p. 9 | Spiritistic Troubles

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Dec 10, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 48.

Spiritistic Troubles

Spiritistic Troubles.—A Sunday magazine tells us that there are things that are worrying earnest Spiritualists a great deal now. One of these is, Where do ghosts get their clothes? and where do spectral skeletons get their bones? and where do phantoms get their breath to shriek? and how can they walk through solid walls without tearing their garments? This is leading some of them to believe that there is a low form of consciousness in inanimate matter; and Dr. T. Clay Shaw, a noted London physician, claims that a ghost is a replica of a former object which can assume a solidity or can condense itself so as to be capable of exciting vision, and can then revaporize and disappear; and if this is true, it must work on living material, however attenuated its form, inasmuch as it appears at one time in one guise and at another in a different one. So he holds there must be a spiritual form corresponding to every phase of actual life. Dr. Shaw does not believe that all the stories are impostures; they can not be. The thought is that they have power to take living matter and materialize it into various forms. But all these things are within the power of those malign spirits called in Scripture demons, familiar spirits, unclean spirits, angels of the devil, etc. Sometimes, doubtless, they deceive with actual appearances of what may be called materialized objects, but sometimes they hypnotize the soul into believing that he sees what is really not there.