"Christians can not rise up to the sublime altitude of adopting, in practical life, the ennobling teachings of the Nazarene including love and forgiveness, as long as they believe the God of their worship to be a vindictive and passionate being full of spleen and vengeance. To believe in such a God naturally inspires the effort to imitate his characteristics, and hence they become spiteful and vengeful, and in favor of taking human life on the scaffold, because a badly organized mortal in a fit of rage or in the pursuit of revenge for, perhaps, an imaginary wrong done him, slays his neighbor. The killing of one man by another is no worse than judicial murder, and both are relics of barbarism and a past heathen age, and you ought to have done with them. To-morrow, Margaret Fuller on prayer.
Sept. 1, 1882, came the following writing from the spirit of Margaret Fuller:
"True prayer is the yearning of the soul for something it feels the need of. It need not be expressed in silent words or oral declamation. Every aspiration is in the true sense a prayer. Every aspiration, though silent, has its potencies, reaches out and attracts its kindred spiritual affinities. If your soul-yearnings and aspirations are of a sordid and purely earthly nature, they affect and attract corresponding influences in the invisible realm of being, permeate your soul and limit it to that sphere. If, on the other hand, your aspirations pertain to the realm of the lofty and beautiful, you render yourself thereby receptive to the grand and ennobling influences of the pure and heavenly. If you pray for riches in a worldly sense you prepare the mental, moral, and spiritual conditions to attract the spirit misers and the selfish. If you pray for spiritual illumination and aspire to moral excellence, you bring to your sphere and aid the noble and unselfish children of the more exalted spiritual spheres. If you meditate a wrong deed or action you will be successful in drawing to your assistance those unfortunates of the spirit world who have not outgrown the tendencies, inclinations, and imperfections, of their earthly careers and conditions. Hence the very great importance of being mindful for what you pray. The spiritual influences that you attract and which thereby become associated with you, exert a powerful influence in directing your footsteps, molding your actions, and in the construction of your spiritual temple in the new life just before you. Would you desire the companionship of spirit paupers and spirit tramps, become one yourself, and you may depend on success. Would you prefer rather to be attended by good and noble spirit and spiritual influences, aspire to be good and noble yourself, and your success is assured. Of one thing be enlightened, your spirit attendants during your mortal journey will be no worse than you are yourself. It is yourself that prepares the conditions and not they. If your actions are upright, your aspirations noble, and your thoughts elevated toward the divine, you thereby exert a positive repellant power that no evil can overcome, and in such a generated atmosphere an evil influence can no more dwell than oil can mix with water. Bear this great law in mind, and take advantage of it and you are safe and all will be well. Heed it not in conduct and thought and it will rebound upon you with damaging effect.