THE REJECTION OF THE PSYCHIC.
Many persons—scientific, theological, learned, and illiterate—reject the psychic, and refrain from investigating, either from constitutional bias or from crass ignorance; and such have played the part of learned Sadducees or low fellows of the baser sort before anything having the remotest flavour of spirit. The man of science is rendered purblind by “my hypothesis,” the theologian by “my belief,” the man of the world by “my business” or “my position.” The respectable church-goer—who vaccinates his children, as he has them baptised, because it is the proper thing to do—has neither head nor heart, apparently, to understand anything beyond the common ideas of the hour. He would crucify all new thought, or new spiritualism for that matter, as the Jews did Jesus, because the new doctrines promulgated and the new wonders performed tend to subvert the present respectable order of things.
The worship of Diana is not confined to ancient Ephesus. The great Diana of old was the type of that “Respectable Custom” which the majority of mankind worship and obey to-day, because, as of yore, it conserves their vested interests, official connections, and brings them “much gain.” As for the man in the street—the multitude having no shepherd—he is always more or less hypnotised by the well-clad and well-fed, smug-faced worshippers of the aforesaid “Respectable Custom;” hence he is ever ready to shout “Crucify,” or “Hurrah,” or aught else he is influenced to do, especially if such exercises give him pleasure and excitement for the time being. He accepts or rejects as he sees “his betters” think best, and so, unfortunately, is unfitted to a large degree, for the intelligent investigation of his own nature. These form the largest group of rejectors of the phenomenal evidences of soul.
The psychic, however, has suffered less from such rejectors than from those who claim to be recognised and known as converts and exponents of the same, who at best have only shown themselves to be “seekers after a sign.” They may have run into the wilderness and have had a bit of miraculous bread, and yet not be a pennyworth the better of it in either soul or body—i.e., life or conduct. These, by their foolishness, have prevented many well-meaning and otherwise able persons investigating the psychic, for the latter saw nothing in the lives of professed spiritualists to make them desire to have anything to do with spiritualism. Moreover, coming in contact with the iconoclastic in spiritualism, they have become disgusted with the crude and the coarse therein, as they have with the revelations, inspirations, and fads, advocated by certain mediums, and hence have rejected the wheat because of the apparent great quantity of tares.