L. A. S by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Sep 28, 1905

L. A. S

By L. A. S.

A WRITER in the Hibbert Journal of recent date comments on the fact that simultaneously with the growth of materialistic views which is characteristic of the times there is also a “remarkable revival of the occult.” And this revival of occultism is more general than might at first thought be supposed. “It is idle, it is simply not true,” says this writer, “to say that this dabbling in the black arts is confined to those few queer people whom we shall always have with us, and that it is without significance. One has only to walk up and down a street in the busier part of any of our cities to see what a trade must be going on in the unseen and the diabolical.”

It is a remarkable fact that with all the increase of scientific knowledge for which the age is noted, and the general diffusion of this knowledge among the people, there is at the same time a marked revival of superstition and confidence in the pretended revelations from occult sources. This is evidence that scientific knowledge, as the world supplies it, is no safeguard to the mind against superstition. The doctrines of Rome, which are largely superstition or of superstitious basis, flourish in an age of great intellectual light the same as they did in medieval darkness.

But while scientific knowledge is on the increase, true faith—belief of God’s Word, adherence to the solid, old-time doctrines of Christianity—is markedly on the decline; and between this fact and the revival of superstition there is a direct relation. Atheists attempt to show that faith and superstition are essentially the same. The religious phenomena of the present day refute this idea. So far from being the same or similar, they are opposites, and each is destructive of the other. The individual noted for a sane, sound mind, fortified against all forms of religious quackery, is pre-eminently the one who takes God’s Word for his guide and source of knowledge in the things of the spiritual life.