but the novitiate. They bring immortality to light under a blaze of evidence which outshines, as the sun the stars, all traditional or historical testimonies. For surmise they give us conviction, and assured knowledge for wavering belief.
“13. The chief motives which induce spirits to communicate with men appear to be—a benevolent desire to convince us, past doubt or denial, that there is a world to come; now and then, the attraction of unpleasant memories, such as murder or suicide; sometimes (in the worldly-minded) the earth-binding influence of cumber and trouble: but, far more frequently, the divine impulse of human affections, seeking the good of the loved ones it has left behind, and, at times, drawn down, perhaps, by their yearning cries.
“14. Under unfavorable or imperfect conditions, spiritual communications, how honestly reported soever, often prove vapid and valueless; and this chiefly happens when communications are too assiduously sought or continuously persisted in: brief volunteered messages being the most trustworthy. Imprudence, inexperience, supineness, or the idiosyncrasy of the recipient may occasionally result in arbitrary control by spirits of a low order; as men here sometimes yield to the infatuation exerted by evil associates. Or, again, there may be exerted by the inquirer, especially if dogmatic and self-willed, a dominating influence over the medium, so strong as to produce effects that might be readily mistaken for what has been called possession. As a general rule, however, any person of common intelligence and ordinary will can, in either case, cast off such mischievous control: or, if the weak or incautious give way, one who may not improperly be called an exorcist—if possessed of strong magnetic will, moved by benevolence, and it may be aided by prayer, can usually rid, or at least assist to rid, the sensitive from such abnormal influence.”—(Debatable Land, pp. 171-176.)
We have no intention of criticising this creed of the spirits as set forth by their learned medium. It is heathen, not Christian, and we have discovered in it nothing new, true or false. It denies the essential points of the Christian faith, and what few things
it affirms that Christianity denies are affirmed on no trustworthy or sufficient authority. A man must have little knowledge of human nature, and have felt little of the needs, desires, and aspirations of the human soul, who can be satisfied with this spirits-creed. In it all is vague, indefinite, and as empty as the shades the heathen imagined to be wandering up and down on this side the Styx. But in it we find a statement that dispenses us from the necessity of examining and refuting it. In Article 4 we find it said: “Vastly wiser and more dispassionate than we, they [the spirits] are still, however, fallible.”
Whether the spirits are wiser and more dispassionate than we or not may be questioned; they do not seem to be so in the author’s illustrative narrations, and the fact that they have undergone no essential change by throwing off their overcoat of flesh, and living the same life they lived here, and are in the sphere for which they were fitted before entering the spirit-land, renders the matter somewhat doubtful, to say the least. But it is conceded that they are fallible. Who or what, then, vouches for the fact that they are not themselves deceived, or that they do not seek to deceive us? By acknowledging the fallibility of the spirits, Mr. Owen acknowledges that their testimony, in all cases, when we can have nothing else on which to rely, is perfectly worthless. We can bring it to no crucial test, and we have no vouchers either for their knowledge or their honesty. Even supposing them to be what they profess to be, which we by no means concede, it were sheer credulity to take their word for anything not otherwise verifiable.
Mr. Owen and all the spiritists tell us that the spirit-manifestations prove undeniably the immortality of
the soul; but they prove nothing of the sort. We need, in the first place, no ghost from hell to assure us that the immortality of the soul follows necessarily from the immateriality of the soul; for that is demonstrable from reason, and was generally believed by the heathen. What was not believed by the heathen, and is not provable by reason, is the Christian doctrine of the resurrection; and this, and supernatural life and immortality, the spirits do not even pretend to teach. Look through Mr. Owen’s statement of their teaching, and you will find no hint of the “resurrectionem carnis” or “vitam æternam” of the apostolic symbol. Are we to reject the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and the life and immortality brought to light through the Gospel—which is something far different from a simple continuation of the soul’s physical existence—a doctrine so necessary to virtue, and so dear and consoling to the afflicted, on the authority of fallible spirits, whose knowledge or veracity nothing vouches for, and who prove themselves not seldom to be lying spirits?
In the second place, what proof have we that those rapping or table-tipping spirits are the spirits of men and women once in the flesh? Mr. Owen undertakes to establish their identity, but he does not do it and cannot do it; for no proof in the case is possible except by a miracle, and miracles the author rejects, and declares the argument from them in all cases a non-sequitur. The spirit-manifestations of which the spiritists make so much, and in which they fancy they have a new inspiration and revelation, are nothing new in history, and are not more frequent now than they have been at various other epochs. They were more common amongst the polished pagan Greeks and Romans
than they are in any real or nominally Christian nation now. They are nothing new or peculiar to our times. Tertullian speaks of them, the author of the Clementine Recognitions was acquainted with them, and so was St. Augustine. The trance was one of the five faculties or states of the soul recognized by the Neo-Platonists, and was the principle of the Alexandrine theurgy. The church has in every age encountered them, been obliged to deal with them, and she has uniformly ascribed them to Satan and his angels. She has had from the first, and still has, her forms of exorcism against them, to cast them out, and relieve those who are troubled by them. Every day she in some locality even now exorcises them, compels them to acknowledge the power of the name of Jesus, and sends them back discomfited to hell.