"meet and act upon each other; in all other cases, as far "as we know, matter acts only upon matter, and spirit upon spirit."

This argument is certainly true to the ordinary style of reasoning, but what a dreadful confusion of thought it evidences.

How does inert matter act upon inert matter? Equilibrium of force is not annihilation of force. No man can separate matter from force even in metaphysics, certainly not in physics. Matter acts upon matter by the vital force constantly resident in particles of matter. Force is all material, that is, we may say that force and matter are identical. To annihilate force is to uncreate matter. We know of no force or power that is not inextricably interwoven with material processes.

The idea of Dr. Sharpe, that the divine or Holy Spirit has been deranged or sin-stained by man, is contrary to all natural reason and divine revelation, and is as opposed to common sense, as is the kindred statement that inert matter operates upon spirit. What spirit? There is but one vital spirit in existence, in whom we live, and move, and have our being, and is that operated on? The doctor may well confess that man is the only instance where matter and spirit act in the extraordinary way he describes, and that in other known instances phenomena, equally wonderful, contradict this hypothesis. The entire argument is only supportable upon some concealed mental prepossession traditionally received of man's inherent divinity, but for this it is unintelligible, and so marvellously entangled in its scheme, as to make it a proper subject for the discussion of some erudite debating society to show how its syllogism may be sustained or controverted.

What course of study had been pursued by the homœopathic physician, to enable him to assert so confidently that man is a triune being it is not easy to imagine. If the Royal College of Surgeons can demonstrate such a fact, they should lose no time in making the general public acquainted with the thesis. They might establish an entirely novel and

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original system of therapeutics relative to mental insanity, or assisted by these talented savans and spirit-rappers, Messrs. Home and Squire, might succeed in exorcising evil spirits out of lunatic persons into pigs. There can be no doubt that they would eventually succeed in discovering something, if it were only a universal pill to purge mankind of falsehood and humbug. There is now a chance for them; since professors and preachers of religion have proved themselves empirics, there is an opening for a better class of professors to take up the science of immortality and teach it in intelligible language.

The Bible does not support Dr. Sharpe's diagnosis of the constitution of human nature, for we find it recorded in Genesis that man is a living soul, and in the thirtieth verse of the same chapter, it speaks of "Every beast of the earth, "and every fowl of the air, and everything that creepeth "upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul."

Now, if everything that lives can exist only by and in the breath of one living spirit, and as man is a creature, drawing the same vital breath as the beasts of the earth and the fowls that fly in the air, how is he a triune being while the rest of organised creatures are merely dual phenomena of existence?

Whatever special virtue homœopathy may lay claim to, it clearly stands in need of better explanation than this of Dr. Sharpe.

The church's doctrine of atonement is simply a repetition of the rabbinical theory of regeneration, and is based upon a fundamental error that vitiates its entire scope and application.

The doctrine of atonement by proxy, assumes God to be estranged from man by his sin, and reconciled to him by a bloody sacrifice. Now the Bible doctrine is actually the reverse of this, and asserts that mankind are reconciled to God, and not God that is thereby reconciled to man. God never was estranged in this way, he never ordained sacrifices and blood shedding for evil. He is said to be of purer eyes than to regard this theological demon of man's conjuring up.

Therefore, if he does not acknowledge the devil's catechism of good and evil, how can he accept a redemption price for what he does not claim? To take a redeeming price, is to acknowledge the right to insist upon sacrifice of life for sin. To accept sacrifice for man's sin, is to acknowledge the existence of evil; to acknowledge the existence of theological evil, is to judge good and evil, admit man's claim to divine life, and endorse the serpent's lie.

The apostle Paul's allusion to atonement is not urged upon the Gentiles with anything like the stress that it is pressed upon the Hebrews; and the reason is obvious, that Paul sought to wean the Jews from their inherited prepossession in favour of atonement by sacrificing life for sin. These Jews were unable to conceive of any reconciliation without some atoning blood. Moses' teaching was obviously designed to lead the Hebrews from Egyptian theism. And Jeremiah declares positively, (chap. vii, 22,) that God never designed the Jewish system of sacrifice of life for man's sin. David speaks prophetically of the Messiah, who declares, as the messenger revealing the power of eternal law, "Sacri"fice and burnt offering thou desirest not." The real sacrifice is that of free will. "I come to do thy will, O God," that is the offering, and in this Jesus sacrificed himself, dying in the struggle between his own mental individuality, and the will of his eternal Father.

It is mankind that have refused reconciliation to their Gods, without sacrifice of life for theological evil; man demands atonement, not the true God. The human mind will in no wise be reconciled to its conjured up God without sacrifice for that evil which it has immortalized and deified, and of which the true God will take no account. This human mind that conceived evil, brought it into the absolute to make its Deity complete, and must propitiate this power of evil by blood,-by blood, the reeking smoke whereof is impervious to the solar rays, blood that must have blood, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blow for blow, life for life. Man, blood-nourished, will insist upon his sacrifice of blood, for without this bloody offering, his immortal spirit of evil cannot

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be exorcised, he says: the malignant spirit of evil must suck up this vital liquor, for he lives a huge vampire upon the human race: all creatures devour one another, and man in his turn devours these beasts for his food: man's life is sustained by death of these creatures, and man's own death is the sustenance of the great dragon of evil who ghoul-like devours him. Thus in bygone ages was this great demon conjured up, in days when the poor frightened inhabitants of this planet shuddered at their shadows in the moonlight, when they were terrified into stupor at the evil omens of owls, bats, and night-hawks, when they trembled at they scarce knew what, and looked wistfully around for some peace offering to propitiate the malignant power of an evil eye. Human sacrifices were once a world-wide institution, then the blood of bulls, goats, and birds redeems the price of human life. Finally, one life pays the penalty demanded by ever-accusing man, and one sacrifice redeems all life, and abrogates any death penalty for sin, releasing all creatures from this horrid penalty, whose blood has failed to gorge insatiable maw of him who has the power of death, the accusing demon of evil, the mind of man; and it has required ages upon ages of time, and pyramids upon pyramids of corpses, to gorge the insatiable appetite of the great flesheating, blood-drinking dragon of evil.

the

Shortly before his martyrdom, Jesus Christ kept the Jewish passover with certain chosen disciples, and he made use on that occasion of memorable words, that have been distorted by the priests into conveying a mystical or magical meaning. By the literal acceptation of oriental parables in the words "eat my body, and drink my blood," modern divines have fallen into the same trap that snared the intuitively wise rabbis and scribes who were slain by the literal meaning or by the "letters" that kill, missing the true power that quickens into life; straining at gnats they swallow camels of theology, and stultify themselves before the world.

The injunction of Jesus to break bread and drink wine, in commemoration or in remembrance of him who submitted

to die, to bring immortality to light from the dark eclipse of eternal death, has been sacerdotalised into an ordinance conveying the spirit of eternal life in the materials of human manufacture. Thus traditional church systems swallow the camel of that literal cannibalism that staggered the Jews, while the compromise of protestantism still clings like a drowning wretch at the last stick of the floating wreck of ritualism and tradition, that makes a merely commemorative supper an actual means of life, a sacrament, or sign outward and visible, of an invisible power or Holy Spirit thereby conveyed, as well as a pledge to assure sceptical minds of the theological effect so sacramented, signed, scaled, or sworn to. Thence we descend to the kaleidescopic and dissolving views of those jarring sects that agree in nothing but to disagree, each and every sect straining at gnats, ever composing, ever compounding, ever analyzing, ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the hidden truth, ever seeking, and never finding the elixir of immortality, the philosopher's seven-eyed and white stone of eternal truth.

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It is extraordinary how the church atonement system, derived from the divine teacher's request, can be discovered in the plain words "Do this in remembrance of me, for as often as ye do this ye do shew the Lord's death till he come." This teaching was throughout transparently oriental in its figurative use of idioms or illustrative parables, as arrows from a giant's bow, to bear aloft and far away the feathered words of truth. The teachers and scribes in those days adopted a method of transposing the meaning of words by attaching to one word the accepted meaning derived from another of corresponding numerical value, and this shews the necessity that would occasionally arise for Jesus' disciples to have explained to them certain points, or meanings in those parables or illustrations which they might make obscure to themselves.

To a rabbin the wine of the last supper would have the numerical value of the word secret, and so on.

Upon one occasion Jesus declared himself to be the bread