SPIRITISM AND TELEPATHY.
By G.
For fourteen years the Society of Psychical Research has been experimenting with a Mrs. Piper, who, the members believe, is a “medium” controlled by the spirits of dead people. At least she goes into trances, and talks while in that condition. She claims not to know anything about her condition while in trance, or to know what she says, only as she is told by others after regaining consciousness. She disclaims being a Spiritist, and says she never had anything to do with mediums or Spiritism. She does not believe that she has any communication with the dead, but is utterly unable to account for the phenomena which are manifested through her agency. Her expressed opinion is that her revelations are the result of telepathy, the influence of one mind upon another at a distance, without direct communication through the senses; in other words, it is thought transference from one living person to another without ordinary expression or physical contact. The members of the society who have used her, as she says, “simply as an automaton,” for scientific research, do not accept her theory, but insist that she is a remarkable spirit medium, and that her trance talks are revelations of departed spirits. They maintain that Mrs. Piper, being unconscious of her condition or of what she says when in trance, is not competent to judge of the source of her revelations. Mrs. Piper says that she “can not see how it can be ‘scientifically proved that we can hold communication with the so-called spirit world.’” To this the secretary of the society replies that “telepathy is no more of an explanation than is Spiritism.” From the standpoint of human science, Dr. Hodgson is correct; the one theory is just as difficult of solution as is the other. But from a Biblical standpoint the case is quite different. Mrs. Piper has good ground for the negative side of her argument, that it can not be scientifically proved that we can hold communication with the dead; for the Bible, which is the repository of true science, says plainly that “the dead know not anything;” that “their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the sun.” Eccl. 9:5, 6. On the other hand, while telepathy is equally unexplainable by human science, the Bible reveals a means of accounting for it. The Scriptures reveal to us that Satan, the “prince of the power of the ‘air,’” the leader of a great host of invisible accessories, is able to work “with all power, and signs, and ‘lying wonders;’” and that he is able to “appear as ‘an angel of light,’ working with ‘all deceivableness of unrighteousness.’” He is able, as shown in the history of the work of Christ on earth, to control at his will the words and actions of those over whom he can gain an influence. He is, as Paul tells us, “the spirit that now worketh in the children of ‘disobedience.’” He is invisible, yet he works in a certain class of people unconsciously to themselves. His working is a clear case of telepathy. Satan is the great adversary of Christ, and the great deceiver of mankind. He is prolific of inventions to deceive. Spiritism is his grand delusion; but he has others that accomplish the same purpose in people who do not accept Spiritism, and yet will not “keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.” When Mrs. Piper placed herself in the hands of the Society for Psychical Research, to become an automaton for men who were endeavoring to establish by a false idea of science the Satanic delusion of Spiritism, she placed herself on Satan’s ground just as verily as tho she had accepted the doctrine of Spiritism. For years before she became connected with this society, she had been doing the same work that the professed spirit mediums did, only she claimed for it a different process. The power that works wonders through her is the same as that which produces like phenomena in the name of Spiritism. While she knows by reasonable logic that she does not receive her communications from the dead, she does not know that she is influenced by the same power as are those who believe that they do receive intelligence from that source. The opposing theories held by Mrs. Piper and the society with which she has been so long connected, have caused her to withdraw, but that will not lessen the effect of the evil that will no doubt be continued by both; the separation will most likely be the means of spreading the mediumistic work under the two theories. G.