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.
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