Your ShelfYour Projects

Note and Comment

25%

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Nov 12, 1903

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 80, No. 45.

Read the full edition

Note and Comment

SPIRITUALISM is fast assuming the garb of religion. At the recent convention of the National Association of Spiritualists, held in this city, a new ritual was adopted. Provision was made for the “ordination” of pastors, or ministers, and a company of believers in Spiritualism was recognized as “a church.” This will be seen by reading the following section from the new ritual:—
No pastor or minister shall be settled over a church or society without first having been formally inducted into office by what has been known from the earliest ages of religious history as the service of ordination. No person can become a candidate for ordination until he has received a call to the pastorate of some church or society, or been appointed missionary by some State Spiritualist Association, incorporated as a religious body in the State in which it is located, or by the National Spiritualist Association of the United States of America. All persons who are candidates for pastorates or for missionary work must have been for at least three years in full fellowship with some Spiritualist church or society and for at least two years a licentiate, commissioned by a State or the national association as a trial speaker. Pastors settled for less than one full calendar year shall be ineligible for ordination.
How long will it be before organized Spiritualism will be duly recognized as a branch of the Christian church? “When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with Spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its constitution as a Protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan, and that the end is near.” Truly the end is near. Let us redeem the time.