THE MEDIUM AND DAYBREAK
LONDON, JUNE 7, 1872.

No. 114.—VOL. III.
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MR. MASSEY'S CONCLUDING LECTURE AT
ST. GEORGE'S HALL.

    On Sunday afternoon Mr. Massey delivered his fourth and concluding lecture in the above hall to a moderately large though apparently highly appreciative audience.  The subject of the discourse was: "Christianity as hitherto Interpreted; a Second Advent in Spiritualism."  We suppose the audience was composed more purely of Spiritualists than on any of the three proceeding occasions.  It rests with time to prove whether they will accept the platform so ably marked out on Sunday, or not.  We feel convinced that Mr. Massey laid down, as fully and clearly as could be done in one discourse, the truths and principles which must form the basis of a "second advent" of Christianity—or, in other words, of a universal church, based on the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood or God.  The hearty and prolonged applause which frequently interrupted the lecturer gave evidence enough of the fact that the ideas enunciated by him fell into ready hearts; but whether they will have courage sufficient to apply them as their living and acting principles in everyday life, in face of the existing conditions of society, is another thing.  That there are hundreds—nay, thousands—both in this country and America, who are acting up to such principles, we know, but they are, for the most part, individuals standing alone—poor, obscure, and persecuted; so that when a man like Mr. Massey, who has won a position of honour and respect by his genius, coupled with persistent industry, comes forward, and, when most men begin to think of laying aside the trappings of warfare, boldly enters the arena of political and religious strife, and casts his gauntlet at the feet of society, thereby endangering his well-earned fame, and drawing upon himself the malignancy of a world whose delusive security he has evaded, it is a noble spectacle, emboldening to the timid, and giving renewed vigour to the weary and suffering.

    Mr. Massey said that he had, in this course of lectures, brought forward his personal experience in substantiation of the truths of modern Spiritualism.  He did not think anyone would believe that he would be so senseless as to do so if the whole thing were a falsehood.  He had used his facts as the basis of his lectures.  One of his critics had said he should not like to go through a similar experience in order to be converted to Spiritualism.  He was sorry it was so disagreeable, but there it was, and he could not alter it.  He did not by any means imply that such an experience was necessary to everyone.  Guided by this experience, he had tried to trace a few links in the past, and to try them by the spiritual light of to-day.  It had been his effort to trace how God had wrought amongst all people, in order to develop in their minds a knowledge of spiritual existence, and ultimately a knowledge of himself.  It was false to suppose that Spiritualism was a survival of savage civilisation, evolved in ignorance and superstition.  It was not based upon their philosophy at all.  It was a survival of the same spiritual facts; and if we were compelled to recognise the same spiritual cause, it was a double reason for the truth of Spiritualism.  It was the oldest form of worship in the world, and the one destined to survive all others.  It was the most universal in its claims; its range of revelation included the whole human family—it would keep the heavenly fire burning in the heart when it had died out on the altar.  He had been amazed at the light which the facts of Spiritualism cast on the beliefs of the past.  Most of the mysteries of bygone times which puzzled us, as Friday's foot steps in the sand did Robinson Crusoe, it unravelled.  It gave us, as it were, the Masonic grip whereby we could interpret so many things.  It seemed to create a new seeing sense.

    The lecturer here said that, had he not been obliged to leave out so many things, he might have shown that Spiritualism would explain many old ideas and facts.  For instance, the doctrine of pre-existence might have arisen from the double consciousness he spoke of in his first lecture.  Another illustration which Mr. Massey introduced was that of the shepherds and woodmen of Languedoc—the Albigenses.  They were called by their persecutors "black phantoms," because they fought with such super-human power, overthrowing vastly superior numbers.  The secret of their might lay in the fact of their being assisted by legions of spirits, who told them when to fight and when to flee.  Yet when those men bore witness to the facts of spiritual appearances they were denounced as impious fanatics.  The lecturer said he could mention many lives in the past in illustration of this belief in spiritual aid and guidance.  He would, however, mention but one—Tertullian, who was the first man of his age.  St. Cyprian, in calling for one of his books, would say, "Give me my master."  He at first believed in Christianity as then taught; but he afterwards accepted a broader faith, believing in an eternal stream of revelation always passing from heaven to earth.  He maintained that God descended in all ages to illumine man—that the stream of revelation could be traced through the patriarchs and prophets of the past, and that it had not attained its highest point in Christ.  Such living Spiritualism was, and is yet, considered the most damnable doctrine by the orthodox.

    Revelation by means of objective manifestations was one way in which the ages arrived at a knowledge of God.  It was derived from the positive communication with the spiritual world.  The ladder between heaven and earth—the bridge spanning the chasm of death—was seen by them.  The only hold they had of the spiritual life was the one they had had presented to their senses.  Infinitude had spoken to them with spirit-voices, and in the most natural way illuminated their material existence, and low and selfish as they were, they had left us a spiritual record which we had used at second hand.  Jesus Christ, the most perfect Spiritualist, could have had no idea of founding a religion without spiritual manifestations; he laid claim to them as the proof that God was with him.  He dwelt in sight and sound of the spiritual world, so that the two worlds became one visible unition.  The veil betwixt the two was rent during his life, as that of the Temple was on the day of his death.  Spiritual communication was the means of fusing these two into one.  The holy spirit called the Paraclete was the deliverer of spiritual truth.  It would take Spiritualism a long time to get that which had been personified as the Holy Spirit.  It was the highest kind of mediumship.  St. Paul said: "For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance."  The assurance of convocation at the present day was of a very different kind.  The followers of Christ were to be made mediums, and were to prophesy, heal, and perform miracles of various kinds—this was to be the proof that they were of God.

    "Turn," said the lecturer, "to the Christian Church, and see if it is of God.  Where are its signs of divine mediumship?"  He said the priesthood of Israel was always subordinated to individual manifestations.  Was it so now?  It was subordinated to men who were mere bookkeepers.  They had no visions, no divination, no living word from the Father to a living people.  The light of their Urim and Thummim had gone out—its glory was departed.  There was no sign of the divine presence with the Church of the present time; it had not warmth of heart enough to quicken into splendour its hidden light.  We could not live on the manna that fell in the desert to feed the Israelites.  We could not start in this or other life-matters just where the wisest and best had left off.  Every man must begin from the beginning, be guided by the light God had given to his individual soul.  We could not inherit our faith ready made; those who lived deepest would be the most perplexed before they perfected their faith.

    There was a vast difference between Jesus Christ and his followers.  His was a daily converse with heaven, whereby he was fed from heaven.  Their inspiration was mainly drawn from a dead well, whose waters, seldom stirred by an angel from heaven, had been impregnated with the sulphurous fumes from below.  It had been with the Christian Church as with the Hebrews.  So long as the law was given to them by the Spirit of God it was living, but when written it became dead and useless.  Then came their ruin and dispersion.  They could not go on living on one year's fruitfall; they must have it every year.

    Mr. Massey hero introduced a Story of a French curé who once, on the occasion of the annual blessing of the fields, came to one which was in a very bad condition, and accordingly refused to give it his benediction, saying it would be no use, as it needed manuring.  The whole Christian world, said the lecturer, wanted a top dressing and a thorough digging and dunging.  Manifestations were the earliest necessity, and he thought they were just as necessary now.  The disbelieving Thomases were becoming more and more every day.  They must touch the other world in order to believe it.  The spiritual world had come to be looked upon as a far-off land that existed in legend alone.  Yet there never was more need of the signs of its existence.  What did it matter in which shape it proves its existence?  Shipwrecked people did not quarrel with the land they saw at hand.  In one sense at least the objective means had an advantage over the subjective.  In the Eucharist the difficulty was to find where the spirit was located, and the dispute was sufficient to divide churches.  The most thorough and English way of getting God was to eat him.  There surely never was greater need of revelation than now.  Protestantism, which had done so much for mankind in freeing it from the tyranny of dogmas, was an utter failure as a spiritualistic movement.  Its greatest strokes had rebounded against itself.  It had had no new sources of spiritual life.  It had fed the spirit of freethought, but mostly in the direction of science.  It manifested its life in continually dissenting.  We, as a people, always grumbled when agreeing, but when disagreeing grew glorious.  He imagined that the acme of Protestantism was never gained in this world but once, and then it was sublime.  A Scotch sect had divided and divided until the ultimate offshoot was represented by two persons, an old man and an old woman.  She being then asked if she did not consider that they had at length constituted the true Church, replied: " Weel, I'm nae sae sure o' John."

    In presence of the revelations of science at the present day—telegraphy, photography, spectrum analysis, &c.—we need another which will give us the spiritual assurance that we are nothing in this infinitude save pure consciousness of God, and his consciousness with us.  What would the scientific world say if it were announced that a new species was in process of evolution?  It would crawl on all-fours to the ends of the earth to see it.  But it might be that here was a new motion, a new life, a new world evolving before our eyes; and yet Professor Huxley could say, "But supposing the phenomena to be genuine, they do not interest me."   There surely never could have been greater necessity for revelation than now.   But was Spiritualism, with its absurd rapping's and tippings, going to effect the necessary change?  It might be urged that, in comparison with the miracles performed in the past, such manifestations were trivial and nonsensical.  But if spirits were present, there was nothing unnatural in their rapping and knocking.  We imagined that the divine life, the spiritual world, must come to us with pomp and power, with the sound of trumpets and the beating of drums.  But such was not the case; it came silently and stealthily.  The tiny tap had been the turning-point in many lives.  He believed that, as an evidence of spiritual life, one spiritual manifestation was worth the hearsay of a world.  It was the life and resurrection of the rest.  Immortality was not a "perhaps"—it was a fact.  Once immortality thus grasped as a fact, all words about it seemed unimportant.  The man who had once felt sure of spirit-presence, once heard a spirit-voice, or been breathed upon with spirit-breath, was in a different position to one who had not experienced these things; he had lost all cowardly fear of death.  The Christian world had cultivated the greatest fear of death, which to it was like taking a step in the dark—putting the foot on the last step of a stair and finding no foothold.  Our faith did not conquer death at the last moment, but carried a triumphant consciousness of having conquered death the whole life through.  With such an assurance, the Spiritualist could walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and, having passed it, could turn round and ask: "Is this the bugbear that has frightened so many?"  We could say farewell to the old dread and despair.  What cared we for the broken shell, who had heard the flute-note of the immortal bird?  Death was but the shadow of life's presence.

    This communication of the divine life was to beget in us the divine life.  If God had been with us, we must prove it to others.  "I believe in spirit-rapping" was no great creed.  The thing of importance was, what we were going to do.  It was useless to climb to the hill-top if we had no eyes to see the glories of the sun.  Belief was not given to us to be limited to a form of belief.  It was not in believing but in doing that we could get the true focus for God to act upon us.  The visitation of God did not descend on the bended knees of piety, but on the wearied feet of active charity; and before offering up prayer men should ask themselves what it is worth.  If we had a love, we should let it work.  Jesus called it a love of one's neighbour.  We must be as mediums for transmitting to others what we had found for ourselves.  Pass them on; that's your proof of the love of God, be they golden thoughts or golden nuggets.  That is the sole return we could ever make.  The consciousness of self must be absorbed in doing good.  In this trance of self God came nearer to us than in any other way.  The only proof of our love of God was in freely using our riches of every kind for the love of others.  It was in action that we most nearly touched the divine life.  What had men not found compatible with belief?  Had they not killed and slaughtered their fellow men for the glory of God?  Had they not believed they should find God if they only got far enough away from humanity, and so had become monks and gone into the deserts?  Men had believed that by standing on one leg for thirty years they could hop into heaven at last.  They had seen their brothers and sisters suffer starvation and miseries of every description too horrible to think of, and had only remembered that they were all of one flesh and blood when epidemic disease had brought them to death's door.  They believed on Sundays that they should not bow down to graven images, and yet during the whole of the week they grovelled before and worshipped a piece of metal stamped with the image of the sovereign of the realm.  Men had believed that God was the author of diseases, when they themselves were the cause of them.  They had mocked us long enough with their lying beliefs about the origin of evil.

    After a severe denunciation of the present form of belief, Mr. Massey went on to say that Spiritualism, as he understood it, meant a new revelation.  Many things would change, and some things we mistook for real would whiten with the seeds of dissolution around them.  But the eternal truth could not be changed—only the false.  Spiritualism, as he interpreted it, meant a new life in the world.  New light and life did not come to impoverish; they came to enrich.  Spiritualism would prove a mighty iconoclast.  It would break many an image of God, thereby to reveal the true God concealed.

    In speaking of the question of woman's suffrage and woman's suffering, he said the degradation and injustice were too horrible to think of.  We had never known what was woman's proper place in creation.  We did not get geniuses by hereditary influence.  Perhaps it was on account of woman's nature and her more spiritual rapport with the Creator that we got the higher specimens of God's image amongst humanity.  If it were not so, he did not see how she could have made her way through the world.  He believed that had it not been for this rapport humanity must have been far worse that it is at present.  He looked upon her as a coadjutor with God.  Instead of woman having been the cause of the fall, he believed she had been our salvation.  He dared only hint at things that were done in the land.  How many idiots were born into the world because of drunken fathers!  How many women brought into the world little children the picture of their fathers in a state of moral death!  It was a wonder that they were not worse than hopeless idiots.  It was enough to make us rise and try to help one another.  It was the desire of Jesus Christ to establish the kingdom of God, not merely hereafter, but here, and at once, though its beginnings were as small as a gram of mustard seed.  It was to be the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven.  Christ never made any distinction between the here and the here after.  A true spiritual life, lived in fulfilment of spiritual relationships and in the presence of God, would constitute the kingdom of heaven.  He said there were some who should not taste death until they had seen the Son of Man.  He spoke of the spiritual life.  He had no notion of its being shut up in the church; neither did he contemplate a religion for one day in seven.  If men did but live now and act here as they would desire to do when their spiritual vision was unfolded, it would be the kingdom of heaven.  Christ asked for fellow-worshippers, not mere repeaters of his words.  He said: "Why call ye me Lord and do not the things which I say?"  And again: "He that heareth and doeth not, is like the man that, without a foundation, built a house upon the earth."  We remembered his hatred of pretenders.  The one drop of gall in his nature was wrung out in this instance.  When asked by the young man what he should do to inherit the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, "Sell all thou hast and give to the poor."  He knew what riches became when they possessed their heritors.  He said, "How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of heaven."  He did not mean that it was not to be founded on this earth.  He meant that those who did not help to found it here would not find it hereafter.  "Bear one another's burthens."  "Lay not up treasures on earth;" such was what he commanded.  Yet this was exactly what myriads of his followers were doing.  The Church had made of Christ's life, a life lived for us, whereas it was meant to be a life lived by us.  Jesus Christ must himself be offended with the world's worship of him.  He no more asked for this now than he did eighteen hundred years ago.  He asked for souls burning with love for one another.  We had made a fetish of Jesus.  He bequeathed his life to us that we might continue it.  It was a life of hardship and pain lived for the sake of humanity.  Instead of living that life, we had merely erected statues to his memory.  We were tempted, as he was, by the powers of this world.  He conquered the temptation by resisting the devil; we conquered by succumbing, and this we called the religion of Christ.  What was considered the prop and stay of heaven had been the very means of preventing heaven from coming down to us.

    Mr. Massey here characterised the prevailing custom amongst the rich, of worshipping on Sunday and treading down the poor man during the week, as totally opposed to the spirit of Christ's teachings.  He also considered the orthodox faith, which made man think of nothing but his own salvation, as eminently mean and selfish.  The man who was always thinking of himself in the battle must be a coward.  A man consumed with the thought of his own safety and salvation could not be worth much in this world or another.  He related the anecdote of the Scandinavian chieftain, who was promised salvation if he would believe and consent to be baptised.  He was half inclined to give way, when he thought of his companions and those who had died in the faith and of their forefathers, and asked what would become of them. "They are certainly damned," was the reply.  "Then I would rather be damned with them than saved by myself," said the grand old hero.

    The clergy of the Church of England were so far off as to be out of hearing.  Many of them were very good fellows in their way.  Speaking to several of them with reference to the agricultural labourers, they all of them, with one accord, took sides against them.  He knew a poor man who for forty-five years worked for one firm.  He began at 16s. per week, and worked his way down to 6s.  That was his own father.  At 6s. per week he broke a limb, and was pensioned off with a fourpenny piece.  At the same time, during these forty-five years any possessor of capital might have put it out to usury, and it would have been more than quadrupled.  Such was one of our laws, and yet no Christian minister would dare to go to the root of the matter.  The consciousness of this wrong was yet to be created in the minds of men so far as Christianity was concerned.  They never seemed to think that Jesus Christ meant what he said.  He spoke so figuratively that they considered he was not in earnest.  Ask them to believe in the Thirty-nine Articles, and they would swallow any number; but ask them to believe all Jesus Christ said as true, and they would not do it.

    Were such a person as Jesus to appear in the House of Commons now he would be patted on the shoulder and lionised; but let him speak out such sentiments as Jesus uttered in his lifetime, and the members would immediately begin to remonstrate with him, and say, "You surely do not mean all this in earnest?"  It had been looked upon us a piece of the grossest injustice that trades unionists had made it a law that good and bad workmen should receive the same wages.  He considered this a practical realisation of the teaching of Christ.

    We cannot follow the lecturer into his examination of the question of capital and labour.  It was a powerful piece of argumentation.  In conclusion, speaking of Christ's second coming—"What if he is on earth already?"  What if, while we were sitting gazing at the skies for his appearing, he might be coming out in burning cities?  What if he were tired of 1800 years of preaching, and had at length sent Communists and Internationalists to bring about his mission?

    Mr. Massey said that the little good that such as he could do in twenty or thirty years, by writing and speaking, those with Capital might do in the course of a year or two.  Take, for instance, the agricultural labourers.  Let any man with money work a farm on the co-operative principle, or any principle whereby the labourer would be raised above the position of a chattel hireling, and see what a revolution he would cause in a short time!

    The lecturer here introduced the story of a mail steamer, full of gold diggers returning from California, which was wrecked.*  When it was known that the ship was sinking, and there was no chance of escape, all emptied their hoards of gold on to the cabin floor, and invited anyone to help themselves that liked.  When a chance offered itself for the saving of the women and children, these rough men quietly helped them into the boat, and saw them put off without any sign of selfishness.  Immediately afterwards the vessel sank.  Spiritualism, he thought, must have some such effect on those who felt its arresting hand put on them for the other world to look into their faces; for if the spiritual world presented itself in life, its effect must be lifelong.  It must be impossible for men to continue living on in utter selfishness or in vice, when they knew that the spirit-world was present with them—when they know that those loved ones who had gone before were still watching them, sorrowing for them in their degradation, and helping them in their trials.  We all had our angels walking and talking with us, though they might not break into visibility.


* In 1857 the paddle-steamer SS Central America was on passage to New York City  laden with gold coins, ingots and specimen gold fresh from the California Gold Rush, when it foundered in a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina.

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WHO'S WHO.

 
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, anglicised as Tertullian, (ca. 160–230) was a church leader and prolific author during the early years of Christianity.  He was born and spent his life in Carthage, in modern Tunisia.  He was the son of a centurion and was well educated, especially in law.  Tertullian converted to Christianity ca.197 and became a formidable defender of the faith and the first important Christian ecclesiastical writer in Latin, his writings being witness to the doctrine and discipline of the early church.  Tertullian denounced Christian doctrines he considered heretical - in his doctrinal treatise refuting heresy, 'De praescriptione hereticorum' (On the Claims of Heretics), he argued that the church alone has the authority to declare what is and is not orthodox Christianity.  However, later in life he adopted views that were themselves regarded as heretical when he joined the Montanists, which accounts for his failure to attain sainthood.  Like all Montanists, Tertullian held that Christians should welcome persecution, not flee from it. He later established his own sect, the Tertullianists.
 
Paraclete, Comforter (Latin 'Consolator'; Greek 'parakletos'), an appellation of the Holy Ghost. The Greek word which, as a designation of the Holy Ghost at least, occurs only in St. John (xiv, 16, 26; xv, 26; xvi, 7). According to St. John the mission of the Paraclete is to abide with the disciples after Jesus has withdrawn His visible presence from them; to inwardly bring home to them the teaching externally given by Christ and thus to stand as a witness to the doctrine and work of the Saviour. Paraclete is important to Christians because it sheds much light on the nature of God and Christ and the Holy Spirit and brings into question the concept of the Trinity, often a source of great confusion. The Holy Spirit, or Paraclete, is the third person of the Holy Trinity. The Paraclete is also called the 'Spirit of Truth', the 'Comforter' and the 'Supporter', as it is the Paraclete who comes alongside the Christian to provide guidance, consolation and support throughout life’s journey.
 
Urim and Thummim—the sacred lot by means of which the ancient Hebrews were wont to seek manifestations of the Divine will.  Urim is derived from the Hebrew for "light", or "to give light", and Thummim from "completeness", "perfection", or "innocence".  From which it is surmised by scholars that the sacred lot had a twofold purpose in trials, viz. Urim served to bring to light the guilt of the accused person, and Thummim to establish his innocence by revealing the will of God on the contested point or other problem. However, the relatively few mentions of Urim and Thummim in the Old Testament leave the precise nature and use of the lot a matter of conjecture.
 
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) - English biologist and administrator, president of the Royal Society, 1881-1885.  Huxley qualified as a doctor.  He later undertook a voyage as a navel surgeon to the southern hemisphere, where he devoted much time to the study of marine invertebrates, sending details of his discoveries back to England where his paper 'On the Anatomy and the Affinities of the Family of Medusae' was printed by the Royal Society in the Philosophical Transactions in 1849.  On his return to England in 1850, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in the following year received the Royal Medal and was elected to the Council.  His first reaction upon reading Darwin's 'The Origin of Species' was "How exceedingly stupid not to have thought of that."  Referred to as "Darwin's bulldog," Huxley fought valiantly on Darwin's behalf, while never accepting the Darwinian principle without qualification. A talented populariser of science, he coined the term "Darwinism" to describe organic evolution by natural selection. In 1869, Huxley was charged with heresy after giving a Sunday lay sermon "on the physical basis of life", in which he justified the materialist investigation of life while insisting that materialism as a philosophy of ultimate existence was no more legitimate than spiritualism. On this basis he coined a new label for himself, "agnostic".  Huxley's agnosticism was widely held to be a natural consequence of the intellectual and philosophical conditions of the 1860s, when clerical intolerance was trying to excommunicate scientific discovery because its apparent clash with the book of Genesis.

 

MR. MASSEY'S LECTURES CONCLUDED.

    The utterances of the lecturer on Sunday afternoon were those of a man thoroughly honest and deeply in earnest.  It is seldom one sees such a sublime manifestation of the grandeur of our common humanity as was presented by Mr. Massey when, amidst a torrent of moral missiles which were hitting his audience right and left, he declared himself the son of that patient old labourer who towards the end of a penurious existence was pensioned off with a fourpenny bit!  The world in general depends on its trappings and other fortuitous circumstances for making an impression; but the lecturer, like a true poet, simply and trustingly relied on that divine and priceless gift—his manhood, and won gloriously.  If the highest heads in the realm had bowed themselves before the audience with the tale of their family lineage—even if the Sovereign herself had done so—the plaudits could not have been heartier; nay, they would not have been so hearty.  It was a triumph worth the sufferings of a lifetime, and, to those who witnessed it, a more instructive lecture than empty words could possibly convey.  In it was exemplified the whole genius of Spiritualism, which, like its exponent on Sunday last, conscious of intrinsic worth, can disregard with well merited contempt the silly baubles which are so highly prized by the children of the human family.

    In every respect the lectures were more than a success, and eclipsed the highest anticipations of all concerned.  The chief glory of the occasion culminated in the conduct of  the lecturer himself, who exceeded all that could possibly be expected of him in his treatment of the subject.  This is a more pleasing result than crowded houses and an overflowing treasury.  It is men, not circumstances, that Spiritualists are looking for, and a true specimen has been found in Mr. Massey.  Of all the literary men of the age, no one has attained such unsolicited distinction from such a small beginning.  He is a literary man in the true sense of the term, because he is creative.  He feeds the world's mind with new ideas and improved forms of thought.  Is it not to be expected that when such a man advances into a new and unworked field, and there displays the richest characteristics of his genius, his brother litterateurs would rally round him, and with warm, fraternal sympathy encourage one who is universally acknowledged to be an ornament to the profession?  Most certainly, if there were any such his contemporaries.  It is well known that the Poet Laureate stands on the same spiritual platform with Mr. Massey, and would have been present at St. George's Hall had he been in town.  But where are our other literary men?  These egotistical book-makers, professional magazine hacks, and newspaper cab-horses are no more literary men than their equine prototypes are martial steeds.  They are like the Irish servant, the son of a drunken hodman, who euphoniously described his father as an architect.  The true literary man, like every other class, is known by his sympathies.  Need we be surprised, then, that Mr. Massey's late effort was parsed by in insolent silence by these inferior creatures, who have as little power to appreciate the lecturer's performance, as an owl has to emulate a bird of song?  Where were our Internationalists, Communists, National Reformers, our Republican Bradlaughs and Odgers, and their tongue-tied sectarian organs?  Where was the Beehive, with its queenless cloud of buzzing drones?  Where were the Nonconformist organs, and the anxious seekers after divine light in creed and rationality in church polity?  Empty hypocrites all!  Selfish place-seekers, blowers of their own trumpets, the bantlings of tyrannical sects!  If they were true reformers, real well-wishers of humanity, the term "Spiritualism" would not have the effect on them which a scarecrow has on the feathered thief.  Theirs is a party cry, and hence the radical principles which dare be uttered only by the Spiritualist, rebuke them as severely as the sects they war against.

    But we must defer further punishment to these recreants this week, simply suggesting that if they had not the decency to acknowledge the courtesy of an admission to the lectures, perhaps they will have so much regard for self as to attempt the defence of their conduct, when we shall be at their service with a further instalment of our opinion of them.

    Respecting the financial aspect of the affair, we have much pleasure in presenting the following very satisfactory statements from Mr. Daw, who acted officially in getting up the lectures:—

To the Editor of the Medium and Daybreak.

DEAR SIR,—As treasurer to the Committee of Mr. Gerald Massey's lectures, I beg to hand you the balance-sheet of receipts and expenditure, by which the guarantors will see they are relieved from any call being made on their proffered kindness.

    In the monetary as in every other point of view, the lectures have been an absolute success.—Yours faithfully,

N. FABYAN DAW, Treasurer.

   N. F. DAW, Treasurer.

    Spiritualists need not trouble themselves with the indifference of the outside masses.  Numbering amongst themselves, as they do, the first minds in the land, the above facts show that in bringing their views before the public they can achieve as much success as any party in the country.  Such results as are shown above—the time, most inauspicious of all, a Sunday-afternoon—in the most unmistakable way indicate, we have no doubt, even to the owls referred to above, that after all there is SOMETHING IN SPIRITUALISM.