[Footnote 65: This explains Planchette, which is a step toward the revival of heathen idol-worship.]
They gave forth oracles, and were consulted, through their mediums, in all great affairs of state, and their omens and auguries, which the people consulted to learn the future, as the spiritists do their mediums. Spiritism belongs to the same order. The spirits, as Mr. Grant well proves, are demons, and the whole thing has for its object to reestablish, perhaps in a modified form, the devil-worship which formerly obtained among all nations but the Jews or chosen people of God, and still obtains among all nations not yet Christianized. It began in the grand apostasy of the Gentiles from the patriarchal religion, which followed the confusion of tongues at Babel; and the spiritists are doing their best to revive it in the grand apostasy from the Christian church, which took place in the sixteenth century, and of which we have such clear and unmistakable predictions in the New Testament. So adroitly has satan managed, that, if it were possible, the very elect would be deceived. So much we say of the origin and cause of the spirit-manifestations.
If we examine more closely these manifestations, we shall find evidence enough of their satanic character. All satanic invasions bring trouble or perturbation, while the angelic visitations always bring calm, peace, and order. The divine oracles are clear, precise, distinct, free from all ambiguity; for he who gives them knows all his works from their beginning to their end. Satan's oracles are always ambiguous, stammering, and usually deceive or mislead those who trust them. Satan is a creature, and his power and intelligence, though superhuman, are not unlimited. The universe has secrets he cannot penetrate, and he can do no more than his and our Creator permits. He has no prophetic power, for God keeps his own counsels. He can only guess or infer the future from his knowledge of the present. He has no creative power, and can never produce any thing as first cause. Hence, he can operate only with materials fitted to his hand. The spiritists tell us that it is not every one that can be a medium. It is only persons of a certain temperament, found much oftener among women than among men, and, among men, only with those of a feminine character, and wanting alike in manly vigor and robust health. The spirits can communicate only through such as nature or habit has fitted to be mediums, and the communications have always something of the character of the medium through which they are made. The limited power of satan, his inability to know the future, which exists only in the divine decree, and his lack of power to form his own medium, render the spirit-communications extremely vague, uncertain, obscure, and feeble.
The dependence of satan on the medium is manifest. The spirits will not communicate if anything disturbs the medium, or puts the pythoness out of humor, like the presence of hard-headed sceptics, or a too critical examination by keen-sighted scientific professors determined not to be deceived. Their communications, oral or written, from the pretended spirits of distinguished authors, poets, philosophers, statesmen, are by no means creditable to satan as a scholar or a gentleman. Then again, the spirits really tell us nothing that amounts to anything of the spirit-world. Their representations make it a dim and shadowy region, in which the spirits of the departed wander about hither and thither, without end or aim, apparently worse off than in the Elysian fields of the ancients, which resemble more the Christian hell than the Christian's heaven. There is an air of unreality about them; they are the umbrae of heathen philosophy, not living existences; and their region, or, more properly, their state, would be distressing, if one believed at all in the representations given by them. One thing is evident—the spirits know or can say nothing of the beatific vision, which proves that they are not blessed angels. They do not see God, and are clearly banished from his presence. He forms not the light nor the blessedness of their state. They seem, like troubled ghosts, to linger around the places where they lived in the body, pale, thin, shadowy, miserable, anxious to communicate with the living but only occasionally permitted to do so, and even then only to a feeble extent. Friends and acquaintances in this life may recognize, we are told, each other in the spirit-world, but whether with pleasure or pain, it is difficult to say. The picture of their disembodied life is very sad, and the Christian soul finds it dark, hopeless, cheerless, and depressing; as the condition of those doomed to take up their abode with the devil and his angels must necessarily be.
The doctrines the spirits teach and confirm with lying wonders are what the apostle calls "the doctrines of devils." They are unanimous in declaring that there is no devil and no hell. God may not be absolutely denied, but his personality is obscured, and he appears only in the distance, as an infinite abstraction, being only in the sense in which, Hegel might say, being and not-being are identical—remote from all contemplation, indifferent to what is going on in the world below him, asking neither prayers nor worship, love nor veneration, praise nor thanksgiving, and receiving none. The spirits echo the dominant sentiments of the age, and especially of the circle with which they communicate. They are, where they are not held in check by the lingering respect of the circle for Christianity, furious radicals, great sticklers for progress without divine aid, and of development without a created germ. Yet the doctrines they teach are such as they find in germ, if not developed, in the minds of their mediums. They sometimes deny every distinctively Christian doctrine, and are sure to pervert what of the faith they do not expressly deny. In general, they assert that the form of religion called Christianity has had its day, and that there is a new and sublimer form about to be developed, and that they come to announce it, and to prepare the way for it. The new form of religion will free the world from the old church, from bondage to the Bible, to creeds and dogmas, the old patriarchal systems and governments, and place the religious, social, and political world on a higher plane, and moved by a more energetic spirit of progress. This is the mission of spiritism. It is destined to carry on and complete the work commenced by Christ, but which he left unfinished, and inchoate.
The special object of the spirits, it is pretended, is to convince the world of the immortality of the soul; but in what form, what condition, what sense? The immortality of the soul, or its survival of the body, was generally believed by the heathens, however addicted to demon-worship they might be; but the life and immortality brought to light by the Gospel they did not believe, and the spirits do not teach it or affirm it. The spirits seem to know nothing of immortal life in God, and into which the sanctified soul enters when it departs this life, and is purified from all the stains it may have contracted in the flesh.
The only immortality they offer is the immortality of evil demons or the angels who kept not their first estate. But even of such an immortality for the human soul, they offer no proof. They are lying spirits, and their word is worthless, and their identity with human souls once united to human bodies which they personate, is not and cannot be established. They deny the resurrection of the dead, which St. Paul preached at Athens, and they give, as we have seen, no proofs that the soul does not die and perish with the body. Their doctrines are simply calculated to deceive the unwary, to draw them away from their allegiance to the Lord of heaven, and to drag them down to the region where dwell the angels that fell.
The ethical doctrines of the spirits are as bad as can be imagined, and the morals of the advanced spiritists would appear to be of the lowest and most revolting sort. It matters not that the spirits give, now and then, some good advice, and say some true things; for the object of satan is to deceive, and his practice is usually to lie and deceive by telling the truth. The truth he tells gains him credit, and secures confidence in him as a guide. But he takes good care that the truth he tells shall have all the effect of falsehood. He gives good moral advice, but he removes all motives for following it, and takes away all moral restraints. He wars against authority in matters of faith and morals, as repugnant to the rights of reason, and in political and domestic life as repugnant to liberty and the rights of women and children. All should do right and seek what is good, but no one should be constrained; only voluntary obedience is meritorious; forced obedience is no virtue. The sentiments and affections should be as free as the air we breathe, and to attempt to restrain them is to war against nature herself. They are not voluntary either in their origin or nature, and therefore are not and should not be subjected to an outward law. Love, the apostle tells us, is the fulfilling of the law, the bond of perfection. How wrong, then, to undertake to put gyves on love, to constrain it, or to subject it to the petty conventionalities of a moribund society, or the rules of an antiquated morality! Taking no note of the distinction between the supernatural love, which Christians call charity, and love as a natural sentiment, and as little of the distinction between the different sorts of love even as a natural sentiment, as the love of parents for children and children for parents, the love of friends, the love of country, the love of truth and justice, and the love of the sexes for each other, or simply sexual love, satan lays the foundation, as we can easily see, if not blinded by his delusions, for the grossest corruption and the most beastly immorality.