Spiritism | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 21, 1872

Spiritism.

The Spiritualist, a London journal, wishes it understood “that spirits out of the body are wise or foolish, truthful or untruthful, just the same as spirits in the body”—that they “are but individuals, and do not know everything”—that “their assertions are but the assertions of individuals,” and that “unreliable communications” can only be “sifted out” by “comparing the statements of many spirits.” “There is no more uniformity,” we are told, “in the next world than in this one,” while “spirits are of different religions.” We are not to wonder, therefore, at finding the statements of different spirits contradictory. This is satisfactory so far as it goes; but we should like some authoritative explanation of the fact, that beings who were wise in this world seem to become inconceivably foolish in the next. And especially we should like to know what has become of the brains which Bacon, for instance, incontrovertibly possessed while in the flesh. It seems to us that the explanations and the limitations of The Spiritualist do not cover this point. The value of “spiritual communications” must be tested by our own mental capacity; and what can we say when we find these revelations weak, absurd, and unimportant?—N. Y. Tribune.