SPIRITUALISM A SATANIC DELUSION.
ITS CHARACTER AND PROGRESS.
If Spiritualists are startled at the scriptural idea of unconsciousness in death, we call their attention to their own teachings on the subject:— “The man so killed—what was his sensation? It was for a time suspended. To him existence was nothing. . . . So Prof. Webster was eight days and a half unconscious.”—Death and the After-Life, by A. J. Davis, pp. 18, 19. “It is said that some spirits require a thousand years to wake to consciousness. Is this true?” “Yes, this is true.”—Through Mrs. Conant, Banner of Light, June 3, 1865. Now if one could be totally unconscious eight and a half days, and another for one thousand years, there is only a step to reach the scriptural ground of unconsciousness between death and the resurrection. PERSONATING DEMONS ARE FALLEN ANGELS.
“For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto Judgment.” 2 Pet. 2: 4. “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” Rev. 12: 9. “And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the Judgment of the great day.”—Jude 6. “For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.” Rev. 16: 14. These angels were not spirits of the dead; for they were in existence before men. Man was made lower than the angels. Heb. 2: 7. Their nature was not the same as that of man. Heb. 2: 16. These invisible demons get possession of mediums the same as a magnetizer gets control of his subjects, and thus cause them to write or speak, etc. “The operator forms an image, as of a person, a serpent, a fire, or any other object, in his own mind; when the subject, if well under control, instantly sees the same thing as an objective reality. So, positive minds in a circle, or positive spirits who are around, may present the image of any person with whom they are familiar, and it may appear as a reality to the impressible medium.” Andrew Jackson Davis, in the Herald of Progress, Oct. 27, 1860, of which he was editor, says:— “It is known that a wise and strong-minded person, in the spirit world, has power to make visible to the eyes of mortals the exact appearance or semblance, of the body it wore before death. This representation is elaborated sometimes to the minutest particular, even to the reproduction of the appearance of the habiliments, etc., by which the person was characterized and identified while a resident of the earth.” Again he says, in the Herald of Progress for Feb. 1, 1862: “All intelligent spirits are great artists. They can psychologize a medium to see them, and to describe them, in the style to produce the deepest impression on the receiver. . . . They can easily represent themselves as being old or young, as in worldly dress or flowing robes, as is deemed best suited to accomplish the ends of the visitation.” From this it appears that the spirit operating has power to form a mental picture in the mind of the subject; or, in plain Bible language, the devil can transform himself and appear as an angel of light. How easy, then, according to their own confession, to appear in the form of our deceased friends! Farmer, in “Demonology,” p. 51, says:— “St. Chrysostom admits that the demons in the possessed persons pretended that they were the souls of such or such a monk; but himself asserts that it was the devil that personated the ghosts of those who suffered a violent death, and hereby caused men to think they became demons.” Iamblichus, on the “Mysteries,” says:— “Demons exist prior to souls and to the powers which are distributed about bodies.” Again he admits that there is “a certain genus of demons, which is naturally fraudulent, uniform, and various, and which assumes the appearance of gods, and demons (good ones), and the souls of the deceased.” “Familiar spirits . . . wizards that peep and that mutter.” Isa. 8: 19. There are many specimens of the frog-like peeping and muttering of these spirits through modern mediums, and some of them have been put on record by the Spiritualists themselves. As a specimen we refer to their attempt to give a correct history of the creation. The Bible account they say is unintelligible. Under the imposing head of “Disclosures from the Interior,” in the Mountain Cove Journal, 1853, by T. L. Harris, a Spiritualist author and medium, “an exalted spirit” (?) croaks as follows:— “In the beginning God, the Life in God, the Lord in God, the holy procedure inhabited the dome, which, burning in magnificent primeval and revolving in prismatic and undulatory spiral, appeared, and was the pavilion of the Spirit in glory, inexhaustible and inconceivable, in movement spherical, unfolded in harmonious procedure disclosive. “And God said, Let Mechanical Procedure be! and movement, rhythmical, harmonical, melodial, unfolded from the firmament. “And God said, Let there be space! and the firmament was separated from the emanation, and the firmament, unmoved, appeared, and the emanation unfolded within the procedure. And the firmament is manifest Infinitude, and the emanation separated, is encompassed space. “And God made two great lights to rule the zodiac, and to be for creative disclosure, disclosive manifestation, manifest glory, glorious radiation, interpenetrative aggregation; and thence vortices, vortical suns, suns of vortices, solariums, vortical planetariums, planets, floral universes, universal paradises, paradisaical heavens, heavens of spiritual universes, celestial heavens, seraphic habitations, seraphimal universes, cities of heavenly seraphim, and final consociative universal intelligence in unity of innumerable individuality, in trinity of unfolding universes, adoring and ascending in beatification unto eternal life. “This is the Genesis of Nature;—not uncreated or self-originated, but created;—not the progressive, upgrowing, upheaving, upmentalizing, upspiritualizing, upreaching struggle of a germ;—but condescension infinite, creation voluntary, and bestowment merciful, of the Divine Creator; to whom be given adoration immeasurable and eternal! world without end!” Another spirit peeped out the following, which was published in the same paper:— “God the life, in God the Lord, in God the holy procedure organized the first Orb-Creation in form of appearing as one globular ovarium, which was the germ of the terrestrial universe of universes; and within the embryo of the external of universal impersonal creation, as one curvilinear ovarium; and within the curvilinear the germ of the external, of the universal, personal, or intellectual creation in form of one vortical ovarium. . . . The universal concavity the universal convexity were co-enfolded and encompassed in the universal zodiac, and within the concavity was the visible disclosure unto the germ of the terrestrial.” Prof. Stuart, of Andover University, in the “Biblical Repository,” 1832, gave the following on the difference between true and false prophets and spirits:— “I agree to the fact, that the heathen seers were rightly named manteis, from mainomai, to rave; as Cicero has declared in his first book, De Divinatione. But what an immeasurable distance, now, between a raving man or woman, uttering incoherent sentences; or (which was more common) a dissimulating hypocrite, uttering cunningly and artfully and equivocally constructed sentences and poetic riddles; and a Hebrew prophet, animated by the strongest and deepest feelings of reverence for Jehovah, and a holy ardor in the cause of true piety! Is there ambiguity, flattery, self-seeking, enigmas, in the message of the latter? None. Are not all these stamped on more or less of the heathen oracles? They are. And such being the case, we would separate the Hebrew prophet from the heathen seer, not by discrepancies of a mere physiological or psychological nature, which lie beyond our ken in case they exist at all; or rather, which involve contradictions and impossibilities; but by a rational, enlightened, holy, excited, zealous state of mind, which raised the true seer unspeakably above all false ones, and did this by making him in a high degree like to the Author of his inspiration. Here is something palpable. The oracles speak for themselves.”