Latter-day Blasphemers.
By Uriah Smith
It is with no pleasure that we record the blasphemies uttered in our days by Spiritualists. Yet it is well that some of these should occasionally be presented, that the honest or unwary may have their eyes opened to the hellish nature of Spiritualism; and that all may see that the blasphemers who were to come in the last days, 2 Tim. 3:2, have already appeared. At the Spiritualist camp-meeting, held at Havre de Grace, Md., in Aug., 1871, one of the speakers said:— “The time has come for Spiritualism to take the offensive; our belief has been advancing for a thousand years, and the time is come for us to smite the intolerant enemy like the bullock before the butcher. A nice religion the pretenders would like to fasten upon the worldlings; taken from the records and practices of such old liars and murderers as Moses and his villainous tribe. The Bible is a polluted collection of blood and lies, and unfit for a sane man to read. The only true man that ever wrote in either of the testaments was Judas, who gave Christ credit for being a divine spirit, and who in putting the matter to the test in the so-called betrayal, lost his own life, while such lying hypocrites as Peter, Luke, and the rest of the gang, grew rich on the blood of their master.” An animated discussion took place upon the action of a prominent disciple, who had withdrawn himself from the assembly, declaring the tendencies of the meeting wholly immoral. Sister French made the announcement, and a dozen earnest and disdainful brothers arose in denunciation of such pusillanimity, and shouted, “Let him go; we will have none weak-kneed among us; we have girded for the battle, and we will fight on this line.” So the over-scrupulous delinquent was forthwith dropped from among the familiars of the grand circle. Another still, with an eye upon the signs of the times, observed that, “lately they tried to bring that puny effigy worshipped for the last 1,800 years, who from Adam’s time has been called God, into the Constitution; but we’ll have none of it. It is an insult to our psychological development to admit such an absurdity as a creature like this God. We look beyond such mummery; ours is a vast hierarchy of spirits endowed with all the powers these fools allot to their so-called omnipotent God. Ruler of what is he? Not of this world, for he don’t rule me. I do as I please, so do you. Why even Satan can over-match him, according to Christian doctrine.” Fully an hour and a half was taken up with this address, none of it less radically violent than the sentences quoted, save perhaps a florid peroration to prove the “actualization of the love of life of the world through Spiritualism.”