its spiritaal features ; and to thouBands of beUeveis it made heaven lees appealing, if not actoally insipid. A mother's heart was troubled when she learned that she would ** meet " (if such a phrase was permissible at aU) her child again only as a disembodied spirit. A man felt only moderate consolation in the doctrine that he would come into mental relation with his dead young wife, but would never again see the lovely face, the beaming eyes, the graceful form that had enchained his affections.
Upon this puzzled generation, shaken alike in its conception of heaven and its grounds for belief, A. J. Davis and Spiritualism broke with their restoration of the mediaeval idea. It was "' Summerland, Davis said ; from him Sir A. 0, Doyle has borrowed the term. It was earth without pain, disease, or death. The bereaved mother would see her child's dear form and blue eyes again. The new heaven was not only certain, for it now rested on no inferences and no ecdesiastical authority, but it was also intel- ligible and attractive. It had neither the insipidities of Dante's Paradiso nor the horrors of the Ohristian hell. Universaliste found it just what they desired. Men and women who were on the point of quitting Christianity because of the more painful features of ite mediaeval theology discovered a religicm to which they could subscribe.
By these various developments, scientific and social and religious, the American public was in great part prepared for the new gospel. Other reasons ^^ remarkable growth will appear as our story ;
