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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Psychonomy in its Relation to Religion and Ethics|10-406}} | {{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued |Psychonomy in its Relation to Religion and Ethics|10-406}} | ||
... | {{Style P-No indent|or things under the earth. The Christian religion is the binding of the human spirit to Christ and through him to the Father. The Mahomedan religion is the binding of the spirit to Mahomed and through him to Allah. The highest and holiest religion we can ever attain to is the one that gives us the most elevating, the most just, the most perfect thought of God.}} | ||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |10-408}} | I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, what that religion is? Compare the most beautiful teachings—and many of them are very beautiful—that you have ever received from the Spirit World, with the teachings given on the Galilean Mount night twenty centuries ago: does it not include them and infinitely more than include them? Does it not take up and amplify and vivify and cast light upon the prophecies of all the world? Is not the saying of Goethe true, that the widest culture, the deepest aspiration, reaches not beyond Christ? Accept from the other life, or from this, whatever is worthiest. Read with deepest reverence the revelations of every Holy Prophet of every land; you will find that no higher light has been attained, because it is unattainable. | ||
The right relation of Psychonomy to religion is the same as that of every other science: it has been beautifully expressed by a great teacher of our own time. | |||
“To religion belongs of right the sovereign plan, and this because it is a more direct emanation from the divine source; it finds its response in the deepest needs of our being; it is the earlier manifestation in the history of our race; the earlier in the life of the individual, and it will be the last. But though its place is primary, it cannot be independent of thought and knowledge; nay, the religion of each age must, in a large measure, be conditioned by the state of knowledge existing in that age. We see this in the past history of religion; disastrous have been the effects, when religion has tried to close itself against the rising tide of knowledge; and the lesson of the past, religious men would do well to learn, and keep an open side to the influx of all the new knowledge which each age achieves, and absorb it into their religious convictions.” But when we begin to lose from our lives the dependence upon God, which is true religion, and begin to depend upon other arms, however strong, instead of on His, that instant we have become seekers from the living to the dead, our science has made of itself a religion—we have become idolators. | |||
Psychonomy is no more a religion than any other kind of natural science. That in one branch of the legitimate sphere of her enquiry, men are brought into communication with intelligent, and enlightened, and moral beings, (I wish this were oftener the case) no more constitutes a right to establish a religion of Psychonomy, than does the fact of telegraphic communication with the best thought of many lands constitute a right to establish a religion of telegraphy. | |||
And that brings me to my last words on the relation of ''Psychonomy'' to ''Ethics'', or ''Morals, the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong''. There may be as we have seen “many religions, there is but ''one'' morality.” Thou ''shalt'' and thou shalt not, are enduring as the granite of Sinai, eternal as the graving of God. | |||
The first of such relations is that she be herself moral; that she purge herself resolutely from the evils that are so manifest in her present system; and having done so that she acknowledge frankly her true position as a member of the great family of biological sciences, neither more nor less sacred than physiology or morphology; and fixing definitely the limits of her inquiry as comprehending all actions of life manifested under conditions other than the normally organic, cease to trespass on the territory of the sister sciences. | |||
That while maintaining constantly its ''possibility'', she cease to lay claim to having opened up a clear system of communication with the departed, and acknowledge the present generally unsatisfactory character of such communication. | |||
14. So far as one can look forward to the future the importance of Psychonomy as a science will daily increase, and be more fully recognised. She and she alone can throw light upon the most debated questions of our day, namely, “What is the point at which mind acts upon matter?” What is the connecting link between the two? And this at present is her chief mission. I hear much said about her destinies as the overthrower of materialism and the restorer of faith; and the story of Thomas is always quoted in support of the assertion. But the ''faith'' of Thomas had never been destroyed; he doubted only of the reality of what he saw, never for a moment of his allegiance to his master. “Belief in the supermaterial is not belief in God,” and on that account I think Psychonomy will not do much against materialism; materialists tell you so themselves frequently: against the sorrowful condition of mind which is peculiarly the heri-{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |10-408}} | |||