Page:The Other Life.djvu/267

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the present day would have been extreme radicals in the past; and the radicals of the present will occupy conservative ground when an extreme radicalism shall be pressing in advance of future generations.

Not only the men from our earth who lingered in the world of spirits until 1757 are judged, but the principles which actuated them, the motives, the life, the thoughts, all the spiritual causes which created and perpetuated the civilization of the past. Whatever was false and baneful in them was cast out, so that they might no longer crush or impede or pervert the human soul. The divine right of kings; the sentiment of caste; the feudal spirit; the pleas for slavery; the infallibility of men or institutions; the superstitions of all; the metaphysical absurdities; the theological dogmas which held the mind in bondage; the evil training and the false education; the false prophets and false Christs; those perversions of the meaning of God's Word which darken the understanding and betray the soul; all these and a thousand other ruling loves and ideas of the past have been judged and cast out for ever from the world of spirits. Evil spirits and misguided and frequently good men will struggle hard to retain something of the old life and its forms,