The pre-Christian religion was founded on a knowledge of natural and verifiable Facts, the data being actual, and the method very simply scientific--whether you accept my conclusions or not,--but
the Christian Cult was founded on ignorant belief, which swallowed in faith all that was impossible in fact, and unverifiable in phenomena. Current orthodoxy is based upon a deluding idealism--derived
from literalised legend and misinterpreted mythology--on the idea that man fell from paradise, and was damned for ever before the first child had been born--on the idea that the world was consequently lost--on the idea that the world is to be saved and man restored by a vicarious
atonement--on the idea of a miraculous physical resurrection from the dead. And all these ideas are at once non-natural, non-spiritual, unscientific, and utterly false; and year by year, day after day, their props are being knocked away. But the phenomenal Spiritualist in all ages has founded on his facts. These facts were common with the pre-historic races, and the phenomena were cultivated more intelligently in the ancient Mysteries. But they were utterly abominated and crushed or cast out by the later religion.
What has the Christian Church done with the human soul, which was an assured possession of the pre-Christian religions? It was handed over to their keeping and they have lost it! They have acted exactly like the dog in ’sop's fable--who, seeing the likeness of the shoulder of mutton reflected in the water, dropped the substance which he held in his mouth, and plunged in to try and seize its shadow! They substituted a phantom of faith for the knowledge of phenomena! Hence their deadly enmity against the Gnostics, the men who knew. They had got hold of a faith that could stand alone independently of fact, if you only made believe hard enough, and killed out all who could not believe. They drew down the blinds of every window that looked forth into the Past, and shut out the light of nature from the blinded world in which they sought to live, and compel all other people to live, by a farthing candle of faith alone.
They parted company with nature, and cut themselves adrift from the ground of phenomenal fact. They became the murderous enemies of the ancient spiritism which had demonstrated the existence and continuity of the soul and offered evidence of another life on the sole ground of fact to be found in nature. And ever since they have waged a ceaseless warfare against the phenomena and the agents--which are as
live and active to-day as they were in any time past. Mediums, prophets, and seers, witches, and wizards--the Born Immortals of the early races--have always been done to death by them with
horrible tortures and inhuman cruelties. They have fought all along against the most vital and valuable,the profoundest part of the knowledge of nature, the most concealed, occult, and subtle; and been at war all through against the other world. But murder will out, and the innumerable multitude of their victims are only dead against them. They are living on for us; they are working with us; they are
fighting for the eternal truth with terrible power, against the worshippers of the gory God, the men of the "bloody faith," which has yet to pay for all the massacre and misery that the race has suffered, in order that a delusive fiction might be forced upon the world. The soul was established as a fact, and the future life was demonstrated in the mysteries of ancient Spiritism. These were the creators of a
sentiment that might be called religious, for the first time, and the Christian teachers to-day are but trafficking in and beguiling the hereditary sentiment so evolved, by not only trying to do without the
original factors in the past, but by seeking to efface them from Nature itself. If anything could have put an end to Spiritualism, it was the never-ceasing Christian persecution that was directed towards
that end. They substituted a physical resurrection from the dead for a spiritual continuity, such as was demonstrated in the mysteries of the men who knew! As if a physical resurrection, that was alleged
to have occurred once on a time, could demonstrate the continuity of spiritual existence for us! And to-day you still see their learned doctors of divinity trying to get at the other world by grave-digging--still fumbling after the spirit of man as though his essence were dust of the earth--which they say God has power to put together, every particle of it, at the Last Day; and so
we shall rise again after all. They oppose, and fear Cremation, as Bishop Wordsworth admitted, because it looks as though that would destroy the physical and only foothold of their resurrection.
Tomb-stones, and books, are still dedicated by them to the memory of those who are "no more!"
The future life for them is but a desolate "perhaps." The meeting again is only a "may be." At the mouth of the gaping grave they mumble something about the "hope" of a joyful resurrection. That is the physical resurrection at the Last Day, on which the failing faith was
founded at first; and that, according to John, was all the alleged Founder of the faith had to reveal when He is said to have said: "Every one that beholdeth the Son, and believeth on Him, I will raise
him up at the last day!" The Spiritualism of the Roman Catholic Church, with its doctrine of Angels, its Purgatorial Penance, and efficacy of Prayers for the dead, is a survival from Paganism,
and was not derived from the teachings of the supposed Founder of Historic Christianity as represented in the Canonical Gospels. Hence the rejection of that (and all other such) Spiritualism by the Protestants!
And some of our friends, who are Christians first and Spiritualists afterwards, want to convert Christianity into Spiritualism. But it will not, and cannot, be converted.
In vain you try to engraft the living shoot
Upon a dead tree, rotten to the root.
And to prove my knowledge of fact, I have donated my body to science for training doctors to help humanity instead of the robbing funeral directors who take advantage of grieving people. After they have no further use the remains will be burned. My legs already have been cremated after removal. Did'nt hurt a bit in the furnace!!! |
