Through the mediumship of Stainton Moses

Man makes his own future,
Stamps his own character,
Suffers for his own sins,
and must work out his own salvation.

Sin, in its essence, is the conscious violation of those eternal laws which make for the advantage of the spirit. God cannot view sin as a personal injury. He regards it as we regard the offences of a child, which will bring sorrow and retribution in their train. Sin is not in itself any offence against the Creator. The punishment is not wreaked on a defenceless creature. Sin is itself its own punishment, as the transgression of immutable law.

The striving for high ideals is the key to happiness

Imperator, speaking of capital punishment:

Under no circumstances should it be allowed. The soul, suddenly severed from the body, is thrown back, and becomes grievously dangerous to humanity. The guardians cannot draw near, and great difficulties are set in the way of its progress. It is only those who have passed away that know what evil follow from this rude and barbarous punishment. To punish by the withdrawal of what you call life is an act of senseless folly. It is a remnant of an age of blood belonging to the Jewish dispensation. Reform or seclude the criminal, but never kill the body, as you sever from a body a spirit that has not fulfilled its time in your sphere of being.

There is in Spiritualism a growing and most fatal influence, a spiritual form of materialism which results from the study of phenomena only. Men care only for the force, and refuse to recognise the various forms of intelligence that underlie it. Matter is an accident, spirit is reality. All the religious systems of the world rest on a belief in the future life. Owing to the materialistic atmosphere round the world, there is too great a tendency to smother Divine Truth under a whole host of phenomena. If people rest content with these only, it would have been better for them to leave the subject alone. We hope, however, that many will rise above the phenomenal aspect of the subject and seek for those higher spiritual truths to which the former have only served as an introduction.

The flesh must be subdued to the spirit before the aspirant can gain truth. The aspirant to true spiritual knowledge must be pure in all things, brave in spirit as well as body, single-minded in the search for truth, and self-contained. Purity, simplicity, singleness of purpose, and love of progress and truth; these conduct the aspirant to the domain of spiritual knowledge.

The man who begins by observing scrupulously the minutiae of the ritual law ends by becoming the proud, arrogant, unlovely Pharisee, whose religion is swallowed up by his theology, and who yet can thank God that he is not like other men.

It is against this insidious form of religion that we wage determined war. Better for each struggling spirit that it should grope unaided after its God, trusting in the end to find Him, though after many wanderings, than that it should be cramped and confined by the trammels of an earth-born orthodoxy, which prescribes the God, as well as the way to reach Him-that way being through a wicket of which it holds the only key-which cramps all natural aspirations, drowns all soaring thoughts, and condemns the free spirit to mere mechanical action without a particle of true spiritual religion in it. Better, we say, anything than this parody on spiritual religion.