ered this to be the general condition of Universalists. Mr. Stacy was by, and did not deny that it was so, but said that we must try to bring about a better state of things. Others were present to hear some of the conversation. A person present at that time asked me why it was so, that Universalists would take such a course as they did; and I answered, 'The reason is, that the principal part of Univessalists are Deists in reality;' the person replied: 'I believe in my soul they are.' This was in the presence of Mr. Stacy, and he smiled, which I considered his assent that it was true. I told Mr. Sweet that his description of Universalists would apply generally to them wherever I had been acquainted with them; and he told me he did not care about going among them if that were the case. And the 'unobtrusive practical virtue of Universalists' is, generally Sabbathbreaking, profanity, intemperance, contempt of all the appearances and means of piety, horrid fears of priestcraft, but no fears about any other craft; gambling, laughing, scoffing and swearing about praying, preaching, religious meetings, and religious people, finding contradictions in the Bible, and other great difficulties, etc., etc., etc. The author saw these things till his heart sickened. He was reading many Uhiversalist periodicals, and became fully satisfied from the drift and general course of them that their secret object appeared to be, and their actual effect was, to raise doubts in the minds of their readers, on one religious subject after another, till they should believe in none; and by inuendoes and sarcastic reflections upon the errors of Christians, to spread abroad a deep and universal prejudice against a gospel ministry, the Bible, and all religion. He became satisfied beyond a single doubt that all this was true. He conversed also with many professors of Universalism at different times, and found most all of them to view the subject in the same light. Most all of them to be enemies to Christianity, and to consider the whole engine of Universalism now in the United States to be a shrewd and well concerted scheme to bring together the elements and efforts of unbelief, to overthrow in the end the Christian religion. His candid opinion is, and has long been, that ninety-nine out of a hundred who profess publicly to be Universalists, are unbelievers in divine revelation. I say this in the fear of God, as the result of all I know of them. That the nature of their doctrine is such that most of them [the preachers] as well as their hearers, become so much tinctured with scepticism, that their teachings lead to the same end that open infidelity would. That there are some honest and sincere both among teachers and people, I have no doubt. There are a few learned, gifted, and talented men among the preachers who would be useful in a good cause; many of them are illiterate, and only qualified for levity, scurrility and miserable satire. Winchester and Murray, I think, were pious, but their system was no sooner abroad than infidels, who had been foiled in their recent open attacks on religion, discovered in Universalism a disguise for their doctrines, and spread it forth with zeal,

but

fully satisfied that it would answer their purpose just as well. Hence the numerous conversions of infidels to Universalism, which signifies nothing more than the shifting of an unpopular name for one more plausible. Infidels and loose wicked men have cherished the doctrine enough to make it suspicious and offensive to the Christian, were there no other objection to it. * * * The author of this work once preached Universalism in Ripley, Chautauque Co. (N. Y.,), where he found among his hearers a Universalist drunkard-he had been a preacher! But he was a constant attendant on the preaching. He extold it--he praised the glorious sentiment till we preached directly against drunkenness, and then he fled-we have never seen him since. His name was Winslow. He liked the doctrine; but to hear a Universalist preacher condemn drunkenness so pointedly, was more than he could bear. So it is with the wicked generally; they love the doctrine, and love their sins both at once. How often do we hear men and boys talking of the unbounded love of God' with a profane oath in almost every sentence! The most abandoned swearers, and most abominable characters through the states, are frequently found advocating, amidst shocking oaths and drunken revelry, the 'liberal sentiment !' We should be sorry to state such things if we thought it possible to be mistaken. But we cannot be, unless our very senses have deceived us." [Pages 14, 16, 17, 34, 38, 40, 44, 45, 51, 55, 63, 64, 80, 81, 84, 89, 97, 98, 123, 124.]

So much, reader, for the "practical tendency" of Universalism, and the influence it has upon the characters of " ninety-nine out of a hundred" of its professors! It is true the author of this testimony, since going back to the Universalists, has published to the world that he was affected with a mental derangement when he published his book! But how does he know but that he is deranged now? for if his senses deceived him then, he is no better off now, and has no stronger evidence to prove that he is now in his right mind! It is my solemn opinion, that if ever the man was crazy, it was at the time (after being clean escaped from them that live in error") when he went back and had his name enrolled among a brotherhood of "Infidels," "Atheists," "gamblers,' ," "drunkards," "scoffers at religion, 'profane swearers, ̧” “Sabbath breakers,” “ debauchees," which he knew to be such from the evidence of his own "senses," the only testimony by which he now knows he has an existence !

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Now friend Rogers, I bid you farewell;-I believe you to be an honest man, but wofully deceived; and hence I impute your contradictions, and incoherent, suicidal speculation, not to any lack on your part, either morally or intellectually, but to the sheer deficiency, and radical incoherency of the system you are endeavoring to defend! I have no feelings toward you but those of kindness and friendship, and should I ever see your face, you will, I trust, find me what I here profess to be, your friend and well wisher. May we all desire, and seek after the truth, that it may make us free indeed!

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

DEMONSTRATED BY SCIENCE.*

The first step in attempting to establish, by science alone, the immortality of the soul, and consequently a future conscious state of existence, is to prove, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the soul is a substantial entity. If the soul can be demonstrated to be a substance, and not a vaguely-defined "mode of molecular motion," as claimed by materialists, then the most radical believer in the doctrine that "death ends all," must be so shaken in his faith as to admit in advance the soul's possible immortality. Nay, more. Prove the soul to be substantial, beyond the shadow of doubt, and the candid materialist will be logically driven to admit its immortality as a reasonable probability, since it is a universal axiom of science that no substance, however intangible to our senses, can be annihilated. Hence, the very first step in religious philosophy, in order to prove outside of the Bible that man shall live after the body dies, is to demonstrate the soul's substantial existence here. Can this be done? Can this intangible essence of our being be analyzed in the laboratory of reason, and, by bringing to bear upon it facts of science and proofs from Nature, be shown to possess an entitative character as really and truly as does the corporeal organism which it inhabits? We believe this can be done; and we will now, as briefly as possible, present the reader with what we regard as demonstrative evidence in favor of this central proposition.

The radical position first assumed and made public in The Problem of Human Life, that all the intangible forces, or so-called "modes of motion" in Nature, are real substances, including light, heat, sound, magnetism, gravitation, electricity, &c.-we still regard as the entering wedge to the scientific proof of a future life, and as the archimedean lever of truth by which the world of atheistic materialism is to be overturned. The fact that this fundamental view of Nature's forces had hitherto escaped the attention of theologians and Christian scientists, accounts in a large measure for the unsatisfactory results of pulpit efforts and theological treatises in making sensible inroads into the spirit of skepticism, latent and blatant, which has always stood as a bulwark in the way of the spread of Christianity. Instead of massing Scriptural proofs in favor of the

*By A. Wilford Hall, author of Universalism Against Tiself, The Problem of Human Life, Editor of The Microcosm, etc.

immortality of the soul, which none question and few heed, let every clergyman in the land from this time forward boldly take the view of Nature here outlined, and maintain with incontrovertible proofs that the invisible and intangible "forces" are as really substantial as are the corporeal bodies recognized by our senses, and, you may depend upon it, there will at once be opened to view a new world of substantial entities from which a flood of light will be poured into the skeptical mind. Demonstrate from the pulpit that these vaguely-defined nonentities of light, heat, sound, magnetism, electricity, and gravitation, are real substances,-things which have an entitative existence as literally and truly as have the food we eat, the water we drink, or the air we breathe,—and we can be certain that it will put the honest scientific skeptic to thinking as he never thought before. He will reason with himself when he listens to such proofs: "If these hitherto meaningless 'modes of motion' are in fact substantial entities, then why may not my soul, my intellect, my wondrous spirit, by which I recognize that I am, and by which I voluntarily move my body, direct my course in life, by which I make discoveries and construct ingenious inventions,-why may not this mysterious, indefinable something within me, which Materialism tells me is but a mode of molecular motion,' be also a substantial entity that must exist for weal or woe in a future life?" Such would be the undoubted drift of his thoughts under revolutionary reasoning like this. The question then is, and it is the question of questions in this age of profound research as relates to this discussion: Are there such proofs as those to which we have alluded, -clear, pointed, unmistakable proofs,-which can be poured from the pulpit and religious press into the millions of skeptical minds now in this land, demonstrating that every force of Nature must be, in the fitness and relation of things, a substantial entity? Let us

see.

First of all, let us be explicit in the employment of terms. Without correct definitions of words the truth can never be arrived at. For example, force is not motion, neither is motion force, nor can they by the power of human ingenuity be successfully confounded. Many educated writers, apparently intelligent and discriminating, make no distinction in these two terms, using them interchangeably. This indiscriminate use of force and motion is proved to be the basis of materialistic philosophy by the declaration of Professor Haeckel, the head of that school in Germany, that the soul, or life-force which moves our bodies, is nothing but the complicated motion of the material molecules of the brain and other portions of a living organism. (History of Creation, vol. i., p. 199.) He thus makes the motion of the physical molecules the very life-force which produces the motion, thereby confounding the cause with the effect and the effect with the cause! Weaker or more self-contradictory reasoning in a great writer can scarcely be imagined, and can no where be found.

Yet this childish jumbling together of motion and the force which produces it constitutes the foundation of that materialistic system of philosophy which forms the chief argument of modern science against the immortality of the soul. Let this confusion be cleared up, and let the terms force and motion be shown to sustain toward each other the relation of cause and effect, and the corner-stone of materialism will have been swept away.

To accomplish this important result, and make it clear to the mind of every reader, the statement of a simple philosophical law and its proper amplification will suffice. The law is this: The agent or force which moves a physical or inert body must of necessity be a substance of some kind, or the body could not and would not move. We will now illustrate this law. The water-wheel, for example, is caused to move by the contact of the water with its buckets. Hence the force which produces this motion is the substantial water. The motion of the wheel surely is not identical with the water which causes the motion, though this is precisely what materialism teaches in regard to life as the force which moves our physical molecules. Neither is the motion of the water the force which moves the wheel, but it is the actual contact of the water itself with the buckets of the wheel. Motion, remember, is not substantial, and hence can not produce motion in any substance. Motion is but the act of a body in changing its position from a state of rest, and necessarily ceases to exist the moment the body ceases to move. All the motions of substantial bodies in the universe could never produce the effect of motion in any other body except by substantial contact with it. Motion alone effects nothing in mechanics. Hence motion, in every conceivable case, is but the insubstantial effect of the positive contact of a substantial cause with some substantial body. In this way the doctrine of the conservation of force may be true, and can be understood alone on the principle that all force is substantial, and must in the nature of things be conserved in the economy of God's universe, since no substance, however, it may change its form, can cease to exists.

It does not weaken our position in the least to object, here, that the water is not the force which moves the wheel, since gravity is the force which gives motion to the water and makes it effective. This very objection illustrates the beauty of our universal law, as just presented. The water could no more fall without the substantial contact of gravity to pull it down than could the wheel turn without the substantial contact of the water. Thus are forces linked together in the harmonious order of Nature, the motion of one substantial body being but the effect of the substantial contact of another which we call force. As the water could not act on the wheel, whatever might have been its motion, except by substantial contact, and as gravity could not act on the water to cause it to fall, except by substantial contact with its molecule, so the ultimate cause, which