The story of Jesus is fulfilled again.

Do not fancy that spirit-lives are unable to see and know your sorrows and crimes, nor that they can mix with you and breathe the atmosphere of the world without drinking in somewhat of its curse.

What is the contrast from your life to that of the outcast in the noisome atmosphere of some foul den in a back alley of crowded cities―

The home of misery and crime―

Compared with that which strikes spirit-lives cold and chilling, as they come to the lower spheres!

They come from the land of light and purity and beauty, where there is nothing that is unclean, unholy or impure―

From a scene blurred with no disfigurement―

Where there is no shadow of darkness―

Nothing, but radiance and unspotted purity. 

They leave the society of the perfected and the atmosphere in which dwells peace―

They quit the light and love, the harmony and adoration of the spheres and descend to the cold earth―

To a clime of darkness and despair―

To an atmosphere of repulsion and sorrow―

To an air heavy with misery and guilt―

To a people disobedient, unbelieving, steeped in materialism and dead to spirit influence―

To a world crowded thick with vice, surrounded by the spirits of the undeveloped, and deaf to the voice of God. 

They quit the home where God's light and truth prevail, for the outer darkness of the earth, where only the faintest glimmer of spirit-truth greets their eyes. 

They exchange harmony and peace for turbulence and discord―

For war and turmoil―

The society of the pure and peaceful, for the chilling company of the sceptic and scorner, or even the drunkard and sensualist, the outcast, and the thief. 

They leave temples where they adore the God of heaven, for the nether world, where God is unknown and where a being of man's own imagining reigns in his place.

The story of Jesus is fulfilled again. 

The people will wonder at miraculous works―

They will follow so long as personal interest is excited and personal curiosity gratified, but when they raise them from that level―

When they cut out the egoistic element and deal with eternal and imperial facts, they turn back―

They are unable to receive what is too high for them. 

And so the designs of God are thwarted, and the benefitism, which they are commissioned to bestow is cast aside with thanklessness and the chilling sense of threatened failure is added to our sorrow.