< The Authority of Spirit? (continued from page 11-22) >
The real question is, since that which is outside nature can act through nature and personate nature, and, as it would appear, so acts and personates in order to teach those who have been place by the laws of their being in natural relations—by what authority does it so act, and personate, and teach?
This is a grave question for those who place themselves in the hands of spirit guides or controls.
These have of course, satisfied themselves that their controls are not the agents of a spiritual deluder working out some subtle design, and therefore ought to have it in their power to throw light on a point where more light is greatly needed. Will they deign to impart their light to those who, though not less earnest than themselves in their desire to know and follow the leading of the truth, have been left by the deific intelligences in the hands of nature?
Bishop Berkeley did not deny the reality of nature. What he denied was the existence of what philosophers termed “matter”—an undemonstrable universal substance underlying the structure of all natural objects.
The “matter” of the physicists of the present day is the reverse of this: for it consists in the elements, or the one element to which the ultimate structure of all natural objects can by analytical processes, be reduced—to synthetical combinations of which, by natural process carried on under natural law, they attribute the existence of all natural objects, without entering into the vexed questions of the how or why, the by, what, or whom they were called into being.
Spiritualists should remember that there is a large class of persons who are neither Spiritualists nor Materialists, although firm, believers in the reality of nature, and the intention of the Author of nature, as revealed through its workings, that all teaching should reach them through natural channels influencing them during, by, and through, the uses they make of their natural lives.
It seems to me that so far Spiritualists have thrown themselves too exclusively into one side of their work, the establishment of their facts, which they have done with a success of the extent of which they must be daily becoming more conscious. They ought now to take up its other side, the teaching value of those facts; and, having proved the existence of spirit-action should concentrate their efforts on the demonstration, not of the identity of individual spirits—which is wholly beside the question—but on the authority of spirits as teaching guides.
Spirits may be immortal; may have a right to teach, and to claim that their teachings are divine. But so far, as it appears to me, it has not even boon attempted to prove either of these positions.
15th January, 1881.
<Untitled> (The weather of the last...)
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The Demise of Mr. Epes Sargent
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..ouragement for Workers
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Editor's notes