About London. J. Ewing Ritchie

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СКАЧАТЬ Golden Age opens thus:—

      “As many ages as it took to form

       The world, it takes to form the human race.

       Humanity was injured at its birth,

       And its existence in the past has been

       That of a suffering infant. God through Christ

       Appearing, healed that sickness, pouring down

       Interior life: so Christ our Lord became

       The second Adam, through whom all shall live.

       This is our faith. The world shall yet become

       The home of that great second Adam’s seed;

       Christ-forms, both male and female, who from Him

       Derive their ever-growing perfectness,

       Eventually shall possess the earth,

       And speak the rythmic language of the skies,

       And mightier miracles than His perform;

       They shall remove all sickness from the race,

       Cast out all devils from the church and state,

       And hurl into oblivion’s hollow sea

       The mountains of depravity. Then earth,

       From the Antarctic to the Arctic Pole,

       Shall blush with flowers; the isles and continents

       Teem with harmonic forms of bird and beast,

       And fruit, and glogious shapes of art more fair

       Than man’s imagination yet conceived,

       Adorn the stately temples of a new

       Divine religion. Every human soul

       A second Adam, and a second Eve,

       Shall dwell with its pure counterpart, conjoined

       In sacramental marriage of the heart.

       God shall be everywhere, and not, as now,

       Guessed at, but apprehended, felt and known.”—p. 1.

      I will take, says Mr. Howitt, as a fair specimen of the poetry and broad Christian philosophy of this spiritual epic, the recipe for writing a poem. In this, we see how far the requirements of Spiritualism are beyond the standard of the requirements of the world in poetry. They include the widest gatherings of knowledge, and still wider and loftier virtues and sympathies.

      “To write a poem, man should be as pure

       As frost-flowers; every thought should be in tune

       To heavenly truth, and Nature’s perfect law,

       Bathing the soul in beauty, joy, and peace.

       His heart should ripen like the purple grape;

       His country should be all the universe;

       His friends the best and wisest of all time.

       He should be universal as the light,

       And rich as summer in ripe-fruited love.

       He should have power to draw from common things

       Essential truth!—and, rising o’er all fear

       Of papal devils and of pagan gods,

       Of ancient Satans, and of modern ghosts,

       Should recognise all spirits as his friends,

       And see the worst but harps of golden strings

       Discordant now, but destined at the last

       To thrill, inspired with God’s own harmony,

       And make sweet music with the heavenly host.

       He should forget his private preference

       Of country or religion, and should see

       All parties and all creeds with equal eye;

       His the religion of true harmony;

       Christ the ideal of his lofty aim;

       The viewless Friend, the Comforter, and Guide,

       The joy in grief, whose every element

       Of life received in child-like faith,

       Becomes a part of impulse, feeling, thought—

       The central fire that lights his being’s sun.

       He should not limit Nature by the known;

       Nor limit God by what is known of him;

       Nor limit man by present states and moods;

       But see mankind at liberty to draw

       Into their lives all Nature’s wealth, and all

       Harmonious essences of life from God,

       And so, becoming god-like in their souls,

       And universal in their faculties,

       Informing all their age, enriching time,

       And blinding up the temple of the world

       With massive structures of eternity.

       He shall not fail to see how infinite

       God is above humanity, nor yet

       That God is throned in universal man,

       The greater mind of pure intelligence,

       Unlimited by states, moods, periods, creeds,

       Self-adequate, self-balanced in his love,

       And needing nothing and conferring all,

       And asking nothing and receiving all,

       Akin by love to every loving heart,

       By nobleness to every noble mind,

       By truth to all who look through natural forms,

       And feel the throbbing arteries of law

       In every pulse of nature and of man.”

      The peculiar doctrine of the Spiritualists seems to be the belief in Spiritual intercourse, and in mediums; as The Spiritual Magazine tells us “the only media we know accessible to the public are Mrs. Marshal and her niece, of 22, Red Lion-street, Holborn,” we need not give ourselves much trouble about them. Concerning intercourse with departed spirits, an American Judge СКАЧАТЬ