Robert Dale Owen was an intelligent, thoughtful, honest man. He was deceived by several mediums, but remained a believer. He wanted Spiritualism to be true. He hungered and thirsted for another life. He explained everything that was mysterious or curious by assuming the interference of spirits. He was a good man, but a poor investigator. He thought that people were all honest.
Question. What do you understand the Spiritualist means when he claims that the soul goes to the "Summer land," and there continues to work and evolute to higher planes?
Answer. No one pretends to know where "heaven" is. The celestial realm is the blessed somewhere in the unknown nowhere. So far as I know, the "Summer land" has no metes and bounds, and no one pretends to know exactly or inexactly where it is. After all, the "Summer land" is a hope—a wish. Spiritualists believe that a soul leaving this world passes into another, or into another state, and continues to grow in intelligence and virtue, if it so desires.
Spiritualists claim to prove that there is another life. Christians believe this, but their witnesses have been dead for many centuries. They take the "hearsay" of legend and ancient gossip; but Spiritualists claim to have living witnesses; witnesses that can talk, make music; that can take to themselves bodies and shake hands with the people they knew before they passed to the "other shore."
Question. Has Spiritualism, through its mediums, ever told the world anything useful, or added to the store of the world's knowledge, or relieved its burdens?
Answer. I do not know that any medium has added to the useful knowledge of the world, unless mediums have given evidence of another life. Mediums have told us nothing about astronomy, geology or history, have made no discoveries, no inventions, and have enriched no art. The same may be said of every religion.
All the orthodox churches believe in Spiritualism. Every now and then the Virgin appears to some peasant, and in the old days the darkness was filled with evil spirits. Christ was a Spiritualist, and his principal business was the casting out of devils. All of his disciples, all of the church fathers, all of the saints were believers in Spiritualism of the lowest and most ignorant type. During the Middle Ages people changed themselves, with the aid of spirits, into animals. They became wolves, dogs, cats and donkeys. In those day all the witches and wizards were mediums. So animals were sometimes taken possession of by spirits, the same as Balaam's donkey and Christ's swine. Nothing was too absurd for the Christians.
Question. Has not Spiritualism added to the world's stock of hope? And in what way has not Spiritualism done good?
Answer. The mother holding in her arms her dead child, believing that the babe has simply passed to another life, does not weep as bitterly as though she thought that death was the eternal end. A belief in Spiritualism must be a consolation. You see, the Spiritualists do not believe in eternal pain, and consequently a belief in immortality does not fill their hearts with fear.
Christianity makes eternal life an infinite horror, and casts the glare of hell on almost every grave.