Page:Saints or Spirits, Agnes Repplier, 1920.pdf/3

1920.] The Church has always maintained a discreet silence concerning these revelations. "What is called superstition is but suggestion in its unacknowledged and unconsolidated form;" says an acute English writer, endeavoring to straighten out the devious paths of psychical research.

There are upholders of Spiritism who claim that it will renew the faith of the world. Listening to the eloquent pleadings of Sir Oliver Lodge, one would imagine that there was no such thing as belief in the immortality of the soul, and that he was bringing this consoling doctrine to a race which had either never heard of it, or had forgotten all about it. Professor Hyslop admits the existence of faith, but proposes to render it superfluous by offering direct evidence of survival. He will replace the Communion of Saints with the communion of spirits, and the invocations of the Church with mediums and controls. Because these mediums are sometimes frauds, and the controls often give indications of feeble-mindedness (as in the case of Raymond Lodge's Feda), we are disposed to underrate the fast-growing influence of Spiritism upon a disturbed and sorrowful world.

In this we are at fault. Mr. Cyril E. Hudson, who has made a careful study of conditions in England (a land friendly to ghosts), says plainly that Spiritism is a rival to Christianity. Its advocates are wont to speak of it picturesquely as a "hand-maid" of religion, inasmuch as it fortifies belief in the unseen. "But, as a matter of experience, it is found that a man who becomes a Spiritualist ceases almost invariably to be a Christian in any traditional reuse of the word. Not for nothing has the Christian Church throughout her history discouraged the practice of necromancy, the morbid concern with the dead which must interfere with the proper discharge of our duties in that plane of existence in which God has placed us."

Mr. Hudson also calls our attention to one phase of the subject which is often ignored, but which is of the utmost importance. In Sir William Barrett's On the Threshold, we find references to "mischievous and deceptive communications," as well as to the profane and obscene matter which occasionally intrudes itself into automatic writing. "Some who have taken the trouble to inquire," says Barrett, "have come to believe that Spiritism reveals the existence of a mysterious power which may be of a more or less malignant