186 A QUESTION PBOPOUNDED. 



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, tak- 

 ing 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 hi 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 thou- 

 sands, or even hundreds, of years ago, may have become, 

 or be about to become possible now ? That the same pro- 

 cess 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 



