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

203ever shed light upon this earth, should be our guide; but not the Christ as interpreted by the socalledCatholic Churches. The true spiritist will find no difficulty in understanding the altruistic lifeof the high earth spirit who voluntarily lived as a mendicant to teach love and charity to mankind,to prove the evanescent character of the natural body, and the duty of man to himself and hisneighbour during his brief and transitory career. We want a college for sensitives, but no churches,no ritual, no parsons, and, above all, no creeds. The only churches in which the spiritist canworship with consistency are those of the Unitarians, but there is no reason why he should notadopt such elements of the Catholic teachings as deal with the simple and elementary truths enunciatedby the highest spirit with whom the world has any acquaintance. Amid the encircling gloomof religious confusion he carries within him the conviction thatWith the morn those angel faces smileWhich he has loved long since and lost awhile.After all these years of investigation we know very little; we have only glimpses of the nextstate ; and we shall never know much more unless people record their observations at the time ofthe events, with all the particulars in full. The difficulties in the way of discovering any law whichgoverns psychic phenomena are immense, because there can be little doubt that all spiritmanifestations involve operations in more than three dimensions—a condition of which we knownothing at all. It is only by a careful record of events made within forty-eight hours of their occurrencethat we shall advance in knowledge. The magazines and newspapers are full of wondroustales of dreams, visions, phantasms, and the like, all reported as having happened “some yearsago,” or “to my grandfather,” or “my grandmother”; these are no help. Human nature is such thatno story gets smaller in the telling. I would not give a fig for the strict accuracy of any of thesecasual narratives. It is the rarest thing in the world to find a memory for accurate detail of an eventwhich happened at a distance of twenty years; exaggeration is one of the commonest of humanfailings, and very few people keep notes, even of the remarkable events of the day.Thousands of people are deterred from relating their psychic experiences by fear of ridicule,or— what is more important—fear of the loss of their situations. It is a sad fact that, with a fewbrilliant exceptions, we have all the professors of science and religion against us. This is really veryremarkable when you come to consider how, in both these domains of human activity, the workersare dealing with the unseen. To mention two or three instances in science, there are wirelesstelegraphy and other functions of electricity, astrophotography, gravitation (which may turn out tobe electromotive force), the vibrations in the ether and the fusions of gases these surely might warnthose who deal with them not to thrust rudely aside the evidence of telepathy between human anddiscarnate spirits, for the testimony is abundant and easily obtainable. Even more inconsistent isthe attitude of the teachers of religion. Their whole fabric is built up from the unseen; thefoundation of their faith and the sole justification for their aspirations are the mystic dealings of anunseen power with a certain Semitic race during a period of five thousand years. And yet, whenevidence is brought to them that these supernormal occurrences have not yet ceased and are stillexhibited in other nations, they refuse to examine it. One religious faction, indeed, admits therecurrence in modern days of what it erroneously terms “miracles,” but says they are the work ofthe devil; while the reformed churches actually declare that spirit manifestations ceased with themission of the apostles and only lasted during the period covered by the records in that collection ofunequally inspired papers called the Bible. It will hardly be believed two hundred years hence thatin this year, 1911, more than half the population of the British Islands professed to believe that thespirit of man ceased to function anywhere when the breath left his body; that at some future date,counted in hundreds of millions of years, it resumed its activity in its old body, and was then judgedfor what sins or good deeds it committed at that remote period, during an existence of some seventyyears or less. If this is not what is meant by “the resurrection of the body” and “the day ofjudgement,” I should like to know what is the esoteric interpretation of the Apostles’ Creed and thevarious prayers and hymns bearing on the subject.I must frankly confess that, until I studied spiritism, I did not know how to read the Bibleproperly. This book is full of occult manifestations from one cover to the other. In the NewTestament we have fragmentary records of the life of the greatest sensitive who ever lived. After a