Can the Dead Speak?

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 18, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 11.

Can the Dead Speak?

It has been but a few days since Joaquin Miller died, and now the widow has announced that she has received a “spirit message” from “the beloved poet of the Sierras.” Most of our Protestant churches teach that Spiritualism is a delusion of the devil, but at the same time they also teach that every man has an immortal soul that can not die. This soul, so they tell us, leaves the body at death and is fully as conscious as it was before the person died. The Spiritualist goes just one step further and says that if this soul is conscious he wants to talk to it so as to learn something from it of “the beyond.” The Bible plainly teaches that God only hath immortality, and this gift is received only by the overcomer through Christ. It is an absolute impossibility to prove the immortality of the soul by the Bible. The Bible offers immortality through Christ for those who seek for it, but nowhere does the divine Book say that the individual possesses it of himself. It can be shown clearly from the Word of God that the spirits that come to people purporting to be our “departed friends” have no connection whatever with the dead. They are, to use the words of inspiration itself, “spirits of demons, working signs.” These sign-working demons, according to the Word of God are to draw all the world in their delusions, except those who will study and be guided by that divine Book. It is important that we learn what the Book says on the subject.