preachers, shot out into the heated atmosphere of unventilated rooms, or into the zomatic vapors which poison the respirable air in over-thronged meeting-houses.

The moral is: IIuman life and human hearts are profoundly earnest, even when taken in their lightest moments, and the struggle for diurnal existence is too serious and too incessantly intense, to be trifled with by indulging in any unnecessary sensationalisms, either in politics or religion. And the moral laws of the eternally just Father and Mother will hold unpardonably responsible every person and every sect who violates the sovereign principles of harmony.

INSANITY CAUSED BY HORRIBLE SUPERSTITIONS.

SPIRITUALISM, not as a religion, but as a manifestation of human life and immortality-bringing to the world a new science of mind and a new philosophy of the universe-is entitled to highest rank among mankind's impersonal benefactors.

Of all known manifestations vouchsafed to man, we regard those demonstrating the absolute contact, by magnetic cerebro vibrations and co-incidental sympathy, between mind and mind, however wide asunder, as of the highest importance to the advancement of mental knowledge and universal human health.

In earliest ages the ignorant inhabitants, like the uneducated of our own day, in many countries, attributed all.mysterious diseases, fits, paroxysms, maniacal violence, etc., to the direct action of some overmastering evil intelligence. The doctrine of devils, infernal genii, fallen angels, magicians, wizards, witches, etc., can be traced to no other origin. History is overloaded with examples which I need not here quote. But Spiritualism with its phenomena comes to relieve the world—yea, to save mankind, if they will be saved -from the horrible superstitions which have been in

corporated into theology, and are taught every Sunday from pulpits and in the Sabbath schools of Christendom.

Destitute of knowledge of spiritual laws, operative incessantly in the brain and nerves of human nature, who can wonder that mankind institute imaginative explanations of mysterious phenomena.

For illustration take some curious and horrible superstitions which prevail to-day in certain mountainous districts beyond the Atlantic. Says a correspondent: The inhabitants of the villages of the Vosges, except those who by reason of their position in the lower parts of the mountains and their almost utter seclusion from the rays of the sun, are cretins, are a hardy people, possessing much common sense in all things into which a suspicion of the supernatural does not enter, but as soon as there is even a hint of this they lose all courage, even in the best of times, and give way to the play of their fancy with utter abandon. And one cannot wonder at this, for the entire aspect of nature about their habitat is fitted to produce such a state of mind. Everything about them—the frightful chasms, the torn and ragged cliffs, the hoary woods sometimes inclined almost at right angles with the sea level, the motionless cataclysm, the silent, eternal nightmare-suggest only anger and malediction. No wonder that amid scenes like these the devil should be worshipped even more than

God, since the devil must be placated and God is to these people a good being, but one far removed. The roar of the cataract tumbling hundreds of feet from the overhanging rocks amid the dank and aromatic forests; the soughing of the wind at nightfall, and the moon bursting in full splendor over the summit of some far-off crag without warning, and suddenly overwhelming gorse and gully with its strange light, fill the day and night with possibilities of superstition and horror which need only some material distress, some abrupt breaking in of influence from the outer world, to make them spring into life with maddening vigor, and set the whole people into an agony of fear. To these people the woods are at all times filled with goblins and fairies, as is often the case in metal-producing regions. Cobalt and nickel are to them not metals, but demons whom they half fear and yet half hope to see, for there are many stories of how gnomes have suddenly started from the earth and conferred not only wealth, but even supernatural powers on those who have been bold enough to wait and receive them.

DEMONS IN DOGS AND WOLVES.

Inhabitants of the village of Pas-sur-Mont, among the Vosges, not many months ago, furnished a visitor with

a thrilling example of superstition concerning the doctrine of malign possession. He describes a cretin` of the extreme type thus: "His mouth, always open and full of saliva,. shows teeth which are going to decay. His chest is narrow, his back curved, and his breath asthmatic. One sees, indeed, arms and legs, but his limbs are short, misshaped, lean, stiff, without power and without utility; the knees are thick and inclined inward, and the feet are flat. The large head droops listlessly on the breast, the belly resembles a bag, and the integuments are loose. The loathsome, idiotic creature hears not, speaks not, and only now and then utters a hoarse, wild, inarticulate sound. At first one thinks this being is a gigantic polyp, something in horrid imitation of a man, for it scarcely moves. It creeps with the painful heaviness of a sloth-a living hatred, a curse, a cretin. This is, of course, as the cretin appears in his most aggravated type. There are beings who possess all this hideousness conjoined with sufficient intelligence to work and even plot to accomplish their ends."

The superstitious people, impressed with some of the psychological phenomena made familiar by Spiritualism, but without knowledge of the laws of mental contact, start and maintain theories to the effect that some of these cretins possess the power of leaving their bodies and appearing in the form of dogs and