Spiritism - What Is It?

( Originally Published 1919 )

Opinion of Sir William Barrett—Possibility of Spirit Communication—Sir Oliver Lodge—Swing of the Pendulum of the Mind—Spiritism in the Days of Moses—Identically the Same To-day—Its Universality Among Pagan Nations—Sins of the Apostate Jews—The "Fallen Angels"—Prayer of the Church—No Satan, no Christ—Past Conditions and Practices Reproduced in Modern TimesWarning—Vast Experience of the Church with Spirits.

The Rev. Dr. Campbell, when recently addressing a great congregation in the London Tabernacle, declared that he had read with deep interest Sir Oliver Lodge's "Conversations with his Dead Son," and that he was amazed and mystified. Why should he have been "amazed and mystified"? Did not Saul see and converse with the dead prophet Samuel, or with a spirit personifying him? Is not the Bible, from cover to cover, filled with examples of the living orally communing with the spirits of the dead or spirits speaking for the dead? In fact, is not all literature, all history—sacred and profane Plutarch, Homer, the Lives of the Saints, all hagiology, punctuated with instances of the living communicating with the dead?

The experience of Sir Oliver Lodge is nothing new. Holding converse with the dead is the daily experience of thousands living in Europe, Asia, and America, and is a cult or practice almost coeval with the human race.

The idea of the possibility of spirit communication is, of itself, in no way opposed to reasonable belief, but is a matter altogether dependent on the testimony of witnesses, whose evidence is legally entitled to belief. It has already been decided by rigid examination.

Seventy years ago, when Darwin and Huxley thought they had pushed back the frontiers of the unknowable to the farthest point attainable, that is to a negation of God, the still but impressive voice of the scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, was heard, crying in a wilderness of scoffs and jeers. Today Sir Oliver Lodge has swung the pendulum back to where it was two hundred years ago. And all the while the natural and the supernatural maintain their inalterable laws, while only the minds of the scientists are vacillating.

It is a melancholy reflection upon our processes of thought that, after emerging from what scientists are pleased to call "superstition," and establishing elaborate cosmogonies and theories seemingly fixed and unalterable, the human mind should be driven back upon the old traditions and the old practices.

Is it not deplorable that, when the intellect of man has lost the truths made known by God from the beginning, he is driven to take refuge in pure negation of all revelation or indulge himself with evocation of the dead, as Sir Oliver Lodge is now doing, or seek for information on the soul's destiny from those whom St. Mark calls "spirits of evil" and "unclean spirits"?

Spiritism, or the practice of necromancy, is today, as it was in the time of Moses, an evidence of moral decadence. As in the days of old, it has grown into a cult with which thousands are obsessed. It has a copious literature punctuated by such startling terms as "telopsis," "telepathy," "teloteropathy," "zoo-magnetic force," "telekensis," and many other fine words invented by the Psychical Researchers.

Spiritism is a development of paganism, an outgrowth of heathenism in every age of history, and is found with pitiable forms of devil-worship among nations that are most deeply sunk in idolatry. Its permanency, then, among Japhetic races in modern times is an alarming mark of the degeneracy of our boasted civilization.

Three thousand four hundred years ago the pagan world was so steeped in Spiritism that God, under pain of death, prohibited its practice to the Israelites : "Neither let there be found among you any one that . . . consulteth spirits, or . . . that seeketh the truth from the dead." (Deut. XVIII, 11.)

So that Spiritism, or communing with spirits and summoning the souls of the dead to hold converse with the living, goes back very far in the annals of the human race. It was prohibited to the Jews by command of God in the time of Aaron. The prohibition was renewed by Saul, under pain of death, and before his time Moses, the "friend of God," publicly proclaimed that "the Lord abhorreth these things and those who do them." Necromancy and Spiritism invoked the doom of the Gentile nations, who abandoned themselves to the worship of demons and to the frightful impurities and abominations which brought down upon them the anger of God and racial annihilation.

The worship of Priapus, the divine rites paid to the Phallus in the days of Asa, the Judaean, by the apostate Jews, and mercilessly reprobated by Ezekiel, the prophet of God, what were they but the deification of lust and the worship of the devil,—the god of promiscuous sexual intercourse'?

There is not in all history, sacred and profane, anything to be compared to the awful indictment framed by Ezekiel, in his sixteenth and seventeenth chapters, against the apostate Israelites who intermarried with the idolatrous

Ammonites and Moabites, the "worshippers of devils who brought shameful abominations to their sons and daughters." All through the Old and New Testaments there runs, as distinctly visible as a black thread woven into white silk, the malign influence, not of disembodied souls, but of spirits lost in hopeless despair. There is no fact of history more strongly attested than this.

Submitting our obedience to the records and revelations of divinely inspired writers and to the doctrinal teaching of the imperishable Church of God, we hold that the spirits that appear, or make their presence known, to the necromancers and accredited "mediums" of the cult of Spiritism, are demons or, according to St. Peter and St. Jude, "angels who kept not their principality, angels that sinned." We know that the souls of the dead do not return to amuse the living or to satisfy their curiosity, and we also know that pernicous intermeddling with the unseen world of evil spirits is, sooner or later, sure to end disastrously.

The historic Catholic Church teaches now, and for two thousand years has uniformly taught, the existence of Satan, of lost spirits, their unquenchable hatred for the human race and their sinister influence upon persons who abandon themselves to intercourse with them.

If there be no devil or evil spirits, what is the meaning of the exorcisms in Baptism, of the appeals to God in the Church's Missal, ritual, and public prayers, to save us from the evil influence and enmity of Satan and the angels "who sinned"? To this end she commands her priests, after they have offered up the Sacrifice of the Mass, to say aloud this suggestive and doctrinal prayer : " May God rebuke Satan, we humbly pray, and do thou, Michael, Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, drive back into hell all the evil spirits who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls."

If there be no Satan and no evil spirits there can be no Saviour, for, from whom does the Saviour save us? There can be no Redeemer, for, from what are we rescued, and if there be no Saviour and no Redeemer, can there be Christianity? Now, why did Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Redeemer and Saviour, become man? St. John removes all doubt from our minds when, in language emphatic and convincing, he tells us in his first Epistle : "The Son of God appeared upon earth that he might destroy the works of the devil."

All the ribald laughter of scoffers, all the ridicule of sceptics, all the sophisms of infidels, and the incredulity of those "wise in their own conceits," cannot alter facts. The existence of evil spirits and their malign influence over the souls of men and women are not alone facts of history, sacred and profane, they are facts in the life and experience of the human race.

Clairvoyants and mediums represent as definite a profession among us to-day as did pythonesses, necromancers, and soothsayers among the Romans and earlier races. Seances and conversations with spirits of the dead—in realit with powers of darkness—are entered upon without fear and spoken of without abhorrence.

Nor do we believe with some learned theologians that the unchangeable enmity of the devil and the malevolent operations of evil spirits on human souls are less now than before the Redemption. The Christian, by prayer and sacramental grace, while not immune to attack, is stronger and better armed. That the manifestations of the "powers of darkness" are less visibly pronounced than in former times is patent to every student of diabolic agency, but that their hatred for man or their evil influence upon those whose lives are corrupt, is weakened or weakening, we are not, from what we have seen and read, disposed to admit.

The monstrous crimes which today disgrace our race, the appalling number of suicides, the unnatural lusts, the lawlessness, that is, the contempt for law, human and divine, and the atrocious destruction of prenatal, infant, and adult life, belong not to man as God made him. These inhuman and unnatural violations of the dignity of man—made just lower than the angels—must be charged to agencies outside of human existence and with which our nature ought not to have anything in common.

The Church of God warns her children to have nothing to do with mediums, seances, or with Spiritism in any form, which often lead to insanity and to utter moral depravity. She commands her adherents to have nothing to do with anything or any person mediately or immediately associated with diabolism and spirits of evil. She has behind her the experience of two thousand years and, when she speaks, she speaks with authority and with a knowledge that covers the religious and social history of the human race.