Is Spiritualism Fraud or Fact?
Is Spiritualism Fraud or Fact? is an article including 4 sub-articles written by various authors published in the Greensboro Daily News on 10 august 1930.
Authors are :
- Article 1 : Lady Jean Conan Doyle (ACD's wife)
- Article 2 : Rev. Desmond-Morse-Boycott, a leading Anglican priest and ecclesiastical writer
- Article 3 : Hannen Swaffer, one of England's foremost literary critics
- Article 4 : Edith Shackleton, the noted authoress
Is Spiritualism Fraud or Fact?
Since Death Of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle All England Has Manifest Much Interest In Subject. — Four Noted Authorities Express Themselves.
Article I.
By Lady Jean Conan Doyle.
"By their fruits shall ye know them..."
The fruits of the churches have been the most ghastly wars, where millions have been killed. At the present time every nation is turning its most scientific brains to the discovery of poison gases which will destroy some other nation.
When the peace of the world is held on a leash called the League of Nations, when the whole world is full of unrest beneath the surface, when materialism is like a great fungus growth in all directions, when selfishness and lack of conscience are apparent on all sides, is it not time — and obvious — that the faith-fruit should be recognized as being utterly inadequate as a force in the world?
Isn't it time the churches should replace it by knowledge given direct from the higher spheres?
Told To Try Spirits.
We were told to try the spirits. The churches say they believe in the communion of saints, but they do not live up to it, and so they are out of touch with the spirit world, and have been so since the early Christian days, when they had mediums called the angel of the church attached to every church.
Let them get back to the simple, beautiful teaching of Christ, and scrap the gorgeous camouflage so often used to hide the emptiness behind, and that the world will be more what God meant it to be, and Christ's life will not have been lived in vain.
Spiritualism is the only religion that does not ask for blind faith, but offers definite proof to the individual.
Comfort Carried.
We agree that such remarks as: "Tell my sister I am happy — George is here and is happy, but tired" mean nothing to the world — but carry both comfort and conviction to the individual to whom they are addressed.
Article II.
By Rev. Desmond-Morse-Boycott,
(A leading Anglican priest and ecclesiastical writer).
A few months ago the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sent me a paper which he had written, with the earnest plea that I would accept the "new light" of spiritualism.
I read it carefully, and you may care to know the conclusions which I have come to after much careful thought.
First let me say, however, that I have never been to a seance. I do not think that a seance, if I, as a churchman, were free to go to one would carry me one step further, because I believe already, as do many churchmen, that spiritists, as they are more properly called, get results. It is evident that discarnate spirits do "come through." No one with an open mind can suppose that devotees of this very old cult (for an account of 3 seance read I. Samuel. XXV. III.) are the victims of illusion.
Spiritism is a menace to the church, because a great many people are being led to look upon it as an advanced form of the Christian religion. It purports to be also, the primitive form.
I have no space to produce evidence here, but a careful study of the history of the primitive church has led me to the conviction that Lady Doyle is in grave error when she asserts, as many spiritists do assert, that the early church used mediums and was spiritistic. Spiritism, in this age, is based upon forged title deeds.
A Fraud Unmasked.
I should like to know whether it is true or not that in France seances leave resulted in blasphemy? I do not assert it, but it is said so. In this country they seem to be included in a form of worship, and there is no blasphemy. If that be, so, it would seem as if discarnate spirits can adapt themselves to company, as some rogues can in this life. I have had the perfect gentleman in my drawing room who knew all about my family, only to find out later that he was a fraud!
We have no means of knowing who these discarnate spirits are, and it is well to remember that there is no terrestrial monopoly in fools.
Thus, as there must ever be this uncertainty if one believes as a Christian, in the existence of evil as well as good spirits, it is disastrous to push this cult upon the credulous, who believe anything that is novel.
The effect, too, of seances upon the morbid and restless must be very bad, worse than the effect of revivalist meetings.
Becomes Dominated.
The "modus operandi" is awful. The medium abdicates his conscious mentality, and becomes dominated by unknown forces. We have no right to expose our God-given faculties to intrusion, or rather possession, in this way, or any light to allow some one else to do so in our behalf. No good purpose is served. A few may be comforted by what seems to be direct contact with their loved ones, but they receive far less real comfort, it seems to me, than that which the Church of God (condemning spiritism) has to give them in the great and true seance, the Holy communion, at which our Lord is the medium, and wherein we meet our loved ones, and angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, or in the ancient doctrines of prayers for the dead and the invocation of saints. No one has ever been harmed by these. Millions have been consoled and strengthened. Spiritism is a blind alley, and down it the blind are leading the blind.
I have said nothing about the dangers of self-deception, but they are widely spread. I have studied the opening of the very beautiful Scripts of Cleophas and find a direct contradiction of the narrative in the Acts of Apostles, in the description of Pentecost. I have no doubt that the Scripts "came through." That doesn't make them any more true than if a bishop wrote them in a hurry in Lambeth palace.
Finally, I am convinced that spiritism is a subtle form of materialism. It seeks to bring down the other-worldly to this world. The whole effort of Christianity is to uplift the earthly to the heavenly.
Article III.
By Hannen Swaffer.
(One of England's foremost literary critics).
It is charged that spiritualists have merely given the world such messages as: "Tell my sister I am happy," or "George is here and is happy, but tired."
Must we alter truthful wards to make them more impressive?
If a man's wife is reported drowned at sea and then, after she has been missing for days, he gets, say from Vancouver, a cable which says: "Am safe. Kiss the baby. Love and kisses," would you call that trivial?
It might be trivial to you, if you opened the cablegram by mistake, but to the man concerned it would be the most important message of his life.
World's Record Seance.
When Estelle Roberts gave clairvoyance in the presence of 10,000 people at the Albert Hall a few weeks ago, her demonstration of proved survival was reported at length by the newspapers without one word of cynicism. There was no laugh, no sneer.
It was the most largely-attended seance the world had ever known. Spiritualism had at last won, after 8O years of ridicule and persecution, misrepresentation and abuse.
I have heard Estelle Roberts give hundreds of clairvoyant messages in public. I have known them checked from a verbatim record. I have seen scores of letters from people, strangers to spiritualism, who have received from them advice and comfort.
I don't care whether the world regards it as trivial or not. I only now that it is true. I am only concerned with the truth. I don't embroider it, or change it, to suit one particular creed, or alter it to fit some worn-out theology. A fact is a fact.
"When the great ones of this world who have died speak through a medium we find men who were lords of language and gods of thought using the same trite phrases as though self-expression had reached a robot level for all," you say.
Have you read "The Script of Cleophas," which, written down in semi-trance at speed faster than I could write words learned by heart, consists of a continuation of the Acts of the Apostles, and has been admitted in public by Dr. Oesterley, examing chaplain to the Bishop of London, to be veridically evidential?
Ether of Space.
There are scores of such books. Have you read Hir Oliver Lodge's conversation with the late W. F. H. Myers, when they discussed the ether of space? I don't know any bishop who could have phrased them.
When the war had made millions of people doubt the omnipotence of God, and the clergy were despondent about how to fill their churches spiritualism brought hundreds of thousands of people, who wanted proof, back to the churches which they had left.
It convinced, for instance, Oliver Lodge, an agnostic; Conan Doyle, an agnostic; and Robert Blatchford, an agnostic. Those are only three of many thousands. Spiritualism has insisted on all the facts all the time.
Because of its 80 years of proofs, it has at last proved so much that funeral services display an air of calmness and confidence. Heavy mourning is no longer seen. Colored flowers are used for wreaths. The words, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," are disappearing from the parrot phrases which the world no longer wants.
Death An Incident.
Death is now proved to be an incident, not an end. The world has grown tired of faith; it wants knowledge. Faith is for the child; the adult demands the facts.
I was asked, only last week, to go to a church in the midlands to produce the facts of survival in an Anglican pulpit.
Another Anglican minister called at the Marylehone Spiritualist association a week or so ago, and said: "I have been preaching all my life. Without the facts I cannot go on. Give them to me. Prove them."
I could quote scores of such cases in a modern world. The church must be based on fact, or it will perish.
Article IV.
By Edith Shackleton.
(The Noted Authoress).
On tenderness to the grief-stricken the spiritualist movement runs as on greased rollers. In its present stage spiritualism Is an attractive haven for the sort of egotists who, when their nearest and dearest dies, cannot accept their part in the common lot of humanity and are quite prepared to believe that any previously acknowledged physical law will now be repealed in their favor.
One cannot jeer at or argue with such people — least of all if one has endured grief with a brain that does not cease to function normally under the bitterest tortures of bereavement.
The marvel is not that people run to spiritualism but that they get any comfort from it. A belief in after-life is not a spiritualistic invention. It is a part of almost every religion. There are thousands of men and women who still stand up in church every Sunday and say, "I believe in the resurrection of the body, the life ever-lasting"... meaning literally every word they say what is the boasted revelation of spiritualism to them?
Bridging Gulf.
Another exaggeration of the spiritualists is their claim to bridge the gulf between this life and another. One might suppose that they themselves felt immortal. After all, the gulf is to be bridged sooner or later for all of us, for it is surely reasonable to assume that what has happened to our dead will happen to us too. Not one of us, when our time comes, will escape that bridge even if we wish to.
It has always puzzled me that spiritualists should be eager to spread a belief which appears to be definitely belittling to the human soul, I honestly believe that if I found some proof that the dead for whom I mourn and whom I adored and respected in life were now struggling in some such mean outer world as medium project, desperately trying to "get through," in some such state of mind as I find myself when confronted with a defective telephone dial, or an unhappy stranger who does not speak any language I know — I honestly believe that I should try to hush up such deplorable, unprofitable news.
So far spiritualism has proved no moral force. Assuming that belief in an after-life creates an urgency to behave well in this — which is rather a mean what of looking at life, anyhow — the people who believe in an afterlife because some medium, paid for the job, has told them something whirls is as easily explicable as the things just now being told by a pair of entertainers at a cabaret, do not believe in it any more firmly than multitudes have done all down the ages.
Empty Cradles.
Women are also allowed more licence in grief than men. This is an inheritance from the days of large and rapidly appearing families when women often wept over empty cradles for children whose fathers had not yet become conscious of them as individuals. There is no evidence that women feel bereavement itself more acutely than men do, though a bereaved woman oftener has to suffer in more ways by losing support and position than a man does. But so particularly sacred is female grief supposed to be that very few of us are brutal enough to ask a woman to apply reason to anything which appears to give her comfort or courage.
Not so long ago. when a young woman I know, after losing one of her children, gathered all the resources of a fine character and a rational education and said: "I must not spoil the lives of my other children by mourning," and somehow asserted her usual cheerful calm, her husband was so revolted that he almost left her, though her attitude was exactly that he had intended to take up himself!
The encouragement given to wives to be feeble-minded is such that I marvel so many of them remain sane and merry.
(World-Wide News Services, Inc.)
