Glimpses Of The Next State.Pdf - Spiritualists' National Union

188(1) What is the good of it all?(2) Why is darkness necessary?(3) Why do mediums require to be paid?(4) Why are they always ignorant, uncultured people?(5) Why is no useful, material information given at seances?(1) What is the good of it all? Is it of no good that men and women are comforted inbereavement by the knowledge that those they have loved and lost are alive and watching overthem? Church eschatology does not teach this; it puts forward quite a different doctrine. It tells of aseparation of the spirit from the body, certainly; the spirit goes into some region unknown, whereit, apparently, has nothing to do until some very remote date—possibly billions of years hence—when it joins the body again for the Day of Judgement. On that day its doom is sealed; it may be asheep and attain everlasting happiness, or a goat and be thrown into hell.Quite lately the book of Hymns Ancient and Modern was revised, and the following hymn,499, was retained by common consentOn the Resurrection morningSoul and body meet again;No more sorrow, no more weeping,No more pain!Here awhile they must be parted,And the flesh its Sabbath keep;Waiting in a holy stillness,Wrapt in sleep.For a while the tired bodyLies with feet toward the morn;Till the last and brighter EasterDay be born.. . . . . .Soul and body reunitedThenceforth nothing shall divide,Waking up in Christ’s own likenessSatisfied.. . . . . .On that happy Easter morningAll the graves their dead restore;Father, sister, child, and mother,Meet once more.If this hymn means anything at all, it is an explicit announcement that, until some vagueresurrection day, father, sister, child and mother do not meet or commune with one another. Whatcomfort does this give to the sorrowing earth spirit who remains behind? Those who believe in thispernicious doctrine are of all men most to be pitied. The whole doctrine, as taught by the churches,of a bodily resurrection and a judgement day full of horrors, is barbaric, and does not yield onescrap of comfort to the sorrowing survivor. But those who have assured themselves by experimentand research of the grand truths of spiritism, how differently do they regard physical death! Thelost child is not gone, only removed from sight and in a region of happy consciousness where it haswider opportunities and greater facilities of expansion than it had on the earth plane; from whence,under certain favourable conditions, it can commune, sometimes even by speech, and always by