“ As is obvious enough, Science, with all the boasting of its adherents, can, after all, effect but little. True it is that wonderful discoveries are made in the Realms of Nature. Operations untraced before, are now accurately apprehended; and secrets, long hidden, are triumphantly brought to light. One might imagine from the random confidence of some (as guides more shallow than safe) , that Science had discovered an appliance for every human weakness, an antidote to every physical evil or disease, an unfailing specific against every want and woe. ”

“ Spiritualism also flatly denies the great Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the body:—
“Spiritualism teaches, on the authority of Scripture and of all spirit-life, that there is no such thing as death: it is but a name given to the issue of the soul from the body. To those in bodies who witness this change, the spirit is invisible, and they only see a body which ceases all its living functions, has lost that intelligence which during so-called ‘life’ emanated from it, and lies stiff and cold, and to all appearance dead. But even the body is not dead. ”

“ Good spirits and bad are around us; good spirits to aid us, to waft our lame and imperfect prayers to heaven, and to protect us in the hour of temptation or peril. ‘He shall give His angels charge over thee, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.’ Bad angels, too, are around us and against us, percolating through every avenue of the soul, inflaming the imagination, warping the judgment, tainting the will, and too often, alas! ”

“ We will only add that we cannot but hope that, Spiritualism being so far an approach to truth that it admits an important class of facts which had lately been very much denied and ignored, may, by the difficulties which they raise, lead some minds to reconsider the position they have taken up with regard to the Supernatural. There is no bridge across the chasm which divides Faith from Unbelief, and yet in this World the edges are so close that it is but a step, and we pass from darkness into light. ”

“ In conclusion I may say that, although I have heard a great many accusations of imposture, I have never detected it myself; and, although a large proportion of the more extraordinary phenomena are such that, if impostures, they could only be performed by means of ingenious apparatus or machinery, none has ever been discovered. I consider it no exaggeration to say that the main facts are now as well established and as easily verifiable as any of the more exceptional phenomena of nature which are not yet reduced to law. ”

“ I don’t believe in such nonsense.’ Here are the facts, and we demand in the true spirit of Science to know what is to be done with them. If you have any theory by which they can be explained, let us hear it, in order that we may judge of its merits; if you have not, we are all the more justified in clinging to our own. ”

“ I got into bed, and, with the conviction that I should sleep soundly as usual till six in the morning, was soon lost in a comfortable slumber. Suddenly I was awakened, and, on raising my head to listen, I certainly heard a sound resembling the light soft tread of a lady’s footstep, accompanied with the rustling as of a silk gown. I sprang out of bed, and having lighted a candle, found that there was nothing either to be seen or heard. ”

“ This is, perhaps, one of the most remarkable and best-authenticated recent cases of Spectral Appearances which has ever been narrated. The various independent testimonies dove-tailing together so perfectly, centre in the leading supernatural fact—the actual apparition in the daytime of a person just departed this life by sudden death, seen not by one only, but by two people, simultaneously; and seen in company with the spirit of a very holy and renowned saint, the chosen patron of the youth who had just been drowned. ”

“ Captain Morgan retired to bed, and slept, but was very soon awaked by a great flapping of wings close beside him, and a cold, weird-like sensation such as he had never before experienced spread through his frame. He started, and sat upright in bed; when an extraordinary appearance declared itself in the shape of an immense black bird, with outstretched wings, and red eyes flashing as it were with fire. ”

“ Anyhow, we are told that Antichrist shall reign. Thousands, deluded by false miracles and lying wonders, will become his subjects, his willing votaries; and own him as their king. His worship will be an adroit counterfeit of the worship of the True God—his kingdom a parody of the Catholic Church; while its doctrines will be at once so attractive and delusive to fallen man as that the predicted Apostasy will be great and widespread.”—Sermons on Antichrist. ”

“ Supernatural order is good and beneficial to man, energizes that which is evil. There are angels and there are demons. There is light and there is darkness. Numberless armies of glorious spirits, as the Divine Revelation tells us, [79] stand, rank by rank and order by order, as the bright ornaments of the City of God. Their subtlety, their quickness of penetration, their extensive knowledge of natural things, are undoubtedly perfect in proportion to the excellency of their being, inasmuch as they are pure intelligences, perfect from the Hand of their Maker. ”

“ Now, what we wish to point out is, that nothing which thus rests only on experience can, in any true sense, be called a first principle. It is merely a wide generalization, which may, any moment, be displaced by a still wider one. Mr. Lecky, in his ‘History of Rationalism,’ asserts that the evidence in favour of the reality of witchcraft would be irresistible, were we not convinced, on à priori grounds, that witchcraft is a delusion. Once Mr. Wallace fully shared this conviction, and found himself compelled, in his own words, to ‘reject or ignore’ all this evidence. ”

“ And yet the mocking devil induced the zealous Protestant fathers to accept this most truly ‘doctrine of devils,’ as an antidote to Popish error. As some glimmering of the direst consequences of this shutting-up of the middle states of the invisible world began to dawn on the Protestant mind, it set about to invent remedies and apply palliatives, and by a sort of spiritual hocus-pocus, it taught that if the greatest sinners did but call on Christ at the last gasp, they were converted into saints, and found themselves in heaven itself with God and the Lamb. ”

“ The Apparition or Spectral Appearance of my friend’s father to him in the West Indies—the old gentleman having died in England, and the fact of two officers having seen it simultaneously, shows that it could not have been the result of their imagination, but that it was an objective appearance; in fact, the dead man’s immortal spirit, indicating to one once bound by Nature’s ties to the living witness of it, that the separation of soul and body had taken place. It is firmly believed by the family, who, however, all shrink from making their names public. ”

“ Those well-intending persons, therefore—and we believe that among Protestants there are many—who go to séances out of curiosity, and who are sometimes heard to say that if Spiritualism be true it must therefore be right, should be warned that they are lending countenance to persons in whose writings the doctrines of the Trinity and the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ are emphatically denied—the Holy Ghost scoffed at in words too blasphemous for repetition, our Blessed Lady insulted, and the whole fabric of Religion attacked and undermined ”

“ The phenomena I am prepared to attest are so extraordinary and so directly oppose the most firmly-rooted articles of scientific belief—amongst others, the ubiquity and invariable action of the law of gravitation—that, even now, on recalling the details of what I witnessed, there is an antagonism in my mind between reason, which pronounces it to be scientifically impossible, and the consciousness that my senses, both of touch and sight—and these corroborated, as they were, by the senses of all who were present—are not lying witnesses when they testify against my preconceptions. ”

“ Protestant Reformers perpetrated a more monstrous outrage on the Divine justice, and more frightfully libelled the Divine mercy, than by the broadest stretch of imagination one would have thought it possible. ”

“ Spiritualism knows that there are isolated passages in the Gospels and in the words of our Saviour capable of being made to bear an appearance favouring the doctrine of eternal punishment, but it knows that the original terms bear no such latitude, and when Christ says there is a state ‘where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched,’ it admits the state, but denies that any of God’s creatures will continue in that state a minute longer than is necessary to purge the foulness of sin and the love of sin out of their spiritual constitutions. ”

“ For by Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Necromancy Satan still works, men being his direct agents and slaves. Sometimes in one form, sometimes in another, he dupes those who seek him; while his legions suggest to men’s minds evil thoughts, paint dangerous objects to the imagination, frequently direct the active current of the human heart to sin, and finally turn round and accuse their captives at the tribunal of God the Judge of all. So must it be to the end, for this life is man’s time of probation. ”

“ Spiritualism is avowedly opposed to the Christian Religion. ‘The Creed of the spirits’ is published in the shape of a little tract, one of those called ‘Seed Corn,’ which active agents love to distribute gratuitously wherever readers can be found, and these are its clauses: ‘I believe in God’—‘I believe in the immortality of the human soul’—‘I believe in right and wrong’—‘I believe in the communion of spirits as ministering angels.’ Nothing more. ”

“ This mighty mass is traversed by the forces electrical, or magnetic, or with other kindred names; and these by their incessant and indomitable action are adequate to account for all the phenomena of the world of matter, and of man. The upheaval of a continent; the drainage of a sea; the creation of a metal; nay, the origin of life, and the development of a species in plant, or animal, or man; these are the achievements of fixed and natural laws among the atomic materials, under the vibration of the forces alone. Thus far the vaunted discoveries of Science are said to have arrived. ”

“ For many centuries the ablest men were not merely unwilling to repudiate the superstition; they often pressed forward earnestly and with the most intense conviction to defend it. Indeed, during the period when Witchcraft was most prevalent there were few writers of real eminence who did not, on some occasion, take especial pains to throw the weight of their authority into the scale. Thomas Aquinas was probably the ablest writer of the thirteenth century, and he assures us that diseases and tempests are often the direct acts of the devil ”

“ Bad angels are around us, even within the protecting sanctuary of God’s Church, when summoned, permitted there by the subdued and corrupted will of man. Bad angels are around us in every walk and rank and condition and event of life: we see them not, but they hover over us and around us, and they penetrate within the mysterious precincts of the soul, by many a foul and unholy thought, by many an evil suggestion to sin. ”

“ But the Materialism of these latter days is blinding men’s eyes, that they cannot see, and successfully destroying their faith in all that is beyond their cramped and narrow temporal range. Intellectual Paganism, and a positive disbelief in the distinct Nature of God, if not openly professed, is indirectly acknowledged; while the Faith of Pentecost, which for generations has regenerated the World, is cast aside as worn out, effete, and valueless. The possibility of miracle is derided; Providence is scouted as the fond dream of an exaggerated human self-love ”

“ The boastings of Science, consequently, become vain and vapid: its works lie in the dust. Past ages have had their pride humbled; as Tyre and Alexandria and Babylon too eloquently tell. When God, by the insolence of intellect, is thrust aside, He sometimes, nevertheless, mercifully but efficiently reminds men that [Pg 239] He is. When the Supernatural is deliberately denied and scornfully rejected, suffering may serve to open the eyes of the blind and make the dumb to speak. The general tendency in these days is to worship Mind, Intelligence, and Power, for Might, with too many, is Right. ”

“ I had not entered my bedroom many minutes when he stood before me. Like you, I could not but think that I was looking on the living man, and so accosted him; but he answered, “Chedworth, I died this night at eight o’clock; I come to tell you, that there is another world beyond the grave; and that there is a righteous God Who judgeth all.”’
“‘Depend upon it, uncle, it was only a dream!’ But while Miss Wright was thus speaking a groom on horseback rode up the avenue, and immediately after delivered a letter to Lord Chedworth, announcing the sudden death of his friend. ”

“ But a general belief in sorcery and divination remained powerful and active long after the supreme and glorious victory of Christianity in the sixth century; and the manner in which the authorities of the Christian Church met the belief, and, by Sacraments and Sacramentals, aided the faithful to withstand the legions of the Devil and his human allies, is perfectly familiar to the student of history.
The well-known conviction that demons had appeared to mankind under the names of sylvans, gnomes, and fauns was common enough amongst the Romans prior to the revelation of Christianity ”

“ God sees at one view the whole thread of my existence, not only that part of it which I have already passed through, but that which runs forward into all the depths of Eternity. When I lay me down to sleep I recommend myself to His care ”