Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.djvu/253

Rh The so-called medium makes his way into the confidence of those mourning the loss of friends, when sorrow stirs the mind like a fermenting fluid, till it is ready for any change. Great desire renders the sorrowful receptive of the belief that the departed can commune with them. “The wish is father to the thought.” This error gains its foothold in mortal mind by coming, clad with the drapery of heaven, at the hour of human yearning. It is a mystery and marvel. The mental phenomena are not understood. What, more than ignorance and superstition, are needed as the foundation-stones of such a belief? Perfection is not expressed through imperfection. Spirit is not made manifest through matter. There are no convenient sieves that can strain Truth through error. The medium imitates whomsoever he believes to be controlling him, producing a sort of self-mesmerism.

Darkness and light, infancy and manhood, sickness and health, are separate beliefs that never blend. Who would say that infancy can utter the ideas of manhood, that darkness can represent light, that we are in Europe when we are in the opposite hemisphere? Logic cannot bridge over the gulf between two such opposite conditions — as the state of those you believe to have died and come to life again, and the state of those whom you believe never to have died.

You call one individual (the living) matter; and the other (the dead) you call spirit; when the fact is that neither is Spirit. That matter is the Truth of existence, or that Spirit and matter, Intelligence and non-intelligence, can ever commune together, is an error that progress and Science will destroy.