OPINIONS OF HALLAM AND OTHERS. who find it necessary to avoid martyrdom by approaching as Nicodemus did Christ; the time is not far off whe will assume a more broad and open aspect. The ravag infidelity with its many faces or rather masks, are bec so fearful, and are showing themselves so rampantly 1 very penetralia of the Established Church, that there be a remedy, or the day of Christ's second advent may declared at hand; for very soon there will be no faith left on earth, except in the Roman Catholic fold which yet needs vigorous purging, and in this the growing church of spiritualism, which opens its arms to the gospel in all its original investments of power, natural and supernatural. Distinguished Churchmen seem more and more becoming sensible of this. I have already recorded remarkable words of the Bishop of London, uttered at a Young Men's Association Anniversary, and we find him again, in a sermon. delivered in Westminster Abbey, as reported in the Times, saying, 'The especial lesson taught by Jacob's dream was, that God constantly controlled our thoughts, and that we were constantly in connection with the world of spirits, whilst we thought we were far away amid worldly things. He entreated those whose thoughts turned heavenwards, not to check them; for they might be certain that they were enlightened by the same glorious presence which cheered Jacob in the wilderness.' And we find the Rev. E. Bickersteth declaring that No part of divine truth can be neglected without spiritual loss; and it is too evident that the deep and mysterious doctrines of revelation respecting evil spirits and good spirits has been far too much disregarded in our age.' We find Hallam in his 'Literature of Europe' (vol. i. 275-6), asserting the same thing, and that an indifference to this knowledge of invisible things, or a premature despair of attaining it, may be accounted an indication of some moral or intellectual deficiency, some scantiness of due proportion of mind.' We have the present Dean Trench, in his Notes on the Miracles,' stoutly declaring the doctrine of the miraculous. The true miracle ear volu. be lef self o writte atte P a higher and purer nature coming down out of the world by untroubled harmonies into this world of ours which so y discords have jarred and disturbed, and bringing this ‘again, though it be but for one prophetic moment, into ony with that higher.' Stating this to be a nature is ng it to be perpetual, and, therefore, as much belonging now as then. We find the Rev. Professor Kingsley as strenuously defending miracle, and affirming that the only difficulty lies in the rationalist's shallow and sensuous views of nature;' with much more of the kind in his Westward Ho!' and other works. We find the Rev. F. D. Maurice in one of his recent Tracts for Priests and People,' asking why things true in the Gospels should not be true in the days of Queen Victoria? These are all symptoms of a need strongly felt in the ecclesiasticism of the day. 6 NOTE. Whilst this is going through the press, a phenomenon of a most extraordinary kind has shown itself in America. Mr. Mumler, a photographer of Boston and a medium, was astonished, on taking a photograph of himself, to find also by his side the figure of a young girl, which he immediately recognised as that of a deceased relative. The circumstance made a great excitement. Numbers of persons rushed to his rooms, and many have found deceased friends photographed with themselves. 6 The matter has been tested in all possible ways, but without detection of any imposture. An account of the particulars will be found in the Spiritual Magazine' of December 1862, and of January of the present year, and specimens of these spirit-photographs are now published by Mr. Pitman, Paternoster Row. CHAPTER XII. OPPOSITON TO NEW FACTS. Vertentem sese frustra sectabere canthum, Thus rendered by Dryden Thou, like the hindmost chariot-wheels, art curst, PERSIUS. T will be as well here to devote a chapter to some of those numerous facts which should act as a warning to opponents not to gibbet themselves as obstructors of truth to future times. It will be well employed if it save but one reasonable creature from adding his name to the long catalogue of those who, whilst they think they are doing God service, are merely persecuting His truth. The Creator of man, He who knows all the springs and motions of the human heart, when He was in Christ on the earth, said to His messengers of His great new truths, 'Behold, I send you forth as lambs amongst wolves' (Luke x. 3). This is His announcement of the inevitable consequences of the mission of truth to the end of the world. Persecution is the eternal heritage of truth. There is a deadly enmity to truth in the spirit of the world, which no knowledge, no experience, no infinitely repeated folly will ever cure. The world hates new truths, as the owl and the thief hate the sun. Mere intellectual enlightenment cannot recognise the spiritual. As the sun puts out a fire, so spirit puts out the eyes of mere intellect. The history of this hatred of truth is the same in the Pagan and the Christian world. Socrates, Pythagoras, and many others, fell under it. But it is most strikingly demonstrated in the history of Christ and His church. The Jews, the educated classes of that time, who had studied the prophets, and carried the institutions of Moses to the utmost perfection, still wanting the spiritual vision, when Christ came covered with all the signs of prophetic history, could not see Him. But what it did to Christ and His apostles, it had done long before. It ridiculed Noah's building the ark for a hundred years, till the flood came, and swept all the sneerers away. It made the life of Moses for forty years a torment, and after a thousand miracles in the wilderness. It caused the pagans to roast, boil, and hew in pieces the early Christians. 6 Nor was it less operative amongst the early Christians themselves. They ridiculed the discoveries of science, as the scientific ridiculed their Christianity. In his twentyfourth chapter, De Antipodibus, de Cœlo ac Sideribus,' Lactantius laughs at the notion of there being such things as antipodes, thereby showing that the theory of the rotundity of the earth and of antipodes was held, as we know it was, by Macrobius, Pliny the Younger, Cleomenes, and others. Lactantius is quite merry at the idea of 'homines quorum vestigia sint superiora quam capita;' whose heels are higher than their heads. Is it possible, he asks, for fruges et arbores deorsum versùs crescere? pluvias et nives et grandinem sursùm versùs cadere in terram?' that is, for fruits and trees to grow downwards! rains, and snow, and hail to fall upwards to the earth for fields, and seas, and cities, and mountains to hang upside down? The reason, he says, by which they came to such absurd ideas was, that they saw the sun and moon always setting in one place, and always rising in another, and not knowing the machinery by which they were conveyed when out of sight, they thought the heavens must be round, and, therefore, the earth must be round too. Nay, according to him, they had actually made an orrery. Itaque et aëreos LACTANTIUS ON ANTIPODES. 237 orbes fabricati sunt, quasi ad figuram mundi eosque cælarunt portentosis quibusdam simulacris, quæ astra esse dicerunt.' Thus the earth was, according to these philosophers (some of them of the first century of the Christian era, probably earlier still), round, and the planets were represented the same, and as circulating round it. Then followed what Lactantius regarded as a very monstrous notion. Si autem rotunda etiam terra esset, necesse esse, ut in omnes cœli partes eamdem faciem gerat ; id est, montes erigat, campos tendat, maria consternat. Quod si esset, etiam sequebatur illud extremum, ut nulla sit pars terræ quæ non ab hominibus, cæterisque animalibus incolatur. rotunditas adinvenit. Sic pendulos istos Antipodes cœli That is, if the earth were round, it would follow of necessity, that it would everywhere present the same face to the heavens; it would elevate its mountains, extend its plains, diffuse its seas. And if this should be, then this extreme condition would follow too, that there would be no part of the earth which might not be inhabited by men and other animals. And thus the rotundity of the earth is actually made to introduce pendulous antipodes!' But if you ask, says our learned Christian Father-and he was a very learned man of his age, and did able battle with the heathen and their mythologies-how all these things are prevented flying off from the round earth, and dropping into the lower regions of space, they tell you that it is a law of nature that the most ponderable substances tend to the centre, and are united to the centre as you see the spokes in a flying wheel; whilst the lighter substances, as clouds, smoke, and fire, are carried from the centre, and mount towards the heavens. Assuredly, if we have not specific gravity here, soon after the Christian era, we are on the skirts of it. 'Quod si quæras ab iis, qui hæc portenta defendunt, quomodò non cadunt omnia in inferiorem illam cœli partem; respondent, hanc rerum esse naturam, ut pondera in medium ferantur, et ad medium connexa sint omnia, sicut radios videmus in |