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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Psychonomy in its Relation to Religion and Ethics|10-402}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Psychonomy in its Relation to Religion and Ethics|10-402}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|fallen with their eyes open. Sounds heard by a whole concourse of people at once, and voices as from heaven. A human being returning from the other world—does not the Bible call him a ''spirit''? A seer of visions, a dreamer of dreams, is he not the possessor of ''spiritual'' gifts? With every mysterious personage, and with every mysterious event, a substantive or adjective is connected. Let our science be Spiritualism, and ourselves Spiritualists.” A Baptism that had momentous issues.}} | ||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |10-404}} | 5. We have noticed the importance of words as the handmaidens of thought; it is but a question of time when they break from their allegiance and become her mistresses. And this usurping character of theirs was never more clearly manifested than in the history of the movement we are considering. At the outset there is confusion of thought; the doctrine of the alleged communication with the “spirits” of the departed is mixed up in the minds of the earliest commentators on the phenomena with hazy references to the mystical part of the teachings of S. Paul which connect the sacred with the spiritual. | ||
What they mean they do not quite know themselves, and they do not know what S. Paul means. But in a few years the floating notion becomes crystallised into the conviction that the spiritual and the supernatural are synonymous terms, that the “unseen things” are only unseen because they are attenuate, and the “unheard things” are only unheard because the tympanum of a material ear is too coarse to reflect them; that, given in any embodied man developed faculties of sight and hearing, and in any disembodied man dwelling in the same medium* in which they are produced, the most ordinary faculties of attention—they would be visible and audible enough. | |||
So you get back to a subtler form of the materialism from which you started. Spirit is only a refinement upon matter; many things exist which are unscaleable with material eyes and untouchable with material hands; but nothing exists that is not scaleable with some kind of eyes and touchable with some kind of hands. | |||
And to a “religion” founded upon this materialism, than which the old superstition of a ''Deus ex machina'', and of a profit and loss account with Him was less fatal. Mark the nature of the logic. | |||
We can communicate with spirits: | |||
The terms Spirit and Spiritual are used in scripture, sometimes for the unseen, sometimes for the sacred: | |||
Therefore all that is unseen is sacred. | |||
The terms prophet and seer are used in scripture for those who possess abnormal powers, and also for teachers of divine truth. | |||
Therefore every possessor of abnormal powers is a teacher of divine truth. ''Eureka!'' The comprehensive philosophy of the future is discovered uniting science and religion. | |||
The Holy Spirit is the “magnetic” (''sic'') force inherent in man directed by the angels. God is the name we give to the primeval fountain of that force. Christ was a powerful “medium!” | |||
The angels are our divinities! | |||
The “media” are our priests! | |||
Follow we their gentle guidance! | |||
6.When it came to that, France drew back; her sense of the ''spirituel'' was not very deeply certainly, but some of the doctrines taught by the American angels were hardly “''spirituel''” even in the French sense. She pleaded for Spiritism in the place of Spiritualism, with a small suspicion of the sources of the mischief; but America held firm, while France received the messages of her own angels ''cum grano salis'', in the shape of blessed medals of the immaculate conception, from the hands of the apostle Kardec. | |||
England, considerably later in the day, began to draw back also, under the influence of leaders who knew the Greek and Hebrew as well as the English Bible, and of others who were learning strange things concerning the latest avatar of the Buddha under the Bo trees of New York. That avatar, ladies and gentlemen, which was to destroy your association with its radiance, which was to remove this building from its foundations by the breathing of a magic breath—but which has hitherto mercifully spared you. | |||
People asserted fearlessly that the “''Spirits''” had been wrongly named, that incarnated wisdom was on the whole much better worth thinking about than ghostly twaddle—and there sprang into being the Psychological and Theological societies; but the centre of the movement was not greatly affected by these changes and secessions; things went on and go on now pretty much as before, and the more earnest among us long, as they longed before, for something different. | |||
7. You will say to me that I have exaggerated the state of things, that educated “spiritualists” do not as a rule accept the teachings of spirits {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |10-404}} | |||
{{Footnotes start}} | |||
<nowiki>*</nowiki> Cheap manuals of science are beginning at this time to talk about “etherial mediums” and much more that is useful to non-etherial ones engaged upon revelations. | |||
{{Footnotes end}} | |||