Spiritualism as a "New Religion"
Spiritualism as a "New Religion" is an article published in the Daily Express on 31 october 1916.
The article includes extract of the Arthur Conan Doyle article A New Revelation published in Light (4 november 1916).
Spiritualism as a "New Religion"
SIR A. CONAN DOYLE ON LIFE AFTER DEATH.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claims that we should now be at the close of the stage of investigation regarding spirit intercourse and beginning the period of religious construction. In the course of an article in "Light," he says that the phenomena which have been observed are confirmatory as to the life after death, the unhappy results of sin, "the existence of higher beings whom we may call angels,"
and the existence of the "Summer-land" or heaven.
"No trait of the form and no peculiarity of the mind are changed by death,"
says Sir Arthur, "but all are continued in that spiritual body which is the counterpart of the earthly one at its best, and still contains within it that core of spirit which is the very inner essence of the man."
Sir Arthur says that there are two alternatives in summing up the spiritual philosophy — either that an outbreak of lunacy has assailed men an women who are otherwise eminently sane, or that "in recent years there has come to us from divine sources a new revelation which constitutes by far the greatest religious event since the death of Christ (for the Reformation was a rearrangement of the old, not a revelation of the news, a revelation which alters the whole aspect of death and the fate of man."
Discussing whether communion is right, Sir Arthur says: "Personally I am not aware of any human power which has been given us without our having the right under any circumstances to use it.
"It is either an absurd farce or the most solemn and sacred of functions. But when one knows, as I know, of widows who are assured that they hear the loved voice once again, or of mothers whose hands, groping in the darkness, clasp once again those of the vanished child, and when one considers the loftiness of their intercourse and the serenity of spirit which succeeds it, I feel sure that a fuller knowledge would calm the doubt of the most scrupulous conscience.
"Men talk of a great religious revival after the war. Perhaps it is in this direction that it will be."
