Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/90

 mournful pilgrim at twenty-five, and an old veteran at thirty years! Who's to blame? Somebody! else God's justice is, like man's, a mockery! Brother or sister, who readest these pages, wouldst thou know one of the grand secrets underlying the constitution of the great Brotherhood of Crime? It is because man is a social being, has a mortal and invincible hatred and repugnance to solitude, feels the need of associates and sympathy, and will have both if possible, even though obliged to seek them in the very midst of hell itself. Didst thou ever observe that the majority of spiritual mediums are men and women who are sensitive, lonely, bereft and forsaken? Well, look around, and thou shalt find it so. And these, failing to find sympathy on earth amidst their fellows, search for it in the awful labyrinths that underlie the tomb; and from the Middle States vast hordes of semi-infernals come trooping at the heart-calls of these wretched ones, who, are thus preyed on by vampires from both Eternity and Time; for embodied wonder-mongers sap them dry, and wear them out, while disembodied demi-devils delude them, until the fair Soul-garden either becomes an arid waste, or teems with thistles, thorns, and all unsightly and unseemly things. When such victims cry aloud unto God, and keep crying, He will send His good angels to comfort, save, cheer and protect.

Reader, wouldst thou know why millions of women, fair, loveable, and good as ever God's sun shone upon, yearly rush down the mountain's side and plunge neck-deep into the swamps of prostitution and infamy? It is because their human hearts yearn for sympathy, pine for love, long for something good and kind; which