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Rh own self-destruction on that plane as well as on this, for mortal mind creates its own physical conditions. Death will occur on the next plane of existence as on this, until the understanding of Life is reached. Then “the second death hath no power.”

The period required for this dream of material life, embracing its so-called pleasures and pains, to vanish

from consciousness, “no man knoweth, not the Son, but the Father.” It will be of longer or shorter duration, according to the tenacity of its error. Of what advantage, then, would it be to us, or to the departed, to prolong the material state, and so prolong the illusion of a soul in sense, and a mind fettered to materiality?

Even if spirit communications to material consciousness were possible, they would grow beautifully less

with every advanced stage of existence. The departed would gradually rise above ignorance and materiality, and Spiritualists would outgrow their beliefs in material Spiritualism. Spiritism consigns the dead to a state resembling that of blighted buds, — to a wretched purgatory, where their chances of improvement narrow into nothingness, and they return to their old standpoints of matter.

The decaying flower, the blighted bud, the gnarled

oak, the ferocious beast, — like the discords of disease, sin, and death, — are unnatural. They are the falsities of sense, the changing deflections of mortal mind, and not the realities of Mind.

How unreasonable is the belief that we are wearing out life and hastening to death, and that at the same