we can make a better. I believe in the potency of the mind, but I am not yet through with the doctors and ministers, although I well know they are far from being infallible. I am not opposed to new things, but, instead of being incoherent and a blur, I believe death is a divine link making the grave as sacred as the cradle.

MRS. DIAZ appealed from the remarks of the last speaker, fearing she had not been understood. Her idea, too, was that death was only the parting of a veil, and that the spiritual world lies very close to ours.

REV. F. E. MASON: "Having eyes you see not, and having ears you hear not." I believe that from a material point of view you can see or gain nothing spiritual. In the degree in which you believe in the spiritual, you also become spiritual. Would you prefer to believe that you possess a power to protect yourselves from disease or not?

MRS. DIAZ: I, too, am not yet in favor of killing the doctors, but as we go along I wish that we should always hunt for something better. If we wish to continue prosperous we must plant seeds, the fruit of which will be eaten by our posterity.

After a few announcements the meeting adjourned until ten o'clock Seventh day morning, the audience joining the SWAYNE FAMILY in singing the hymn commencing

"Slowly, by God's hand unfurled,

Down around the weary world

Falls the darkness."

Seventh Day.-Morning Session.

Promptly at ten o'clock the session was opened, the audience singing, under the lead of the SWAYNE FAMILY, Whittier's hymn, beginning—

"Oh, sometimes gleams upon our sight,

Through present wrong, the Eternal Right."

Business began with the reading of the testimonies on "Suffrage" and "Immigration," referred last year to this meeting. They will be found on another page. On motion of SAMUEL PENNOCK, they were indefinitely laid upon the table. CHARLES D. B. MILLS, of Syracuse, N. Y., was then introduced as the speaker of the morning, and delivered the following address:

WORSHIP.

I invite you in your kind patience to hear me in a few plain and, as I hope, simple, rational thoughts on the nature and essential quality of worship. The word itself, our English word, is very old, going back into the Anglo-Saxon, weordhscipe, Old Saxon, and I know not what forms of earlier Teutonic speech, and what ancient dialects beyond. It might be traced back, I doubt not, if the data were at hand, as some day, perhaps, they will be, thousands of years among our remote ancestors in ages prehistoric, when they were dwelling in the clearings their rude axes made in the forests of Germany, or, not yet arrived in Europe, on the steppes, or mountain-slopes and highlands of Central Asia. The thing withal is older still. We cannot, indeed, go back far enough into the dim period of unrecorded foretime to find that absent. In the valley of the Dordogne, in France, are found relics left by men who were utter savages, separated from us probably by tens of thousands of years,-men who had no metals, not even bronze or iron, living in most primitive conditions, and mayhap among the earliest on the planet. These relics, silent witnesses of a long-buried past, in comparison with which in time all that we call ancient history shrinks to naught, attest the worship paid by those men to the world of the departed. They tell of funeral feasts, and the adoration they rendered to the presence and the mysteries that confronted them in view of the open grave. The cross, seen so frequently upon our church-spires and on the altars and tombstones, was a religious symbol long before Christianity was born, or the Hebrew faith, even, had come into existence.

The fact is not only very old, running back to an almost inconceivable antiquity, but also a very wide one, coextensive in its reach with the existence of the human race on this planet. It covers the earth to-day with its monuments and memorials. From all parts of the globe prayers are lifted towards the skies, or to earth, or air, or starry cope; from all lands, continents, isles, amid torrid heats and on Arctic snows, incense is sent to heaven.

We note a wide difference in the meaning put upon this word, or its equivalent, among different peoples and persons, -difference in their recognition and expression of the fact it signifies. In the mind of all rude and barbaric races it is deemed to be invocation and oblation; frequently, we may say generally, in bloody and smoking sacrifices to a personal and very palpable deity, the approach to him by prayer and placatory offering. With the fondness for display, and glaring, obtrusive pomp and show which belongs to the barbarian mind, the palace or temple of his deity is filled with the appointments of a coarse and gaudy splendor, and the devotee not infrequently writhes and tortures his body in a self-immolation to please his capricious and wrathful god. To him there is no worship that is not of this type and style. There must be the invocation, the offering, quite generally a bloody sacrifice, otherwise there is nothing done in the direction of an acceptable divine service.

Schoolcraft describes the Mandans as dancing round the fire where the first kettleful of the green corn is being burned, an offering to the Great Spirit before the feast begins. In my own neighborhood, the Onondaga Indians yearly celebrate the green-corn dance, which is essentially of the same type and quality. The natives of the Fiji Islands, in the Pacific, offer up human victims to their gods, who are said to delight in such flesh. The invocations bear mark of the quality of the religion. Among the Osages, prayers were sent up at daybreak to Wohkonda, the Master of Life. The devotee howled his invocation in this wise: "Wohkonda, pity me, I

am very poor; give me what I need; give me success against mine enemies, that I may be able to avenge the death of my friends. May I be able to take scalps, to take horses," etc. A Nootka Indian, preparing for war, prayed thus: "Great Quahootze, let me live, not be sick, find the enemy, not fear him, find him asleep, and kill a great many of him."

With the Jews, as seen in the Old Testament Scripture, the worship of Jehovah was very much of this type and character. There had been an advance. Polytheism, with its many and oft obscene gods, had been left behind, and the declaration, "I the Lord am one God, and the God of all gods," had been thundered and burned into the ears of the Hebrew people. There had been also amelioration: the qualities ascribed to their deity were, in some respects, more worthy, more humane, than were held to belong to the Molochs and Bels, Anas and Heas of surrounding and contemporaneous peoples. But the birthmarks derived from ancestry were upon the Jewish race, and their temple worship, with its costly and bloody rites, was a piece of court service paid to the grim, stern, jealous monarch who was supposed specially to regard and to dwell with them. Dean Stanley, in his work on the Jewish Church, has brought vividly before us the scene presented at the temple: those courts at the entrance filled with the flocks of sheep and the droves of cattle crowded together, and waiting for the sacrificial slaughter to which they were chosen; the huge altar towering above the people, upon whose horns was sprinkled the blood of the victims, and on whose surface were placed the carcasses to be offered in burntoffering, "a sweet savour unto the Lord." On every day, two lambs of the firstlings of the flocks were offered, one at morning, the other at evening; on each Sabbath two additional lambs, making for the year seven hundred and thirty lambs, plus one hundred and four under that special requirement. Besides these, there were bloody sacrifices required-lambs, bullocks, rams, and goats, more or less, as the case might be— on the first day of every month, on each of the seven days of

the feast of unleavened bread, on each of the eight days of the feast of tabernacles, on the day of the feast of trumpets, on the day of Pentecost, on the great day of Atonement, etc.; so that by the end of the year one thousand one hundred and three lambs had been offered in this way, one hundred and fourteen bullocks, forty rams, and thirty-two goats. And all this blood of these many victims formed but a small portion of the whole that was poured forth in the sacred court. Far the largest part of the stream that was perpetually flowing was from the private offerings that were made upon the altar in behalf of single individuals or families.

North American Indians sacrifice a white dog to the Great Spirit, to Manibozho, or whatever his name may be. The Zulus in South Africa burn incense together with the fat of the caul of the slaughtered beast, "to give the spirits of the people a sweet savor." The Hebrews burnt spices for the fragrance of the odor emitted, and placed, in instances, the fat of the animal slain upon the sacred fire, "to be a sacrifice of sweet savour unto the Lord." It needs eyes more penetrating than mine to read down to a substantial difference between the two types of worship, one "natural," the other "revealed;" one pagan, the other theistic, divine; one false, the other true. With whatever ameliorations there were in the Hebrew, the worship was as that of all other rude and barbaric races, external, sensuous, sanguinary. It rests in the same concept of deity as that of other savage or halfcivilized tribes; its expression in rite and observance is of the same characteristic feature and quality. Such in general is the type of worship, as it has prevailed, as it does prevail, over the less illumined and the less civilized parts of the globe.

To the Christian a different concept, in a degree, certainly, has come. He pays his adoration to one God, a spirit, and him a dweller in temples not made with hands. This God a person, an eye that looks at the heart. There has been a marked advance from the sanguinary monotheism of the Jew, with its elaborate and cumbrous ritual, to the more benign