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so it seemed good in thy sight." Luke x. 21. With this encouragement before us, with a perfect consciousness of being a mere babe in worldly wisdom and worldly prudence, and simply believing that every word spoken of God is true, we have fulfilled our task; may it be as profitable to the soul of the reader, as the writer feels it has been to her own, while with the Bible, and nothing but the Bible, to guide her, she has endeavoured to trace the outlines of what can never be perfectly filled up, until the veil of mortality is withdrawn, which now withholds our eyes from contemplating in all its wondrous details, the mysterious world of spirits.

CONCLUSION.

CONCLUSION.

"WATCH."

"DELIVER us from the Evil One" is the prayer which our Lord has instructed us to put up; and it is much to be regretted, that we are accustomed to use a different form of expression, calculated to withdraw our attention from the great personal adversary, and to present to our minds a vague notion of evil in general. Whatever isolates man, separating between him and the rest of God's creation, is inimical to his best interests. He looks on the inferior animals, and forgetting in how many respects their natural sensibilities resemble his own, he becomes their cruel oppressor. He dooms them to protracted hunger, and thirst; he overworks them, until every sinew of their exhausted frames is wrung by the anguish of intolerable fatigue; he breaks the endearing ties by which the Lord of all has seen good to sweeten their humble existence; and standing on a haughty eminence of superior intellect and conscious immortality, he degrades some of the most marvellous

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of God's works, using them as mere tools for the supply of his artificial wants, the gratification of his avaricious propensities; until the whole creation, groaning and travailing in pain together, sends up a fearful cry into the ears of Him who, from the glorious high throne of his eternal Majesty, stoops to feed the young ravens that call upon him. Man was placed in dominion over the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, that he might exercise a becoming vicegerency, brethren as they all are of the dust out of which his own body is so curiously formed; but Satan fills his mind with pride, and hardens his heart against the pleadings of natural feeling, on behalf of those who have no voice to utter in their own cause; and so, man, standing superciliously aloof from the creatures that his sin has subjected to vanity, works the work of devils in conniving at, if not wantonly inflicting, needless torments upon them.

Again, as below, so above his own scale of being there are races with which he is nearly affianced: not corporeally as here, but spiritually. These he cannot see, therefore he resolves to banish their existence from his thoughts. He is aware that of such superior creatures one class is ever about him for good, the other for evil; but what little he may have incidentally gathered on that subject he heeds not: and as to inquiry, he considers it a worthier employment to explore the depths of the earth for the fossil remains of some extinct species of animals, which had he met with it alive he would

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