Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/742

722 causation beyond matter, who discover causes that are not material (called spiritual), who believe that the Great First Cause (the Unknowable of materialists) is an infinite spiritual power or basis of all things, and who recognize in man also a spiritual power of which they are conscious, widely different from matter, partaking of the nature of the Divine, and, being a very positive entity—the greatest of all realities to us—destined, in accordance with the doctrine of the persistence of force, to a duration analogous to that of matter.

To the materialist, who finds in matter "the promise and potency" of all things, there is no higher object of reverence and love than the examples of men and women within his reach; there is no future life to compensate for the wrongs and sufferings of this, the triumph of fraud, or the unmerited agonies of disease and poverty; there is no apparent controlling purpose of benevolence or justice in the universe, but only a chance medley of strife, in which strong-handed selfishness is best rewarded, and when "man dies as the dog dies" the account is closed, and the self-imposed martyrdom of the loving hero appears a final loss and folly.

To the spiritualist, the universe has a deeper meaning, a nobler destiny. The wisdom of the Infinite, which is unutterably beyond his reach, is a consoling reality, and the little play upon this theatre, the life-struggle of threescore and ten years, is but the beginning, the gestation and birth of a career corresponding to our noblest aspirations and our faith in the Divine benevolence.

Man has such immeasurable powers of adaptation that a strong moral nature may exist under the gloomiest views of materialism (which naturally tend to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann), and sustain itself by its constitutional energy and buoyancy; but there are millions to whom materialism teaches the daily lesson that to "put money in thy purse" is the chief aim of life, and to riot in sensual pleasure on ill-gotten gain, until the candle burns out, is the best wisdom.

The glow of hope, the removal of anxiety, the exaltation of happiness, the enlargement of sympathy and love, which thousands have experienced when they have passed from the dark nescience of materialism to the brilliant certainties of spiritualism, and learned the grandeur of human destiny—whether the change has been effected by emotional eloquence and historical argument in the bosom of the Church, or by scientific investigation and experimental inquiry in pneumatology, or by that direct perception of spiritual existence now enjoyed by a few (and destined to be enjoyed by all when the human race shall have attained maturity of development)—should satisfy any impartial thinker that the diffusion of spiritual knowledge is as noble and practical a form of philanthropy as a good man can labor for.

But, in laboring for these ennobling truths, he encounters a strong resistance in the animal nature of man, in the selfish and depressing