HPB-SB-3-57

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vol. 3, p. 57

H. P. Blavatsky Scrapbooks

from Adyar archives of the International Theosophical Society

vol. 3 (1875-1878)

 

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< Recent Materialistic Speculations Viewed in the Light of Spiritualism (continued from page 3-56) >

the universe, and relegated him to an obscure heaven from which he never issues. Or will they attempt to demonstrate the Resurrection to the satisfaction of the Professors? Nine-tenths of them would attempt to force on them the resurrection of the body, ignorant or regardless of the fact that such a gathering of particles long since resolved into other forms of existence is physically impossible. They reck little of miracles who propound such a monstrous portent. The miracles of the world agglomerated and condensed would be mild occurrences compared to that. The rest of the Prophets who have cast aside such ignorant superstition would find no weapon in their armory that might hew through the shield of unbelief. If they talked of universal belief, they would but be met by the correction, “common superstition.” If they talked of instinct implanted in the soul, they would be met by denial of the soul’s existence, and a reference to Molecular Action. In a word, they have need of the proof which we alone can give.—that of experimental knowledge, of reiterated interviews with those who have cast aside the body, and who have, in countless instances, returned to us the same intelligences, with the same feelings and affections, and the same knowledge as they had when embodied amongst us.

Spiritualism alone can meet that dreary cheerless Nihilism which has found such uncompromising exponents at Belfast. It alone can tell the world of a creed founded not upon tradition, but upon experience: a creed commendable to reason, and satisfying to man’s deepest wants. It will tell the Professors that Goa not only exists, but operates in our midst now as heretofore: and it will tell the Preachers of Orthodox Christianity that He is not the Anthropomorphic creation that they are wont to picture him. It will demonstrate by rigid scientific process existence beyond the grave: and it will tell all that that existence is not the hibernation that some seem to fancy, any more than it is a dwelling in the helpless hell, or the dreary heaven that orthodoxy has imagined. It will trace out a rational scheme of existence gradually developed from the present without-break, and without spasmodic change, a scheme of regular growth in accordance with rational and intelligible laws of progress.

When will those who speak to their fellow-men on religious topics recognize the fact that the Gospel which they preach is one that too often is so overlaid with figments of human error as to have lost its charm for thinking men? With the Bible in their hands, can they not see that a cycle of Revelation is waning to its close, and that to an advanced and progressive race an advanced Gospel is being preached? God is revealing to an age that needs it a fuller and clearer knowledge of Himself. Doubtless the fogs and mists of error and deceit do hang around the truth. But what of that? Has it not always been so? Has God ever saved man the trouble of gaining truth by experience? And what is the use of the Watchman if his eyes cannot discern the signs of the times? If his gaze cannot penetrate the thin veil, let him yield his place to one who has more piercing vision. To men of Science and men of Religion alike we say with confidence, “Sirs, the battle between you is one in which we alone can mediate.” The claims of that department of human knowledge which arrogates to itself the exclusive name of Science are incompatible with those of Orthodox Theology. This has long been apparent to every one but Theologians. That which alone can resuscitate popular Religion, a» an active vitalizing power, is precisely that element which Spiritualism can furnish,—Rational Faith, confirmed by Accurate Knowledge. To the man of Science the experimental knowledge must come home before he can accept from the Theologian the Creed which he has to offer. And to the Theologian there must come a revelation of increased knowledge before he can offer to thinking men a tangible and realizable creed. Science and Religion in the future must unite on the ground of Spiritualism: and then we may hope that the Professors will cease from troubling, and the Preachers be at rest That Millennial Epoch, alas! is distant still. It will not come till Scientific Dogmatism is extinct, and Theological Bigotry is past. Science may be trusted to live in spite of its dogmatism; but it will go harder with Orthodox Theology, unless its professors learn wisdom, and cease to claim a monopoly of knowledge and revelation. It is easy to refer all that contradicts their self-made creeds to Diabolic Agency: to sneer at “Science falsely so called,” and to vaunt the exclusive merit of their own form of faith. They will find such a line of argument of no avail with such as have fathomed questions into which they have declined to look, any more than they will succeed with such men as Tyndall and Huxley. If they will study the Bible instead of quoting it, they will find that history repeats itself, and that the points of similarity between the present age and that which ushered in the Christian epoch are many and close.

A Clerical View of Spiritualism

*

I Am going to offer you to-night the most egotistical lecture to which you ever had the misfortune to listen. I warn you beforehand that I am going deliberately to use the first personal pronoun a good deal; not because I like to do so, but because it is simply unavoidable.

It is now rather more than twenty years since I first began my examination of Spiritualism. I do not mean to say that I have been all that time studying it, as I study it now, and hope to study it still more devoutly for the future. But twenty years ago I saw enough to convince me that there was “something in it,” and ever since that time I have irritated both my friends and my enemies by persistently refusing to say what I thought that something was. Some of them thought me insane, and a good many more thought me wicked for looking into the matter at all: that is, I have reason to know, the opinion of a good many still. But on the other hand, those of my friends who were themselves Spiritualists, held that I ought to make a formal confession of faith. I differed from them, because I had never put myself in a position which demanded any such explanation from me. Perhaps I had not altogether made up my own mind; but, in any case, I kept my counsel, for the sufficient reason that no one had the smallest right to ask me to do otherwise; and I am not generally inclined to put my crude ideas forward unnecessarily. Now, however, the case is different. I recognize the necessity for telling you, as far as I can, exactly where I stand in the graduated scale of belief. I am not, pray understand me, claiming any undue importance for my own personal opinions; but I have asked some of you to join me in the continuous study of what I call to-night “Devotional Spiritualism”—what I called last week “Christian Positivism; and, having done so, there is nothing for me but to make a clean breast of it, and tell you exactly what are the present results of my twenty years’ investigation. It would be obviously unfair to ask any of you to join me in such a study, unless I tell you first of all what conclusions I had arrived at, and left you to judge how far your sympathies and mine would be likely to go together.

Hence you will see the necessity for that ever-recurrent first personal pronoun with which I threatened you.

It was either in the latter part of 1856, or the beginning of 1857, when we were living in Paris, that I got the first intelligent answer to a question through the mediumship of my wife. It was quite clear to me then that, let the people say what they may, let them laugh at the claims of this modern mystery as I had, up to that time, laughed, there was, as I said, “something in it.” I am puzzled to think why it was, having gone so far as this, that I did not set earnestly to work and try to discover what that something was. Well, I was twenty years younger than I am now, but I was even then in holy orders, and the answers to the two questions which I proposed and kept closely concealed from the medium, claimed in the most direct way to be a revelation from the spirit world, and also to be given as an evidence of the great truth underlying Christianity—underlying, in fact, all religion—the existence of God Himself.

True, I had, at that time, sent forward no one person into the spirit world for whom I had cared in this life., I have seen a very great many pass away since then; but even so it is strange to me that I did not prosecute the subject as an evidence of Christianity. The subject took at once a great hold upon me, but more, I fancy, as a curious mystery which I felt I should like to solve, than—which was a later form it assumed—a belief that it was either a gigantic imposture or the most important matter that could possibly claim attention.

It would take me too long to tell you the manifestations we got, nor would there be any object in doing so. I have put them on record, and many of you have read them in print. Some of my friends, as I said, felt irritated that I then gave them all my premises and no conclusions. Now I reverse the process. I give only the conclusions, and not the arguments by which I arrived at them. I always felt that when anybody asked me the question, “Do you believe in Spiritualism?” they asked what it was impossible to answer in a monosyllable, or even a single sentence, because the reply involves at least three stages of belief. It might mean, Do you believe in the phenomena of Spiritualism? to take only one form; Do you believe that the table moves? or Do you say that it seems to move? Well, not being a philosopher, I could have returned quite a satisfactory reply to that demand. I am prone to believe in the evidence of my senses, and that was perfectly conclusive so far. Then comes the much more important question, What is the source of the phenomena? And here it was I hesitated. Even now, looking back over that long space of time during which I was, I believe, in the true honest meaning of a much-mistaken word, a sceptic, I cannot regret any hesitancy. I cannot think the time spent in investigation wasted. It appears to me that the only way to approach so difficult and delicate a subject is in the true spirit of inductive philosophy: to collect and sift evidence, and on such evidence to found your belief. I know this course does not suit the impulsive people. One friend of mine (some of you will know to whom I refer) passed through all the stages of implicit belief and utter incredulity in a week, and then wrote a book to show how he had done it. He was a Frenchman. I am a more or less phlegmatic Briton, and do not believe in doing serious things with a hop, skip, and a jump: Lastly, there comes the great question of identification of spiritual agency, supposing the broad fact of such agency established.

Now, what I used to ask my interrogators when they demanded, Do you believe in Spiritualism? was just this, What do you mean? Do you ask me whether I believe in the phenomena? or whether I accept the spiritual explanation of them? or whether, accepting that, I believe that the communicating spirits are our departed friends, as they so constantly claim to be? I do not think that was unfairly answering one question by asking another. I really did not, and do not, know which they meant; and, moreover, I have a shrewd suspicion that they are not quite certain on that point themselves.

But now, to-night, still keeping to that threefold division of the subject, which is simply a necessary one, let us see where we are. Let us gather up the conclusions at which I, and, perhaps, one or two others who think with me have arrived, 1st, on the phenomena, 2nd, the spiritual source of them, 3rd, the identification of the communicating spirits with those who were associated with us here, and who have passed on one stage in the journey along that road where we are following them.

1. The phenomena do occur. That is a matter on which everybody can exercise their senses. They may be simulated. Tricks may be played; true: and it would be very difficult to find out any domain in which tricks could not be, and are not, played. Spiritualism would be a much more wonderful thing even than it is, if it were impossible to counterfeit it. We live in an age of adulteration, but this is not saying that there is no such a thing as a genuine article. Believing in the phenomena of Spiritualism is very different from believing in every medium who pretends to show them to you. I have been very much censured for writing freely, when I believed that mediums were tricking; but I know that those do best service to Spiritualism who try to divest it of shams. I believe in Christianity; but that is not the same as saying that I pin my faith to every parson. This phenomenal aspect of Spiritualism is one where you are bound, nolens volens, to exercise your judgment. I did so, and, at a very early stage in my inquiry, was convinced that there was a large margin of manifestations which could not be covered by trickery or even explained by the much more amiable method of referring them to psychic force, unconscious cerebration, or m rapport of minds. I have fully gone into all these, and relegated some of the phenomena to those causes as their possible source; but I find, as Professor De Morgan says in his admirable preface to the book From Matter to Spirit, that any or all of these explanations are insufficient to cover the facts. A substantial body of them remain, which are undoubtedly genuine. The phenomena do occur.

But does not the fact of trickery living on side by side with the genuine fact disturb you? No more than the fact that the magicians could do the same miracles as Moses, or the sons of Sceva as Paul. If Maskelyne did everything that mediums do that would not startle me, because the phenomena occur to me when no professional medium is present—nobody who could deceive, if they would. I therefore repeat that, at a comparatively early stage in my inquiry, I became convinced that the phenomena did occur, and if they occurred they certainly demanded further investigation as to how they occurred, and why they occurred. What was their source? Recollect how they came to me at first—claiming to be revelations from departed spirits, and to be sent as special evidences of God’s existence. It was impossible, I will not say for a clergyman only, but for any thinking man, to ignore the claims of such phenomena to further investigation, when he has once convinced himself by sufficient study that they did occur. This really is the attitude assumed by the Dialectical Society in their admirable report on the subject. I myself was a member of the investigating committee; and I think I may say that the full conviction that the phenomena did occur was settled in my mind midway between my first examination of the subject and the present time, perhaps about 1866. Nobody can say I jumped at conclusions. It was the old story of the tortoise and the hare running the race. I certainly did not represent the hare.

I am glad, I repeat, when I thus look back, and reflect that I did proceed so leisurely in this matter. Even if I never read these retrospections to anybody, it would be a satisfaction to me to know that I had, to the best of my ability, thought out this preliminary portion of my subject. It may, I feel sure, help those who are still lingering on the threshold, to know that it is not so hopeless as it may seem that they shall one day arrive at a reasonable conclusion. That is what I claim to have done. There is my first article of faith (remembering my definition of faith as conviction based on reasonable evidence). I know that the phenomena of Spiritualism do occur, just as I know any other fact which has come under the direct cognisance of my senses.

2. I said last week that to call these phenomena spiritualistic was to use a question-begging epithet; and I still think that the term Christian Positivism is a better one, and the one I hope to adhere to in subsequent studies of the subject. But now I wish to tell you that, in my own mind, the use of the word Spiritualism does not involve any petitio principii—does not beg the question—because I claim to have discovered, by the same patient method as I adopted in the case of the phenomena, that the source is spiritualistic.

Taking the genuine phenomena (with the others I have nothing to do), my reasonable conviction, based on observation and experiment, is that—again to use the word given to me by Professor De Morgan—the source is pneumatological, and not psychological: they are objective, and the vast array of evidence shows me that they are simply what they claim to be, manifestations from departed spirits—the communication between the two worlds, in which I had professed my belief every time I said, in the Apostles’ Creed, that I believed in the communion of saints.

I must, you know, by the necessity of my position, look at these things not only with my Bible, but with my Prayer-book, too, in my hand. I believed in the communion of saints. What did I mean? Well, I meant the communion and fellowship between those two sections of the church, the church militant here on earth, and the church expectant in paradise; or, let us leave out the word church, and say the saints on earth, and the saints in the unseen world. I believed (in the glorious words of Wesley’s hymns) that these made but onecommunion.

But what was my church, my congregation of faithful ones? Who were my saints? The Bible saints? the saints in the Church calendar? Yes; but far more those who, during these twenty years, I have been sending on and seeing go from me into the unseen world. If I read in my New Testament that it was possible for Lazarns to go back to the house of Dives, was I to believe that it was impossible for one of mine to return to me; for some spirit out of this body to communicate with me in the body? Where was the line of demarcation? I could see none; and so, you perceive, all antecedent improbability—all incongruity of such an idea with full faith in my Bible and Prayer-book were removed, and my inquiry came to be a pure matter of evidence, just as it had been in the former instance.

I cannot, as I said, pause to tell you how in all these years the evidence has come to me bit by bit. I can only tell you it has come. Few and far between have been the salient facts. They have required much piecing together, and dovetailing into one another. The Spiritualists have said that I was a hopeless sceptic, because I resolved to labour and to wait. The other people said I was dabbling with a tabooed subject—as, I confess, I was. In fact, up to a certain point, I acted out the allegory of the “Old Man and his Ass.” I pleased neither party, because I was not a partisan. But I pleased myself. I have satisfied myself by this long, patient investigation. I know I have not jumped to any conclusion. I know that I have neither forced belief, nor allowed prejudice to scare me away from an unpopular subject; and now it boots not to say when, any more than to tell you precisely how, I feel I have come out of the darkness into the light. I claim to have established on reasonable evidence—as alone a Christian Positivist can do to satisfy himself—

1. That the genuine phenomena of Spiritualism are Spiritualistic, and not psychological; are objective from without, and not subjective, or the product of one’s own mind; and,

2. That these Spiritualistic revelations are not destructive of any previous belief in Bible or Prayer Book, but, on the contrary, confirmatory of such belief that they make present and vital that faith in Christianity which before was very much of a dead letter (being based only on uncorroborated evidence), and wholly a thing of the past. It is so no longer. To the Christian Positivist theology is as purely an experimental science as geology to the geologist, or chemistry to the chemist.

I am not asking anybody to accept this testimony of mine. I should be false to my own principles if I claimed to be dogmatic. I repudiate it utterly. I ask you to take nothing on trust from me. What I ask you to do, if we shall follow out these meetings for the study of Christian Positivism, is to patiently investigate the matter here with me, and at home by yourselves. If you can come to the same conclusion as I have arrived at, you will find that the aid it gives to your ordinary religious life is immense. I care not what the particular form of religious conviction may be—church-life or chapel-life is utterly irrelevant in face of the great fact which is thus brought home—literally home to your consciousness that our two worlds—the seen and the unseen—are not two worlds, but one; that the land where your beloved ones rest after life’s fitful fever is not a land that is very far off, but one that stands related to the one we see around us, only as the summit of the mountain stands related to the lower valley, from which mists and clouds a moment hide the higher planes of life and light.

3. Then you will say to me—That is the one point on which I want to be certified. Granted that the phenomena are genuine, and even the source a spiritual one, are the spirits my spirits? Is it my departed ones who speak to me?

Here, I think, comes in the case of those persons who hold that the phenomena are genuine, but the intelligence is evil. This is the diabolical theory, which has never given me one moment’s trouble, but has, in fact, encouraged me to go on investigating, because I saw that a large number of serious-minded, earnest persons conceded two out of the three positions I was interested in. They allowed the phenomena; they acknowledged that the source was a spiritual one; but the spirit was the Devil.

Now my experience of life shows me that there is never unmixed evil, seldom, perhaps, unmixed good, to be met with here. The normal condition of things is that the evil is mixed with the_ good, and that the responsibility lies upon us all to use the judgment God has given us so as to choose the good and avoid the evil.

Applying this principle to the question at issue, I think it most likely that the manifestations will be of a mixed character. What is the result when I pass from theory to practice? Simply that my previous judgment is confirmed. I will call this, not a third article of faith, if you like, but an article of hope. The line where hope and strong assurance pass into faith is no rigid one.

My firm hope—nay, why should I not, under my previous limitations, say, my firm belief—is, that I have been brought into communication by the means of Spiritualism, not only with strange spirits (why should these gravitate towards me at all?), but to those who were bound to me by the ties of kindred or sympathy here, and who, if they have not altogether lost their personality in the process of death, must retain that sympathy in their new exalted nature.

Experiences of this kind would probably be too sacred, too delicate for one person to communicate to another; but I submit this to you, that, if we allow the reality of the phenomena, and concede the spiritual origin of them, the third position almost stands as a corollary to the other two. If spirits are able and willing to communicate with me, whom should I expect to avail themselves of the privilege? Not the devil—at least, I hope not. Not evil spirits, towards whom I feel no attraction—but just those friends, those second selves, with whom my feelings and interests were closely identified here, and for whom my affection is not destroyed—nay, is intensified—by death and separation. Do you think our appetency towards them is not met by appetency towards us on their side?

Accepting, then, this brief and meagre sketch of my own state of mind, I ask you, what is the only logical conclusion to which it can lead? Surely we all desire to know as much as we can of what lies before us in that new and untried sphere of existence to which we are passing—they have passed—on.

They are, we assume, anxious to communicate with us. Our subsequent examination supports such an assumption with congruent facts. What should be our attitude?

We desire communion—I ask you to note that word—communion and fellowship with those who are invisible under ordinary conditions to the eyes of sense. Is there anything at all to guide us as to the conditions of such communion and fellowship? In plain words, did a departed one ever come back to those who desired such communion, and, if so, under what conditions? Open your Bible at the record of the forty days after the resurrection, and you will see that Jesus came back when the broken circle of the disciples were—-doing what? Sitting in circle, breaking bread, as He told them, “in remembrance of Him.” There we have, depend upon it, the very highest sanction for what we find set down in our Prayer-books as the Communion. What a reality it lends to the dead letter of a sacrament to find that it is the very means of communion with those in the great home beyond!

I believe that when we have gone a little more deeply into this matter of Christian Positivism, or Devotional Spiritualism—call it which you will—this is the form our devotions will spontaneously assume. We shall put ourselves literally in the position of those to whom Christ reappeared when sitting in circle and breaking bread in His name. Sacramental communion will hallow every stance; and no doubt the greatest results will follow now, as they followed then. Then the loved One stood in the midst so substantially as to satisfy the skeptical Thomas. Why not now? Why, at all events, should we not try the experiment? Once or twice, timidly and furtively, we have done so, and not without result. We want to do so regularly; just a few of the most earnest, the largest-minded of us. If the simple ritual did nothing else, it would hallow the subsequent seance as nothing else could do. Why should there appear anything incongruous in the conjunction? Why, indeed, except that we do not look upon Spiritualistic manifestations as the solemn thing we ought to do, if our previous positions are certified; and, therefore, we shrink from associating them with what is always regarded (sometimes superstitiously so) as our highest act of worship.

Mr. Haweis claims a mesmeric character for sacramental grace. So do I; but I go a step further, and call it, not mesmeric, but spiritualistic. Never, I believe, do the earthly and heavenly horizons so blend as in that one act of ritual which alone we owe to Christ Himself, but which has, with so many of us, sunk to a mere formality.

In course of time it is very likely that some of us may be inclined to let this service, at all events, take its turn with others in the simple ritual of Christian Positivism. Last week I asked you to join me in a brief exercise suggested by the memory of that great man, Chevalier Bunsen, the anniversary of whose birth into the better life we were keeping. We even concluded our prayer in the words he left us. Today is the death day (so called) of Mozart; and—believing, as I do, that all inspiration, musical as well as otherwise, is inspiration, I should have liked to commemorate that departure with a service of song.

We shall incorporate some of that great artist’s melody into our devotions; but the form of service we are going to use is a little modification of that ancient evening service of the church called compline. The very word is musical. It signifies the fulfilment—-the rounding out of the religious exercises of the day. “The custom of godly men,” says Hammond, “hath been to shut up the evening with a compline of prayer.” It will not diminish your interest in this particular office if I tell you that the last time we cited it—being the occasion for which I compiled it—was around the coffin of one who had newly gone from us then, and who was very dear to more than one of us now present.

Before proceeding to that, however, I should like to read to you the conclusion of Mr. S. George Stock’s article in the Westminster Review for October, 1875, to which I referred last week, and which so thoroughly expresses my own views on this subject:—

“Instead, therefore, of involving ourselves any longer in needless and endless perplexities by reducing the Supreme Power, whose effects alone we know, to our own level, clothing it in the limitations of our natures, and by so doing rendering it amenable to the human standard of right and wrong—a standard which forces us to condemn what we know of its proceedings—let us commit ourselves with confidence to a creed which contains all the ennobling elements of the old one, and which, harmonising with the highest results of thought, will terminate the distressing- dissension so common at present, between heart and head. If the emotions quail at the prospect of the step now, they will rejoice to have taken it hereafter. The fault of the creed, if a fault there be, is not really that it is too low, but that it is too high for poor selfish human nature; for even if we believe in the holiness of right, in the loveliness of virtue, in the progress and ultimate triumph of man, and of a heaven on earth in the ages yet to come, our hearts may ask the further question, ‘How is it with men? Can the individual be born—and we know that he is so born at times—doomed to wretchedness of mind and body, merely for the welfare of his race?’ If we look not beyond the world of sense, we must reply that this tragedy has been enacted again and again, and that many and many a soul I has been crushed under the Juggernaut of human progress. The idea has been calmly faced by thinkers of our own day; it is not, therefore, I intolerable. But if we fear it there is a way of escape—a door of experience, or of pseudo-experience, opened just when the door of authority has been shut, and, whether we seek it or not, it seems we are destined to have thrust upon us the belief in a world where the crushed flowers may bloom again.

“For, let none imagine that by such speculations as the foregoing he is building up the religion of the future, or that Comte and Strauss will be the prophets of the coming age. Religions are not made, they grow. Their progress is not from the enlightened to the vulgar, but from the vulgar to the enlightened. They are not mere products of the intellect, but manifest themselves as physical forces too. The religion of the future is in our midst already, working like potent yeast in the mind of the people. It is in our midst to-day with signs and wonders, uprising like a swollen tide, and scorning the barriers of Nature’s laws, Yet, however irresistible its effects, they are not declared on the sur face. It comes, veiling its destined splendours beneath an exterior that invites contempt. Hidden from the prudent, its truths are revealed to babes. Once more the weak will confound the mighty, the foolish the wise, and base things and things despised, it may be even things that are not, bring to nought things that are; for it seems certain that, whether truly or whether falsely, Spiritualism will reestablish, on what professes to be ground of positive evidence, the fading belief in a future life—not such a future as is dear to the reigning theology, but a future developed from the present, a continuation under improved conditions of the scheme of things around us. Further than this it is impossible to predict the precise development which Spiritualism may take in the future, just as it would have been impossible at the birth of Christianity to have predicted its actual subsequent development; but from the unexampled power possessed by this new religious force of fusing with other creeds, it seems likely in the end to bring about a greater uniformity of belief than has ever yet been known.

“Meanwhile, it is the absence of oneness of feeling that really needs to be regretted. We have seen that all the essentials of religion can be retained by the so-called Atheist. Might it not be expected that professors of orthodoxy, persons whose religion is their boast, when they find in such a man a love for his fellows, no less disinterested, an effort after advancement no less earnest than their own, would rejoice to join with Theodore Parker, and every truly enlightened Theist, in claiming him as really at one with them, despite intellectual differences? But no; they stand at the ford of Jordan, and if the passer-by cannot frame his lips to pronounce their shibboleth, they slay him, though all the time he was an Israelite and a brother. And yet the war with evil demands that the forces which make for good should be united, nor is there any element wanting to human unity except the recognition of it. We are all of one kindred—children of mystery; all of one language—the voice of Nature; all of one creed—the creed of ignorance, that mighty Catholic church to whose tender bosom every thought-weary wanderer is folded at the last.”

* An address delivered on Wednesday, last week, at a public meeting at the Salisbury Hall, 429, Oxford-street, London.

<Untitled> (The Theosiphical Society failed in their project)

Thanks from G.Brown to his friends.

...

Comte Zichy, Austria

Editor's notes

Sources

• 

  London Spiritualist, No. 277, December 14, 1877, pp. 279-81