Platonists make equal mischief with the doctrines of the New Testament, which they distort through the influence of their pagan notions.

He then proceeds to shew what was the moral character, what the degree of purity and elevation of sentiment in those whom our contemporaries are continually endeavouring to place on equality with Christ:-" Socrates, who was put to death for denying the mythologic gods of Greece, had been previously condemned by the Athenians for revolting propensities, and was so little freed from pagan superstitions that in his last hours he ordered a cock to be sacrificed to Esculapius, one of the idols whose divinity he had ridiculed. Thales, the prince of physicians, the great and ancient philosopher, when asked by Croesus what we know certainly of God, could not tell him; whilst the humblest handicraftman, who is a Christian, knows God, and how His greatness is to be comprehended. As to purity of doctrine, Plato taught the community of women, and recommended their striving naked in the public games. Diogenes and Speusippus were noted for sensuality. Pythagoras amongst the Turians, and Zeno amongst the people of Priene, played the tyrants. Lycurgus thought so much more of his own fame than of the good of the Spartans, that he determined to starve himself to death, because they wished to ameliorate his savage laws. Anaxagoras refused to restore the goods left with him by his guests. Aristippus pretending great severity of manners, in the midst of his purple, indulged himself in all kinds of excesses. Aristotle flattered Alexander as Plato did Dionysius for their own ends."—Apology, pp. 159-161.

Such are the estimates of the pagan authorities, whom our American brethren are so fond of putting in juxtaposition or even in precedence of Christ, by one of the ablest and most thoroughly informed of the early Christians-by one who himself had been born a pagan and had intimate knowledge of what paganism in its best and most enlightened form was-by one who boldly challenged the most learned of the heathen to discuss their history and their religion on their own ground. The opinions of all the learned converts to Christianity in the first ages agree wholly with his. Compare, indeed, the doctrines of any of these vaunted philosophers with those of Christ; full, complete in their system and divine in their spirit; and then compare the men themselves with the meek and perfect pattern of Godlike purity, magnanimity, boundless love, and the heavenly wisdom of love. Is it possible, except through some strange eclipse of intellect, or through a sore and agonizing reaction against the age-long tyrannies of priestcraft, to descend from those to these? Is it possible that the glorious advent of

Spiritualism can lead to a delusion-to a demoralization of the human judgment like this? Is this to be the fatal and disgraceful upshot of those modern revelations which should confirm the old marvels, and add new vigour to the grand historic testimony of the sum of all the ages? As well might we expect the sun of all time to dwindle into a glow-worm-the eternal heavens, with all its stars, to terminate in a mere play-house pageant of spangles! But the moment we abandon the sure anchor of historic fact, we drift into a boundless sea of chaotic speculation.

Spiritualists complain loudly of the public hostility to their doctrines, but they have only themselves—or a large section of themselves-to blame for it. By the extravagance of their dogmas, and the wild immorality of some of their social innovations, they have struck a deadly blow at their own glorious dispensation. Had it been destructible in its nature they would assuredly have destroyed it. By their licentious free-loverism; by citing the teaching of spirits to violate the sanctity of marriage; to declare the non-existence of evil, though its desolation and ruins lie awfully all around us; and by their ignorant attacks on all established faiths; by the loathsome dogma of re-incarnation, and the advocacy of heathenism, they have caused sober and reflective people to start back and stand aloof. By the weak avidity with which they have accepted, not only in America but here also, such of them whose want of opportunity in youth precluded much historic and critical research, whatever spirits told them, merely because they were spirits, and that unsupported by an atom of proof, they have scandalized the good and disgusted the well-informed.

In a recent American Life of the Davenport Brothers, the author makes this very just statement :-"The cause of much of the opposition to Spiritualism must be looked for in the unwise zeal of fanatics, who, assumed, because some disembodied and frequently apocryphal philosophers disavowed doctrines current amongst men here, they must necessarily be false. Hence these unwise men, and women, too, because they believed in spiritual existence and communion, considered themselves not only perfectly justified, but specially commissioned to attack indiscriminately, and endeavour to demolish every system and every thing which did not tally with what in their heated, and hence unsound fancies, were absolute and unconditional truths. Church, politics, art, science, theology, geology, astronomy, religion, creeds, philosophy, love, marriage, and divorce, all and each, became the objects of fierce and vindictive attack by the fevered lips of these people; and no surer passport to their society could be had than a regular attack on Moses, Jesus, and the Bible. For which reason, and believing the whole to be the outgrowth of

the modern wonder, the conservative portion of society, led by their teachers, declared formal war on the Spiritualists.

Most true! Spiritualists have run madly amuck at all other faiths, opinions, and institutions, as if they only "were the people, and that wisdom must die with them!" We outIshmael, Ishmael, to all around us, and then complain, forsooth, that we are an injured, innocent, and misunderstood people! We are, in fact, still in the eruptive period of spiritual infancy. Not till many of us have thrown off from our fermenting blood, the measles, smallpox and other feculent humours of our tomboyhood, will the clarified brain begin to recognize the force of historical evidence, and the childish folly of belief in the mere ipse dixit of nameless and traceless spirits. But to proceed :Our American brethren direct us also to the East, for a proof of the mere modern and mythic character of Christianity-that only religion in the world which possesses a clear and connected historic basis, unequivocal, positive, and predominant over all myth and fable, running from the creation until now. Mr. Peebles, in his Seers of the Ages, tells us that "the historic Jesus is copied from the Crishna of India, &c., and that the close and almost perfect parallelisms between the Crishna of the Bhagavat Gita and the Christ of the Gospels is sufficient evidence that one was borrowed from the other, or that they were both copies from some older myth."

Now certainly no man well acquainted with the ancient theology of the Hindoos could for a moment doubt which of these relations was borrowed from the other, if there were such a borrowing. In the one case we have in the Bible a plain, clear, uninterrupted history from the very earliest era of history down to the time of Christ, in which the founder of Christianity is most unequivocally and luminously heralded and graphically described, his person, his career and his doctrine. This is done, not by one prophet, but by a score, all living in succession; and, therefore, incapable of together concocting such a story. These prophets prove their mission to be genuine by simultaneously prophecying the fates of all the nations surrounding them, and some of those nations then the most powerful in the world. Profane history has most absolutely shown the truth of these predictions; and that truth is every day in our own time being re-confirmed by the discoveries on the sites of those nations. Egypt, Nineveh, Babylon and Syria, have all yielded up to the researches of travellers and archæologists the most amazing proofs of these prophetic announcements of from two to four thousand years ago. The Assyrian relics of art in the British Museum, the bricks and manuscripts of Babylon, the latter now in preparation for publication; the discoveries of the giant cities

of Bashan, still existing, these and the condition of a thousand objects in Palestine place the Hebrew history on such a basis of demonstrated truth as no other history of the ancient world possesses.

Turn from this solid and sunlit plane of history, stretching without a break from the very dawn of history, to the literature of India-and we plunge at once into a region of darkness illuminated only by partial light, into a chaos of myths and legends. There is no such thing as a clear matter-of-fact, continued history of national events, philosophy, or religion. We gather our scattered incidents from different, quite distinct, and often most contradictory books, and all mingled with the wildest and most absurd fables. We have nothing to assure us of the dates of many of the half fact half saga statements, but such as we can draw from the antiquity of the language in which they occur. Some of the greatest authorities, such as Max Müller, tell us that probably these mystical, rather than historic productions, may be as old as the Hebrew history.

Let us suppose them to be so old; nay, let us suppose some of them be as old as the early days of the human race, ere the different tribes had dispersed themselves into different and distant regions, what then? We come merely to that primal period in which the human race possessed, most probably in common, the divine revelations of those leading truths which should become the ultimate springs of universal civilization and religion. Those truths have maintained themselves on a sound and palpable and unbroken highway of history, through the Hebrew, and through no other race whatever. In all others, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, they have become swamped and swallowed up in the vast volumes of heathen darkness and sensualized fable. Only here and there shine out as matters of wonder, brief isolated fires, marking a celestial origin, but the traces of that descent broken up, leaving them but as little islets of light in a vast ocean of gloomy waves shrouded in vague bewildering vapours.

Now, is it from the clear continuous history which has not only preserved these primal revelations, but has in every succeeding age to the epoch of Christianity confirmed and more amply illustrated them, that we are to turn in preference to the mere fragments of these truths floating on the seas of pagan traditions, and allege the full history to have resulted from the isolated fragments? Are we, finding a fraction of a material world shot into our system, to attribute the world to the fragment, instead of the fragment to the world? This is perfectly analogous to what the sticklers for Indian atoms of light in preference to the Hebrew full sun of it, are expecting of us.

These gentlemen lay much stress on the assertion that some of the Indian resemblances to Christian facts are much prior to the Christian era. Suppose this to be actually so, the fact remains that the predictions of Christ, and of the incidents of His earth life, also stood fixed thousands of years in the Hebrew Scriptures before He himself came; and it is much more likely that in the intercourse known to have existed between the eastern nations for thousands of years before Christianity, the Hindoos and others should have received, through their learned men, knowledge of these wonderful predictions, than that the Hebrews should have gleaned them from theirs so mixed with fantastic fable. The whole history of the Jews, so proud of their superior knowledge, so exclusive in their character, is wholly opposed to the idea of such a borrowing, and in the whole Hebrew history there is no trace of any such infusion from the far East. In fact the ancient and complete body of Jewish revelation had no need of it. It is far more likely that the fleets of Solomon conveyed copies of the Hebrew writings to India, which would be amazingly curious to the learned men of the Orient. Again, the Ten Tribes, when carried away eastward, and absorbed in the Eastern nations, no doubt carried with them their prophets and prophetic knowledge; and traces of these Ten Tribes are asserted to remain among the Afghans, and even in peoples more eastern.

It is further admitted by oriental scholars that the modern doctrines and rites of both Buddhism and Brahminism are very different from the ancient ones; and it is far more legitimate for us to suppose that St. Thomas, in his mission to India, immediately after the death of Christ, carried widely through India the new ideas and faith which led to these modifications. His Church, discovered in India in our time, and described in the Christian Researches in Asia of the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, London, 1841, must through this long period have disseminated amongst the learned Hindoos many Christian facts and ideas. Besides, who can doubt that the spirit of God's wisdom and love, which is Christ, has in all ages and nations been stirring and moving in the minds and hearts of all mankind, and more or less revealing himself there, according to the assurance of St. Paul that God had never left himself even amongst the heathen without a witness?

I observe that our friend, Mr. Peebles, in his Seers of the Ages, rests too much on the Anacalypsis of Godfrey Higgins, a work in which there is the most constant straining to draw Christianity from the fragmentary passages of Hindoo mythology rather than from the full and positive records of the Jews themselves. Mr. Peebles and the Americans of that school do injustice