Legend
< Doctrine of Re–Incarnation (continued from page 3-202) >
the integrity of the media through whom the communications are received, on thetruthfulneis of the beings who actually do communicate. There can be no half measure about this proposition; as on a careful review of the characteristics which mark spirit communion, since its first advent through the Rochester knockings, it is a simple impossibility, I believe the mediums capable of originating all the immense mass and variety of test facts that have been given through them, often involving the private histories of thousands of persons with whom they could have had no acquaintance: either we must invalidate the authority of the communicating spirits, or come to the conclusion that we have not yet arrived at a sufficiently definite standard of truth in spiritual communion—that we are at fault in the matter of what to reject and what to accept, and we are too often priding ourselves, upon having progressed beyond the ABC of our spiritual faith, we have not in reality learned fairly how to recognize the A when we see it.
Apologists for contradictory communications are perpetually reminding us that the immense diversity of life, character, and condition in the spirit world, like that upon our earth, is amply sufficient reason to account for contrariety in the communications. In matters of opinion and theory, even in descriptions of the spirit life and land itself, this is certainly true; but when media undertake to give us consecutive biographies of the spirit speaking through them, and boldly proclaim their identity with divers of earth's deceased notables, are we to believe or disbelieve them—which?
If we disbelieve—the whole fabric of our faith, as built upon the integrity of our media, is shaken. If we accept—human individuality, identity, together with the whole realm of earthly loves, friendships, and ties of kindred melt into the illusion of a fleeting dream. There is nothing real, nothing permanent; self-consciousness itself is a myth. Every successive death is an annihilation; and instead of a long and shining list of immortal saints and philanthropists, poets and painters, martyrs and heroes—earth’s history is made up of the biographies of a few wandering sprites who keep stretching out their histories through all time, and reproducing themselves under all manner of protean forms and circumstances.
The hapless believer in Re-incarnation can be as little sure of himself or his own identity, as his most intimate acquaintances are for him. He has not a chance to know who he is himself; who he was yesterday or who he will be to-morrow: and as to the precious ties of parentage, or the divine impulses of family love, kindred and friendship, they are all floating emotions to be blotted out in the grave, and lost in new successions of new lives, new relationships, new deaths, and succeeding oblivions. The most remarkable and certainly not the least indefensible part of the Re-incarnationist’s theory is, however, not only that they have no facts on which to ground their assertions, like the majority of their fellow believers in Spiritualism, but that they infer there must be countless millions of spirits communicating through other channels who have no knowledge of Re-incarnation, and even emphatically deny its truth.
Can the controlling spirits of the Re-incarnationists be the only ones enlightened on such a stupendous item of the soul's destiny?—an item, which if not common to all, must be known So all—and that in realms where such changes must be perpetually going on as would render ignorance of the subject impossible?
If we may trust other media as reliable as those whose authority we have cited, Michael Angelo has been just as busy in America as in London; and yet, when questioned on the subject by his American friends, he can only remember having been engaged in building the Pyramids and fighting the battles of the Israelites as King Saul, when he vacticinates through the lips of one medium in London. Were I disposed to treat this subject from a ridiculous rather than a serious stand-point, I should And food enough for my purpose, even in the hazy attempts at a theory put forth by the best defender of the doctrine—Allan Kardec himself. As it is, 1 only desire to remove tins fungus from the pure and wholesome soil on which we as Spiritualists have upreared our beautiful temple of faith, so fraught with hope in eternal progression, eternal love, individuality, and self-consciouness. It is with him alone, Mr. Editor, that I shall ask leave to offer a few more arguments on this subject in a future paper.