THE ESSENCE OF SPIRITUALISM.
QUITE a stir has been made over the publication of the fact that the poet Tennyson is a Spiritualist. In a letter which he recently wrote to a friend, in which he shows that he is his own medium, he said:— "I have never had any revelations through anesthetics, but a kind of waking trance (this for lack of a better name) I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself, till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve, and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the sweetest of the sweetest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility; the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life." This, which must surely be called the sublimity of egotism, is the very essence of Spiritualism. It is the beginning and end of the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul, for that doctrine begins and ends with self. It was by causing Eve to think of herself, and instilling into her mind an exaggerated sense of her own importance, that Satan secured her fall. The doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul grows out of the idea so natural to man, that he is of such transcendent importance that God could not get along without him; and the next step to that is the idea that man himself is a god. Is it not strange that professed Christians will cling to a doctrine which makes man everything, and ignores Christ as the Author of life? And who cannot see that a doctrine which makes it unnecessary to come to Christ for life, must necessarily tend to immorality, since it depreciates, and causes men to slight, the only source of purity?