SPIRITUALISM by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · April 29, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 18

SPIRITUALISM

By Editor

The Gouverneur, N. Y., Herald of April 8, gives the following note of the celebration of the 32d anniversary of spiritualism in Rochester, N. Y.:—

“The thirty-second anniversary of modern spiritualism was celebrated Monday in Rochester, N. Y., by a meeting at which speeches were made by one of the Fox sisters, and other mediums. A long list of resolutions was passed, in the first of which the city of Rochester was commemorated as the place where the rappings were first publicly investigated and found to emanate from persons once of this life, now of the life beyond. That rap has reverberated round the world, demonstrating immortality.”

In less than a third of a century, this fatal delusion has spread to all nations; for, as stated above, “that rap has reverberated round the world.” But in not a single manifestation are we obliged to resort to the hypothesis of disembodied human spirits; hence they are not “found to emanate from persons once in this life,” and do not therefore “demonstrate” immortality, or what we suppose is meant by it here, a conscious existence after death, before the resurrection.

We might feel obliged to adopt the conclusions claimed, were it not for the Bible. But when the Bible so often declares that the dead know not anything, that with them all consciousness, thought, and emotion have ceased till the resurrection, it settles the matter so far as they are concerned. And the Bible doctrine of demonology accounts in a rational manner for the agencies manifestly at work in the wonders produced. And the prophecies setting forth that in the last days such manifestations should appear, Matt. 24:24; Rev. 13:13, 14; 16:14, and be at the very climax of their wonder-working exhibitions when Christ appears in the clouds of heaven, 2 Thess. 2:8–12, sufficiently explain the phenomenon of the sudden appearance and rapid spread of this work over the earth in the present generation.

Never have we had more reason than now to prize the Bible, and never more occasion to hold fast to it as the only anchor amid the floods of error, deception, and evil, in these last days.