Spiritualistic Sentiments
By Editor
A new school of interpreters of the Scriptures has arisen within recent years, and the number of its representatives is constantly increasing. Their theories are a cross between rank spiritualism and the new theology, with enough of the vocabulary of genuine Christianity to catch the ears of those who pay more attention to words than to sentiments. Their teachings have a flavor of the spiritual, but they are in reality spiritualistic in their tendency. They appear to exalt God and the Bible, but in the final analysis it will be found that they bring both down to the level of human reason. They are among the most dangerous teachers of this degenerate age. A good representative of this school of interpreters is Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who is a regular contributor to the magazine New Thought, and whose poetical productions are copied in quite a number of our exchanges. This writer gives expression to many apparently beautiful thoughts and presents lofty ideals, but a thoughtful study of her writings will justify the statement that they ignore the fundamental truths of revelation, leave no need nor place for the atonement made by Christ, and exalt the divinity alleged to be within every man, rather than the one personal God. They are subtly expressed and attractively clothed variations of the purely pagan religion of self-salvation. They have no rightful place in a Christian paper. A fresh example of the spiritualistic interpretation of the Scriptures now becoming so common is found in a magazine just established to promulgate the ideas of this modern school of thought. Here is a sample:— “Did not our hearts burn within us, while he talked with us by the way?” . . . Who has not felt this burning after listening to a master expounding the truths of Being? And what does it mean? It is the divine in the listeners responding to, or being aroused and kindled by, the divine in the speaker who is conscious of his oneness with the One, and is arousing others to the same realization. . . . When perfect concentration has been established, one passes from a state of thinking to a state of feeling—“feeling after God.” And it is as yet a condition of seeking. But if we seek, we find; if we knock, it is opened unto us, and there bursts on the consciousness the glory of union with the Divine. . . . It is the feeling of the at-one-ment with the All-in-all; the atonement in which one can say, “I and the Father are one,” for he has heard the voice saying, “Thou art my Son.” . . . With this consciousness comes the full breath, the complete breath, which is without physical motion; the perfect union of the within and the without. This is the Baptism of the Holy (whole) Spirit or Holy Ghost (correctly the Whole Gast, the word gast being the Anglo-Saxon for breath). “And He breathed on them and said, Receive ye the Whole Breath.” This is a spiritualizing of the physical or a physicalizing of the spiritual with which we are not wholly unfamiliar, and which professes to be a new light upon familiar passages of the Scripture,—a new philosophy which is destined to supersede the well-established application of these texts. It requires but little analysis to show that this teaching utterly ignores sin as sin, sets aside the true atonement made through the sacrifice of Christ, and by making the Whole Breath the equivalent of the Holy Ghost it demonstrates that every man is, or may be, a temple of the Holy Ghost entirely independent of faith in the gift of Christ. All this sort of spiritualistic teaching tends in the same direction. It is a substitution of human philosophy for divine revelation, and will end in destroying all genuine faith in the Bible as the Word of the living God. We warn our readers against even that almost unconscious assent to such doctrines which may grow out of a passive state of mind toward them. We ought to make a constant and uncompromising protest against them wherever we meet them. They are death to true religion.