The Deceitful Spirit

Signs Publishing Co. · Melbourne, Victoria · Jun 21, 1920

FromAustraliasian Signs of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 25.

The Deceitful Spirit

SIR HENRY LUNN, at a Brotherhood meeting in Kingsway Hall, London, has given a very pungent criticism of the attitude of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle toward the subject of Spiritism. Sir Henry stated that he had been often in the company of Mr. W. T. Stead when the latter entered upon the study of what he called “spooks.” The following summary of Sir Henry’s address we quote from a Melbourne daily:—

When Mr. Stead was about to publish his daily paper which was such a disastrous failure, and nearly ruined his career, he was informed by the medium that the paper would be a most triumphant success. Encouraged by the medium, he plunged into the colossal speculation, which ended in disastrous failure. “One

would have thought,” Sir Henry commented, “that would have shaken his faith in mediums, but it did not.”

On another occasion the medium informed him of the exact number of Liberals, Unionists, Home Rulers, and Labour men who would be returned at a general election, but that forecast was on a par with the forecast about the success of his daily paper.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a member of the medical profession, but he had told them in his recent book that every woman was an undeveloped medium, and suggested that all women should try their hands at automatic writing. “I say as a medical man that Sir Arthur ought never to have penned those words,” Sir Henry declared; “he ought never to have said it to a lot of girls full of nerves and possibly full of hysterics. As a man who cares for the girls of England, I say we don’t want a lot of highly strung, sensitive, and overworked girls leaving their hard work in London offices to spend their evenings with a planchette and the deadly experiments which often overthrow the reason.”

Anciently the test of a true prophet, a follower of God, was the truthfulness of his predictions. If the prophet prophesied and the thing did not come to pass, that was an indication that he was a false prophet. In His admonition to His people in the days of Jeremiah, God, speaking of their false prophets, said: “For they prophesy falsely unto you in My name: I have not sent them, saith the Lord.” Jer. 29:9. These men who have given themselves up to spiritist phenomena and are basing all their hopes upon what Spiritism can bring them from the realm of the dead, have had to admit again and again that the things spoken to them through mediums have proven false; and yet they continue to build their hopes upon the teachings of these self-proved deceivers just as if all their predictions had come to pass. God alone is able correctly to foretell the future. He has given the prophecies of His Word for the very purpose of convincing the world that divinity is speaking in the Bible. But the professed spirits of dead men claim the ability to duplicate this divine function in order that they may deceive the souls of men and women. As surely as the power to make true predictions of future events demonstrates the presence and power of God in prophecy, so does the inability of the professed spirits of dead men to do that same thing demonstrate that they are the enemies of God and men and the deceivers of the world. It is difficult to comprehend how men and women who have been deceived and lied to again and again by these revolted spirits will still seek after them, trust in them, and encourage others also to have faith in their deceptive teachings and predictions. This anomaly was never so marked and never so prevalent in the world as it is at the present time. Millions are following the ignus fatuus of Spiritism to the certain ruin of their souls, and that too in spite of the plainest declarations of the Word of God to the effect that the dead know not anything and have no part in anything that is done under the sun.