"By gentler and educatory teachings, untainted by the corroding canker of selfishness, they might be turned in the right direction and their generations be led into the light, provided that your educational system moved on a loftier plane than theirs; but blood and violence, and all the carnal lusts that follow like jackals in their wake, can only eventuate in driving them into lower depths.
"The spiritual instructors of the outer world, past and present, are and have been, in the main, sincere and earnest, but with a limited idea of the spiritualism they essay to teach. Powerful prelacies have grown up in all the religious divisions, ambitious of temporal power, and untold evils have resulted, not from the system of religion, but from the love of power and authority, non-spiritual in its nature, and as a result the spirit or principle of religion has suffered undeserved obloquy.
"To us the ideal God of your religious people is strangely contradictory and irreconcilable. He is portrayed not as a spiritual being, but as a common mortal in many of the essentials. Their conception of Deity is that He rules as a king in heaven, before whom the redeemed and the saints forever prostrate themselves in adoration or sing praises by voice, and adulate Him with harp and lute and other musical instruments, confessing hourly their unworthiness to come into His presence.
"This is an earthly, barbarous conception of the Supreme Power of the Universe. It was probably of Chinese or Oriental origin in the days of supreme despotism, when every subject must prostrate himself in the dust in the presence of majesty.
"This idea was transmitted to Christendom in the West when royalty proclaimed itself the symbol of Godhood and religion. The subject was taught that the monarch was the direct representative of God, and his court was modeled after the court of the King of kings, where homage and adoration and humiliation were the endless order of all future life.
"We have an entirely different conception of the Supreme Principle, and do not regard it in the light of a ruler or king, in the mortal sense, but the embodiment of justice and love, that neither exacts nor receives adoration of those who pass to the world beyond, the returning children of the great and enduring Principle which exists everywhere, strengthened and broadened by a previous state or states of existence, wherein they were clothed about with mortal and perishable habiliments.
"We look forward to the passage from this world to a better one beyond with joyous expectation, and with no sense of terror or apprehension, and there come us no pangs of dissolution. We have sought diligently to live up to the law of love in this life, and have the fullest assurance that our efforts will meet the approval of the Supreme Principle, whose beneficences invite and permit us to enter the broader fields and more perfect worlds of a higher existence.
"Death, or the exchange of worlds, has neither terrors for those who go, nor the stings of affliction for those who tarry. It is but the inevitable and necessary parting of friends and relatives for a little period, and we know that the shores of reunion lie just beyond the filmy veil of the future.
"The end or change is never hastened nor retarded by the violation of Nature's sacred laws. There are but few partings or deaths in the earlier periods of life. They go with joyful alacrity, as to a feast, at four or five score, and their memory, works and examples cheer and sustain those who remain.
"No; we have no physicians. If, perchance, some law of Nature is violated and mortal ailment ensues, it needs no specialist to discover that fact, or recommend the proper method of rectifying it. That is a part of the education of all. Literally, we neither know nor care to know what physic is. We live simply and in accordance with Nature's laws, and disease, such as prevails in your land and others, is unknown in this, and has been for ages. Science and scientific discovery, as we utilize and employ them, have freed us from disease and made death but the exchange of lives. We know more than we care to tell of the life beyond."