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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |A Voice from Laodicea|10-341}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |A Voice from Laodicea|10-341}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|they are altogether on one side of the general current of thought in our age. Their thought-forms, or scientific instincts, are so little developed, that they will receive anything, not perceiving its incongruity with other departments of knowledge. And it must be confessed that we do meet with Spiritualists of this type, who believe all things, only because they are incapable of appreciating either the magnitude or the difficulties of that which they believe. Now, I suppose we are all agreed that over-credulity is a very bad thing indeed. Like the hustings orator in the Biglow Papers,}} | ||
{{Style P-Poem|poem= “We allow that a man should go tolerable strong | |||
Against wrong in the abstract, for that kind of wrong | |||
Is always unpopular, and never gets pitied, | |||
Because it’s a crime no one never committed.”}} | |||
But our difficulty is not an abstract, but a practical one. Who shall show us the golden mean between scepticism and credulity? Are my audience to-night the philosophers, and I, who doubt, the fool: or am I the philosopher? This is the question we would have answered; is this inspiration of the scientific sense a true inspiration or not, when it leads men to decide against the truth of Spiritualism? | |||
Now we have seen that similar claims of infallibility have been set up for other senses; and we have seen these other senses proved untrustworthy. For the moral sense of the savage bids him kill and eat his grandmother, a custom which would here meet with universal condemnation. And the geometrical sense has never told us anything about objects of four dimensions, and would altogether repudiate two straight lines which should enclose a space, a triangle whose interior angles were not equal to two right angles, or parallel straight lines which met when they were out of sight. So, obviously, the scientific sense may occasionally err. And when it does err, it can be convicted of error, and its disciples reclaimed only by the same means which have convinced those who have been misled by these other intuitions of the error of their ways,—by reason, to wit, and the evidence of the bodily senses. For as the belief of the scientific man in certain laws governing the physical universe, has been built up on the direct evidence of the senses through many generations; so his belief in other newer laws modifying and enlarging the old ones, can only be organised by the constant repetition of evidence of a similar character. It is not the will so much as the power to believe which is lacking. But the power can be cultivated, if the will is there. Just as the sailor learns, by constant practice, to discern objects on the horizon, which to the landsman are invisible; or the chemist to distinguish between odours, which to the uninitiate are all equally pungent; so by diligent practice, I apprehend, the faculty for believing in these phenomena may be developed when the rudiments are present. Constant familiarity with the thing and the idea are all the necessary conditions if the phenomena be genuine. It is unreasonable to expect that the results from such a process should be otherwise than gradual. You are watching not an action, but a growth. Time and time only will shew on which side lies the truth. If on the side of the Spiritualists, the world can no more ultimately believe these things to be false, than any but a monk could believe that the Sun is a flat disc six feet across, and the stars lesser lights shining to brighten the darkness of earth. | |||
It seems probable that even professed Spiritualists feel the need of constantly familiarising themselves with their phenomena. I cannot otherwise account for the fact that so many amongst them are in the constant habit of attending ''séances'', at which nothing but the same elementary manifestations are to be witnessed. To spend four hours a week in listening to jokes by “Peter,” and being knocked on the head by a vagrant musical box, seems an occupation hardly worthy of the apostle of a new faith. But the else anomalous circumstance, that many sensible people are willing so to waste their time, finds a ready explanation in the supposition that Spiritualists themselves often feel the influence of hereditary thought-forms too strong for their new won belief; that this latter, Antaeus-like, dies when raised from the earth. For myself, I am pleased with the explanation, for it would tend to shew that we are not so very far removed from you, when all is said. If you have your intervals of doubt, we have ours of faith, comparable in duration to the revolving lantern of the Start Lighthouse, which shows a brief flash of light for six seconds, and is dark for the other fifty-four. But I trust that I shall offend none by such a supposition. If your faith is not perfect, the fault is not your own. For once break the maxim “De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” and on the dead lay the blame of our chequered doubt, and of your imperfect faith:—the back of eighteen centuries is strong enough to bear it all. | |||
Lastly, it is certain that this reluctance on the part of the world to accept new truth is not altogether evil; is perhaps altogether good. The influence that makes it so hard for a new truth to gain a foothold now, is the surest guarantee that that foothold once gained, it shall never be displaced. It is this tremendous ''vis inertiae'' of custom that is the guardian of all in faith and morality that we most cherish. The twin forces of change and conservation are ever in equilibrium, and ever advancing our social state. If, without the first, we should be stereotyped like the Eastern civilizations, without the other we should sink still lower, to the level of the savage, unable to guard to-morrow, the good which he has won to-day. If Spiritualism with all its present extravagance, grotesqueness, absurdity, could at once gain the adhesion of the world, do you think that that world would be the better for it? Will its most fanatical supporter answer in the affirmative? At the best we should gain a more or less distinct perception of a universe that seems but an enlarged edition of this, with the folly and the purposelessness somewhat more accentuated. But in all probability, we should not attain even that certainty of a future life, but in its stead an unlimited license to shape our own future, and that of our fellows, as we please. We might still agree with the ordinary belief that all alike are to live on, or we might hold, that some only are to be preserved, and the rest to share the fate suggested in the “Phædo,” having worn out one or two bodies to be cast aside as failures, and revert to nothingness. Instead of priests, we should have mediums: for sermons, trance addresses. And in place of one faith and one morality, we should be free to choose between a dozen systems, of Theosophy, Christian Spiritualism, Reincarnationalism, Comprehensionalism, Harmonial Philosophy, and the like. And it is to be feared lest in the endless warfare of creeds and teachers, many would grow to doubt whether there be any morality at all. And what have you to offer that would replace all that we should lose? No, | |||
{{Style P-Poem|poem= “Leave thou thy sister when she prays, | |||
Her early Heaven, her happy views, | |||
Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse | |||
A life that leads melodious days. | |||
“Her faith thro’ form is pure as thine, | |||
Her hands are quicker unto good; | |||
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood, | |||
To which she links a truth divine.”}} | |||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-343}} | {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-343}} | ||