Yours, very truly, James O’Donnell,
Catholic Pastor, Lawrence.
What is this communion which death can not prevent, and which with prayer can impart consolation? It is known in the Apostles’ Creed as
“THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS.”
When it is considered what social penalties attach to the profession of this faith, one must admit that only some very strong cause can induce persons of standing and established reputation openly to express beliefs of this kind. The penalty is loss of confidence and being reputed of unsound mind. It is not an easy thing to profess belief in anything which destroys one’s reputation for sanity, yet undoubtedly this is the result.
It must also be admitted that most of the literature which has come into existence in this way is of a doubtful and disreputable kind, and of a tendency to degrade rather than elevate our conceptions of a spiritual state.
Yet such is the hunger, the longing, the wild craving of the human soul for the region of future immortality, its home-sickness for its future home, its perishing anguish of desire for the beloved ones who have been torn away from it, and to whom in every nerve it still throbs and bleeds, that professed words and messages from that state, however unworthy, are met with a trembling agony of eagerness, a willingness to be deceived, most sorrowful to witness.
But any one who judges of the force of this temptation merely by what is published in the Banner of Light, and other papers of that class, has little estimate of what there is to be considered in the way of existing phenomena under this head.
The cold scientists who, without pity and without sympathy, have supposed that they have had under their dissecting knives the very phenomena which have deluded their fellows, mistake. They have not seen them, and in the cold, unsympathizing mood of science, they never can see them. The experiences that have most weight with multitudes who believe more than they dare to utter, are secrets deep as the grave, sacred as the innermost fibers of their souls—they can not bring their voices to utter them except in some hour of uttermost confidence and to some friend of tried sympathy. They know what they have seen and what they have heard. They know the examinations they have made they know the inexplicable results, and, like Mary of old, they keep all these sayings and ponder them in their hearts. They have no sympathy with the vulgar, noisy, outward phenomena of tippings and rappings and signs and wonders. They have no sympathy with the vulgar and profane attacks on the Bible, which form part of the utterances of modern seers; but they can not forget, and they can not explain things which in sacred solitude or under circumstances of careful observation have come under their own notice. They have no wish to make converts—they shrink from conversation, they wait for light; but when they hear all these things scoffed at, they think within themselves—Who knows?
We have said that the strong, unregulated, and often false spiritualistic current of to-day is a result of the gradual departure of Christendom from the true supernaturalism of primitive ages. We have shown how Christ and his Apostles always regarded the invisible actors on the stage of human existence as more powerful than the visible ones; that they referred to their influence over the human spirit and over the forces of nature, things which modern rationalism refers only to natural laws. We can not illustrate the departure of modern society from primitive faith better than in a single instance—a striking one.
The Apostles’ Creed is the best formula of Christian faith—it is common to the Greek, the Roman, the Reformed Churches, and published by our Pilgrim Fathers in the New England Primer in connection with the Assembly’s Catechism. It contains the following profession: