SPIRITUALISM.—HEATHENISM.
SPIRITUALISM claims to be pre-eminently a religion of progression. We grant it; denying only its claim as to the direction in which it is progressing. It is progressing, if we may be permitted thus to use the word, in the wrong direction; not forward, but backward; not into new light, and higher attainments of knowledge in spiritual things, but into the darkness and foolishness of ancient heathenism. The identity of these two isms will be seen from the following definition of the latter by the German historian, Kurtz, with which we were, for this very reason, particularly struck. He says: "When the words were spoken, 'Go to, let us build,' &c., the hour of the birth of heathenism had arrived. For heathenism essentially consists, on the one hand, in a denial of the living and personal God, and contempt of the salvation which he had pre-determined to bestow—and, on the other, in the opinion of man that he can and must aid himself by his own power and wisdom, and, consequently, in the effort to set forth salvation by his own means." If this is a good definition of heathenism, and who will say that it is not? how clear is the identity between it, and modern Spiritualism; for what is Spiritualism but the very thing here defined? Who has not heard Spiritualists, those who have progressed (?) the farthest, loud in their insults against the majesty of Jehovah, and peculiarly zealous and bitter in heaping "contempt upon the salvation" offered us through Christ. Who has not heard them ridicule the idea of the vicarious sufferings of the Saviour, and set up the Devil-inspired, and fool-hardy claim that man is, and must be, his own redeemer! He who is familiar with these things can come to only one conclusion, namely, that in all their essential elements Heathenism and Spiritualism are the same!