Science and Morals and Other Essays, Sir Windle Bertram Coghill Alan [reading books for 7 year olds .TXT] 📗

The late Dr. Ryder, Provost of the Birmingham Oratory, was a very shrewd observer of public affairs and a very close and dear friend of the present writer. It must be more than twenty years ago since he remarked to me that he thought that materialism had shot its bolt and that the coming danger to religion was spiritualism, a subject on which, if I remember right, he had written more than one paper. I asked him what led him to that conclusion, and his reply was to ask me whether I had not noticed the great increase in number of the items in second-hand book catalogues—a form of literature to which we were both much addicted—under the heading "Occult." Since the war, however, there can be no doubt about the fact that spiritualism has made great strides. A thousand pieces of evidence prove it. Look, for example, at the enormous vogue of Raymond, a book of which I say nothing, out of personal regard for its author and genuine respect for his honesty and fearlessness. But I return to Sir Arthur Doyle's book, and we find him assuring us that he is personally "in touch with thirteen mothers who are in correspondence with their dead sons," and adds that in only one of these cases was the individual concerned with psychic matters before the war. Further, he explains that it was the war which induced him to take an active interest in a subject which had been before no more than one of passing curiosity. "In the presence of an agonised world," he writes, "hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved one had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it really was something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between the two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction." Perhaps it is not wonderful that spiritualism should have won the success which it has, for it offers a good deal to those who can believe in it. It offers definite intercourse with the departed; positive knowledge as to the existence of a future state, and even as to its nature—the last-named intelligence not always very attractive. Further, it requires no particular creed and, it would appear, no special code of morals; for one of its teachings, I gather, is that it does not greatly matter what a man thinks or even does, so far as his future welfare is concerned.

Sir A. Doyle's book is the least convincing exposition of spiritualism I have yet read—and I have studied many of them—but it may be taken to include the latest views on the subject. Amongst the revelations which he gives, there is one purporting to come from a spirit who "had been a Catholic and was still a Catholic, but had not fared better than the Protestants; there were Buddhists and Mahommedans in her sphere, but all fared alike." Another spirit informed Sir A. Doyle that he had been a freethinker, but "had not suffered in the next life for that reason." This is not the occasion, and in no way am I the man, to tackle the subject of spiritualism, but this at least I think may be said, that the person who argues that the whole thing is a fraud and deception does not know what he is talking about. Look at the history of the world—Quod semper, quod ubique, almost quod ab omnibus. The records of early missionaries—Jesuits especially—teem with accounts of the same kind of phenomena as we read of in connection with séances to-day, occurring in all sorts of places and amongst widely separated races of mankind. We have it in the Odyssey; we have it in Cicero and in Pliny; we have it in the Bible. All this is not a mere matter of imposition.

In a very curious book recently published (Some Revelations as to "Raymond," by a Plain Citizen; London, Kegan Paul), to which some attention may now be devoted, the writer, himself a firm believer in spiritualism and one obviously in a position to write about it, points out that the old term "magic" has been relegated to the performances of conjurers, and the terminology so altered as to make spiritualism appear to be a new gospel, whereas the contrary is the case. "The impression prevailed that civilised people were in presence of a new order of phenomena, and were acquiring a new outlook into the regions of the Unknown; whereas the truth was that they were merely repeating, under new social conditions and in a new environment, the same experiences that had happened to their ancestors during some thousands of years." Here I may interject the remark that as far as my reading and knowledge go, no spirit has ever had a good word to say for the Catholic religion. What that Church thinks about spiritualism has been made quite clear, and that is enough for Catholics. Before leaving the Plain Citizen, we must not omit to notice one strange hypothesis of his, all the stranger as coming from a professed spiritualist. He maintains—perhaps it would be fairer to say that he lays down as a working hypothesis—the following thesis: Spiritualism involves the existence of mediums, and mediums for the most part have to make their living by their operations. They will not be averse to making their incomes as large as possible. For the purpose of acquiring information as to the affairs of possible clients, they have, so he asserts, an almost Freemasonic Association by which all sorts of pieces of intelligence concerning persons of importance are collected and disseminated amongst the brotherhood. It did not require much imagination to suppose that the war would add to the number of their clients, whether their claims had real foundation or not; what they wanted above all things was some one of undoubted position who would "boom the movement," in the slang of the day. They laid all their plans to get their man in the author of Raymond, and they got him. Such is his thesis for what it is worth.

However, it is time to conclude. What I wanted to show was that Theophobia was the Nemesis of a dreadful type of Protestantism, and that spiritualism was the Nemesis of the materialism associated with that Theophobia. There is no need to point out to Catholic readers where the remedy lies, and where the real Communion of the saints is to be found. They are not likely to be drawn aside by the "Lo here!" of the "false Christs" whom we were promised and whom we are getting. It is for those who have themselves experienced the consolations of the Catholic religion to do their best, each in his own way, to make known to others outside our body what things may be found within.