He calls in philosophy to confirm his thesis, thus:
“The conception of any such comprehension of our life here in the general spiritual order of the universe can be no better than foolishness, we know, for the reigning materialistic thinking of the present time. But it is, in truth, the only rational view of the world’s existence. Philosophy, no less than religion, postulates the idea that the entire creation of God is one thought, in the power of which all things are held together as a single system from alpha to omega, from origin to end; and all modern science is serving continually more and more to confirm this view by showing that all things everywhere look to all things, and that everything everywhere is and can be what it is only through its relations to other things universally. So it is in the world of nature; so it is in the spiritual world; and so it must be also in the union of these two worlds one with the other. It is to be considered a settled maxim now, a mere truism indeed for all true thinkers, that there is no such thing as insulated existence anywhere—such an inconnexum must at once perish, sink into nonentity. It is no weakness of mind, therefore, to think of the spiritual world as a vast nexus of affection and thought (like the waves of the sea, endlessly various and yet multitudinously one), viewed either as heaven or as hell. Without doing so, indeed, no man can believe really in any such world at all. It will be for him simply an abstraction, a notion, a phantom.
And so, again, it is no weakness of mind, in acknowledging the existence of the spiritual world (thus concretely apprehended), to think of our present human life, even here in the body, as holding in real contact and communication organic inward correlation, we may say, with the universal life of that world (angelic and diabolic), in such sort that our entire destiny for weal or woe shall be found to hang upon it, as it is made to do in the teaching of God’s Word here under consideration. It is no weakness of mind, we say, to think of the subject before us in this way. The weakness lies altogether on the other side, with those who refuse the thought of any such organic connection between the life of men here in the body and the life of spirits in the other world.”
These views, so strongly put forth by Dr. Nevin, we hardly need remark, are familiar to all Catholics, agree with the doctrines of all Catholic spiritual authors, especially the mystics, who have written professedly on this subject, and their truth is abundantly illustrated on almost every page of the lives of the saints. The Catholic mystical authors, many of whom were saints, have gone over the entire ground of our relations with the supernatural world, and, both by their learning and personal experience, have conveyed, in their writings on this subject, important knowledge, laid down wise regulations, and given in detail safe, wholesome, practical directions. They seem to breathe in the same atmosphere as that in which the Holy Scriptures were written, and in passing from the reading of the Holy Scriptures to the lives of the saints there is no feeling of any break. They lived in the habitual and conscious presence, and in some cases in sight, of the inhabitants of the supernatural world; and so familiar was their intercourse with the angelical side, and at times so dreadful were the combats to which they were delivered
on the diabolical side, that their lives, for this very reason, become a stumbling-block to worldly Catholics and to Protestants generally. In the lives of her saints the Catholic Church proves that she is not only the teacher of Christianity, but also the inheritor and channel of its life and spirit. How far Dr. Nevin himself would agree with this intense realism of the church in connection with the supernatural world, as seen in the lives of her saints, we have no special means of knowing; but if we may judge from the spirit and drift of the article under consideration, he goes much farther in this direction than is usual for Protestants. Be his opinion what it may, their lives form a concrete evidence of the truth of his thesis. It is the sense of nearness of the spiritual world, and its bearing on the Christian life, pervading as it does the public worship, the private devotions, and the general tone of Catholics, that characterizes them from those who went out from the fold of the Catholic Church in the religious revolution of three centuries ago. This whole field has become to Protestants, in the process of time, a terra incognita; and if Dr. Nevin can bring them again to its knowledge, and in “constant, living union” with it, he will have done a most extraordinary work.
Efforts of this kind and of a similar nature have not been wanting in one way or another, and are not now wanting, among Protestants. There are those who show a decided interest in the works of the spiritual writers of the Catholic Church. Strange to say—and yet it is not strange; for in this they follow the law of similia similibus—they are particularly fond of those authors whose writings are not altogether
sound or whose doctrines are tainted with exaggerations. Thus Dr. Upham will write the life of Madame Guyon; another will translate The Maxims of the Saints, by Fénelon; and to another class there is a peculiar charm in the history of the Jansenistic movement of Port Royal; others, again, moved by the same instinct, will not hesitate to acknowledge with Dr. Mahan that “such individuals as Thomas à Kempis, Catherine Adorno [he means St. Catherine of Genoa], and many others were not only Christians, but believers who had a knowledge of all the mysteries of the higher life, and who, through all coming time, will shine as stars of the first magnitude in the firmament of the Church. In their inward experiences, holy walk, and ‘power with God and with men,’ they had few, if any, superiors in any preceding era of church history. ‘The unction of the Spirit’ was as manifest in them as in the apostles and primitive believers”;[136] while many of this class in the Episcopal Church translate from foreign languages into English the works of Catholic ascetic writers, and books of devotion, for the use of pious members of their persuasion. The Rev. S. Baring-Gould will give you in English, in many volumes, the complete lives of the saints. They even go so far, both in England and the United States, as to found religious orders of both sexes as schools for the better attainment of Christian perfection, and venture to take the name of a Catholic saint as their patron.
It is evident that, among a class of souls upon whom the church can be said to exert no direct influence,
there is a movement towards seeking nearer relations with the unseen spiritual world, accompanied with a desire for closer union with God. It finds expression among all Protestant denominations. With the Methodists and Presbyterians it is known by the name of “perfectionism,” or “the higher life,” or “the baptism of the Holy Ghost.” It is also manifested by the efforts made now and again for union among all the Protestant sects. It is the same craving of this mystical instinct for satisfaction that lies at the root of spiritism, which has spread so rapidly and extensively outside of the Catholic Church, not only among sceptics and unbelievers, but even among all classes of Protestants, and entered largely into their pulpits.
The former movement assumes a religious aspect; but lacking the scientific knowledge of spiritual life, and the practical discipline necessary to its true development and perfection, it gradually dies out or runs into every kind of vagary and exaggeration. Recently, after having made not a little commotion among different denominations in England and Germany, it came, in the person of its American apostle, Mr. Pearsall Smith, to a sudden and disgraceful collapse. “If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch.” The latter movement—spiritism—leads directly to the entire emancipation of the flesh, resulting in free-lovism, and sometimes ending in possession and diabolism. Spiritism is Satan’s master-stroke, in which he obtains from his adepts the denial of his own existence. These are some of the bitter fruits of the separation from Catholic unity: those who took this step under the pretence of seeking a higher spiritual life are afflicted