly could have written eighteen or nineteen works apiece.