Henry Ward Beecher and Spiritualism
According to the proverb, “Where there's a will there's a way,” how long will it be before Henry Ward Beecher will be a Spiritualist, avowedly, as all believers in the immortality of the soul are, virtually. In the Christian Union of May 21, 1870, he says: “We frankly admit that we long to believe in Spiritualism—but cannot. We not only do not resist evidence and conviction, but we rather solicit belief. Who does not wish with all his soul that it might prove that windows were opened into the other world, through which we might commune with the disembodied.” He sticks chiefly at the literature of Spiritualism. But his scruples in this respect are not, we imagine, such as cannot be overcome, since if he and a few more like him should join the ranks, its literature would be greatly improved. He gives, however, so good a description of it as it stands at present, that we cannot forbear quoting. He says: “We cannot be so tolerant of the literature of Spiritualism as we are of the phenomenology. It is the most hopeless waste of sentimentalism, the most extraordinary effusion of fancy, futile philosophy, and maudlin religiousness, and in the most extraordinary quantity, that ever broke loose upon the world. It would be humiliating to the world to believe that dying gives to the soul such a backset as the revelations of Spiritualism manifest. After the growth and experience of seventy years in the flesh, it is hard to think that one is doomed in the other life to semi-idiocy.”