PROF. PHELPS ON SPIRITUALISM.
Prof. Austin Phelps, in a recent number of the Congregationalist, gives the following as his views of spiritualism. We bespeak for it a careful reading, as the views expressed are those of a candid, thoughtful man, who has evidently examined the subject carefully. He says:— I do not hold to the hypothesis that spiritualism is of satanic origin, without qualification. I hold it as an hypothesis the probability of which must depend on the degree of mastery which science obtains over the whole subject. It is only under the condition that, before some of the phenomena in question science is dumb, that I resort to the supernatural theory at all. In common with the rest of the world, I am waiting for science to recover from its “despair,” and to give us some explanation of the facts, which shall deserve respect. It is not wise to find more of the demonical in the universe than we are compelled to find. But so long as science gives us nothing better, my mind falls back upon the biblical demonology, as being the most probable thing we have, within the range of human knowledge, in explanation of the mystery. As a believer in the Biblical demonology, without qualification or deduction, I find no great difficulty in settling accounts with spiritualism. Some minds can rest in having no theory on this subject. Others cannot. I doubt whether anybody can, whose nightly sleep is broken up for months by the sports of “racket-sprites” in his chamber. When we come upon phenomena which the police give up as beyond their province, and which Signor Blitz gives up as beyond his art, and which established and recorded science gives up as beyond its ken, and which even hypothetical science, within the range of natural operations, does not touch at all, we are impelled to ask, “What next?” Has anything else ever been known to human faith, or suggested to human thought, which possibly can give us some result better than the “despair of science?” It is just here and under these conditions that the Biblical demonology comes to our relief. Why believers in the Scriptural demonology should hesitate to make the application, thus qualified, I do not understand. It surely is not unscriptural nor unphilosophical. If there is a world of demonic intelligence, and if incursions have been made from that world into this, it is not unphilosophical to believe that similar incursions may be made again. Be it so, then, until science can explain the facts in some more satisfactory way. It is only when science stands stock still, and says, “Beyond this line I know nothing and can explain nothing,” that we feel at liberty to look elsewhere; and not even then, except as we get the hint from a divine revelation. I am less reluctant to admit the demonology of the Scriptures into the problem, because I suspect that our indignant and shamed recoil from the Salem witchcraft was given to our faith in the explicit declarations of the word of God. This is evinced more by silence than by speech, but is none the less real for that. We believe, not only less than our fathers believed of the kingdom of Satan, but less than the Bible positively affirms. The reaction of the Salem tragedy is not a wise use from an abuse. There is danger in a truth ignored. This is specially the fact where supernaturalism is involved. That, in a certain amount, the human mind will have. If men do not find it, they will make it. Taught to ignore the divinely revealed forms of it, they will grovel in false forms. The readiness with which spiritualism has made headway, I suspect, is due to the larger disease, both in popular and clerical thought, of that portion of the supernaturalism of the Scriptures which concerns the personalities and activities of superhuman orders of created beings. That instinctive faith in the supernatural, which the Bible feeds with dignity and purity, if denied such food, we might naturally expect to find rotting in some such putrescent heap as that of modern spiritualism. There may be more danger than we think in believing nothing. Spiritualism is not an error of the schools; it is in the homes of the people. It is extending, broadcast. Our home missionaries find it away up in the mountains. Young pastors inquire what to do with it. Not a religious newspaper in the land has so large a circulation as that of its leading organ. We cannot afford to wait indefinitely, meanwhile believing nothing, for science to rid us of it. If it is a device of Satan, the sooner we find that out, and as religious teachers proclaim it, the better.