Communion With the Dead by F. M. W.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Sep 8, 1910

Communion With the Dead

By F. M. W.

It is not professed Spiritualists alone who cherish belief in communion with the departed. Many who pass as good orthodox members of the professed Christian church, affectionately hold to this sentiment. Under the heading given above, the editor of the Northwestern Christian Advocate (Methodist) of July 29 says:—

Those who have gone from us to the home land still love us and think of us. Their loving relationship to us should be a sanctifying influence in our daily lives. Their coronation should give us a deeper consecration to all things true and beautiful and good. The memory of their love should redeem us from all selfishness. Their purity should help us to be clean and strong in the hour of temptation. They are doubtless oftener nearer to us than we think. The spiritual world is so near us that we ourselves are in it, though our eyes are holden. If our eyes were opened, we should be greatly comforted. How pitiful it would be if we should also be ashamed!

“How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affections bold, Should be the man whose thought would hold An hour’s communion with the dead.”

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has permeated the world, and is Satan’s great masterpiece in preparing the minds of men for his last great deception as manifested in so-called modern spiritism. The Word of God plainly declares that “the dead know not anything. . . . Their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished.” In speaking of those who have died, Job says: “His sons come to honor, and he knoweth it not; and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them.” Our friends who have died are asleep,—in a sleep that knows no waking until the resurrection morning. They are without thought, without consciousness, incapable of memory, of love, or of hatred. They know nothing whatever of the events which have occurred on this earth since their death.

The Scripture plainly tells us that Satan will work in the last days with great power, and signs, and lying wonders. It declares that the agencies which do this “are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth into the kingdoms of the earth and of the

whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.” The falsehood told by the arch-deceiver to our first parents in the garden of Eden, “Ye shall not surely die,” has been believed by the nations of men, and its baneful fruit will be seen in the last great deception of personating demons, by which Satan will engulf the world. This doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the conscious state of the dead, has been received in the Christian church; and many professed Christians to-day, while holding no organic connection with Spiritualists so-called, and who would dislike to be called by this name, are such in belief; and unless they obtain a knowledge of what the Scriptures declare concerning this subject, they will be overthrown by this great, overmastering delusion of the last days. Upon us who understand the Bible teaching on this question, and who realize the crisis before us, rests the responsibility of doing our utmost to spread abroad a knowledge of the truth of God.

F. M. W.