Legend
< Captain Burton's "IFS." (continued from page 8-134) >
mechanics without making plain the law of gravitation underlying all. You cannot teach acts of honesty without making plain to heart and head of the learner the laws of love and duty that underlie all such acts.
Prophecy, or no prophecy, a nation that accepts the double-damned maxims of human brutality and human selfishness as her mother-law is already a nonentity; when the sulphurous fire within her shall reach even her external body, and the smoke of her destruction ascend, is but a question of time.
Madame Blavatsky
Sir,—Although I am not so bold or so unpolite as to meddle spontaneously with that very delicate subject, a lady's age, yet, when it is thrust before me, I am in the habit of accepting it or not according to circumstances. So I must say I was considerably surprised to find in The Spiritualist of January 24th that Madame Blavatsky is, by her own showing, now eighty-two years of age, because I had inferred, from a letter by that lady, that it was so very different.
It had been alleged by an interviewer of Madame Blavatsky, in the Revue Spirite of June, 1878, that Madame “had passed nearly thirty years in India.” To this Madame Blavatsky, in a letter contained in the Revue Spirite of September, replied:—“Speaking of age, although the journals have given me respectively, and at different epochs, the age of 25, 60, 86, 92, and 103 years, I feel myself obliged to assure your readers that I have not ‘passed more than thirty years in India.’ It is exactly my age—c’est justement mon age—although very respectable such as it is—it is in violent opposition to this chronology of fantasy.” I had been led, from this, to suppose that Madame Blavatsky was thirty years of age. Madame Blavatsky has begun a series of letters in the Revue on the doctrines of the Theosophists, and in her letter of this month says, “If our doctrines interest the readers, in our next number we will try to be more explicit.”
<Untitled> (Sir,—There are one...)
Sir,—There are one or two particulars in Dr. Wyld’s otherwise excellent description of Madame Blavatsky in this week’s Spiritualist on which I should like to remark. In doing so, it is true, I have some apprehension of opening upon you the floodgates of theological controversy, although my object being only to guard against the old and perpetually recurring fallacy of confounding real and verbal differences, it ought not to have that result. In charging Madame Blavatsky with persisting in confusing “the essence with the external garment of Christianity,” it would be interesting to know what and how much Dr. Wyld himself regards as the essence, and how much as the garment. Without assuming any other knowledge of his beliefs, I should certainly infer, from what he tells us of Madame Blavatsky’s agreement with him, that were all the Churches of Christendom reunited, with an inquisition that should take the tenets common to all of them as the standard of orthodoxy, Dr. Wyld would with difficulty escape its fangs. What is that esoteric Christianity which is one and the same with esoteric Brahmanism and Buddhism? If there is nothing essential to Christianity which distinguishes it from the essence of other religions, by what right does it assume a distinctive appellation in virtue of this common truth? If these are his views, is it not obvious that it is Dr. Wyld who is using the word in anon-natural sense in defending Christianity, and not Madame Blavatsky in assailing it? If Dr. Wyld used the name “Christianity” to denote beliefs which any “heathen” may hold, can he complain of others for refusing to follow him in this misleading nomenclature? What, in the opinion of any real Christian, would be his Christianity who should reject the identity—in a sense in which no other man can ever be identical—of the historical (or, as some of us may think, unhistorical) person Jesus Christ with the supreme principle of the universe which we name God? Who should deny that that person is our Redeemer, in the sense in which no other man can ever be so termed? I will not speak of such doctrines as the vicarious sacrifice and atonement, against which even intelligent clergymen are revolting, but which are still either expressly enunciated, or apparently implied in most of the Christian creeds; still less of that other grotesquely shocking superstition, which yet few Christian ministers have the courage expressly to disclaim, that belief in these things is necessary to salvation. I speak only of the Jesus of the Gospel narratives as supplying, and exclusively supplying, in His attributes, and being the fundamental belief of Christians; and it is not the Gnostic Logos that will save Dr. Wyld from the dilemma in which he is placed. For my own part, in repudiating the term Christianity as descriptive of the profound truths of which I have but as yet a faint aperpi, I hold myself consistently at liberty to follow the track of those truths in the sublime, but for me, alas! too obscure writings of such great spiritual seers and thinkers as Behmen and St. Martin, for instance. So far as I have been able to penetrate into their essential teachings, it seems to me that they would be quite unimpaired by the admission that the supposed Christ of history is a myth. Yet in these writings, if anywhere among professedly Christian authors, is to be found that esoteric Christianity which is merely the ever-springing revelation of eternal truth to the prepared spirit. It argues nothing for Dr. Wyld that these men also called themselves Christians. The question is whether under the name of Christ they were speaking of a historical personage or of a regenerative principle. Surely the latter; and it and they might as appropriately, or rather with as little propriety, have been called by any other name.
What, I would ask Dr. Wyld, are “the doctrines and works of all Christian teachers” for which Madame Blavatsky displays “an unreasoning and intolerant hatred? " Are they doctrines and works which he accepts as expositions of his own Christianity? If not, is it not evident that he is taking a name to which he has no right? Is not a name, as a medium of mutual understanding by those who use it, the property of those who use it in a common sense, and not of those who use it in a peculiar sense?
Dr. Wyld’s account of our friend is generally so appreciative and just, that I cannot but regret that in this and in one other respect he should seem to go rather out of his way to censure. It is true that her task in life being combative, she has the combative characteristics which can only be replaced by contemplative calm when the work of life is over. We attain to “the wisdom of the soul” by different roads. Once attained, it is perhaps not less perfect and sublime when it is the hero’s repose from the battles he has fought, and his recovery from the wounds he has received, for truth’s sake.
Dr. Wyld referred to another matter which it might be desirable to explain, if that were possible or allowable. I mean the age of our friend. Dr. Wyld would, I know, be the last person willingly to expose any statement of Madame Blavatsky to misconstruction. But he may unintentionally have done so with those who know, or who may ascertain, her life history only so far as any one can know it but herself. To Dr. Wyld, I believe, the statement was not incredible or inexplicable even in its apparent sense. But to other friends of Madame Blavatsky it was; and I can only say that they believe themselves to be in possession of an explanation which is at once profoundly interesting and, to them, entirely credible.
Spirit Identity
Sir,—The identity of those spirits who have been prematurely removed from this earth is probably made out by the aid of their guardians, or by the friendly intervention of some other spirits. I have never believed that messages are given, as a rule, by the unaided power of the spirit principally concerned. Most spirits, I believe, are unable to communicate independently, and avail themselves of the mediatorial aid of those who can; just as we, on our side, find a medium to place us in communication with spirit. I have been repeatedly told that messages given either through automatic writing or by raps proceed from a number of spirits acting in concert. And I find, as a rule, that messages are written by one who is more facile with the pen than those who use him as amanuensis.
The remembrance of earth-life is another matter. I believe that the spirit, as soon as it attains full consciousness on being freed from the body, sees and knows the events of its previous existence. And this it would do even though one’s stage of that existence were a very short one. This is an invariable law in spirit life. That many seem to forget, or not to be able to tell accurately the events of their bodily life, may be owing to one or more of many causes. Either they have not mastered the difficulties of communication, or they have lost sight of the past in the absorbing interests of a wider sphere of life, or they have no strong rapport with earth; or, as in some cases known to me, the interval of semi-consciousness on their entry to the world of spirit has been so prolonged as to efface remembrance, or at any rate to blur the record of memory.
There is strong reason to believe that there is an evolution of spirit, step by step, up to incarnation, and that what we call earth-life is only one of many stages which the spirit, when emancipated from the prison-house of the body, is able to survey.
London, Jan. 25.
The Religious Aspects of Spiritualism
Sir,—I had hoped to say my last in this controversy, but Mr. Mould has asked me—in the last number of The Spiritualist—some questions in so kind a spirit that I scarcely deem it fair to carry my lance out of the tournament without some answer being given to him.
He apparently wishes me to attempt to show that the “note of unity” is existing in the Christian faith, as exhibited in the creeds of Unitarians, Trinitarians, Arminians, Calvinists, and a number of other forms of opinion. To do so would involve a theological argument; and <... continues on page 8-136 >
Editor's notes
- ↑ Madame Blavatsky by Scrutator (signed as Scrutator), London Spiritualist, No. 336, January 31, 1879, p. 57
- ↑ Sir,—There are one... by Massey C.C., London Spiritualist, No. 336, January 31, 1879, p. 57
- ↑ image by unknown author
- ↑ Spirit Identity by Stainton Moses, William, M.A., London Spiritualist, No. 336, January 31, 1879, p. 57
- ↑ The Religious Aspects of Spiritualism by Blake, Charles Carter, London Spiritualist, No. 336, January 31, 1879, pp. 57-8
Sources
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London Spiritualist, No. 336, January 31, 1879, p. 57