The above passage is none the less impressive because it was written more than twenty years ago. The task of examination belongs to those who, while fully acquainted with the records of the past, possess the knowledge and trained powers of observation which such investigations require.
II
The Churches have positive duties, and may not turn aside from their chief business. (1) It is the fashion with Spiritualists to write as if their cult were the only alternative to blank Materialism, because they forget that the one sure message about the Unseen has been committed by our Lord Jesus Christ to His servants and friends. The Churches proclaim that message. Christian ministers, like the Shepherds of Bunyan’s Delectable Mountains, have in their hands a perspective glass through which the pilgrims may see the gates of the Celestial City. Their teaching, like that of the Shepherds, bears the mark of “other-worldliness,” which thirty years ago was applied as a term of reproach to the organised denominations in this country. The Churches can say, in the words of a saintly Wesleyan minister, William Arthur, “The last tunnel is on the east of the land of Beulah, towards the rising of the sun, and opens in face of the golden gate, where are the Shining Ones. How far off it is I cannot tell: the Everlasting Hills are covered with a golden haze. Glory be to God.”[44]
Goethe put the same thought somewhat differently in “Faust”:
“What a cloud of morning hovers
O’er the pine-trees’ tossing hair!
Can I guess what life it covers?
They are spirits young and fair.”
“Then said the Shepherds one to another, Let us here show to the pilgrims the gates of the Celestial City, if they have skill to look through our perspective glass. The pilgrims then lovingly accepted the motion. So they had them to the top of a high hill, called Clear, and gave them their glass to look.”
The Church possesses to-day the gift of clairvoyance, but she exercises it like the Shepherds on bracing mountain-tops, not in dark and stifling rooms. Her messengers go among the sick, the dying, and the bereaved, speaking of eternal life through Christ.