With the Church of Rome no such change is manifest. By keeping its people in ignorance, by condemning all change or any improvement under the name of “Modernism,” and by insisting upon the dogma of infallibility and blind obedience, Rome thus far has resisted all change and refused all compromise.
The change in Protestantism represents the growth of intelligence, the recognition of the rights of conscience, and individual and intellectual freedom.
The stability so apparent in Romanism relies solely on Ignorance, Superstition, and Fear, enforced by the dogma of “Infallibility,” and reinforced by the power of “Excommunication” and the penalty of “Anathema.”
The unity and stability of the Roman Church, thus secured by force, will presently be found to be apparent only. It could only work and hold in the dark ages. Internal division and dissension, now known to exist, await only some fresh act of oppression, or some new abomination, or abuse of political power, to disrupt its solidarity.
In the meantime physical science has steadily advanced, opening new avenues of wealth, industry, and opportunity, and so developing the resources of this Western world.
But more important and far-reaching still have been the discoveries regarding the finer forces of nature.
The wonderful development and application of discoveries in Electricity have not only opened a new world previously unknown and unsuspected, but have seemed to endow these subtle forces almost with an intelligence of their own. Crass materialism is dead and space practically annihilated.
If a single wire or a vibrating disc cannot originate intelligent speech, it can retain, repeat, and transmit the qualities, tones and inflections of the human voice in a way that seems miraculous and uncanny. It is thus that our concepts of nature have been enlarged, refined, and actually spiritualized. “Brutal” and “dead” matter are no longer in evidence nor even mentioned.
With the advent of modern spiritualism came another group of phenomena. Making the largest allowance for fraud, self-deception, and all the vagaries of the imagination, no intelligent individual, familiar with the phenomena, will attempt to deny the extension of man’s psychic world of consciousness and the manifestation of intelligence in ways and under conditions previously unknown. The identification of these intelligences, always difficult, and generally problematical, need not here be discussed at all. The facts and the phenomena are all that we are here concerned with.
The most important consideration regarding all these phenomena is that they do not develop, but on the contrary dominate the individual. They are, in fact, altogether subjective. The medium may put himself in the negative or passive condition to be controlled, but he cannot command nor control the influence nor the “entity” that influences him, and eventually he loses the power to resist it, and likewise the power of self-control.