Chapter X
THE CHURCHES AND THE SÉANCE
The late Dr. Amory Bradford, one of the most eminent leaders of American Congregationalism, caused something of a sensation eleven years ago when he urged the students of Hackney College, Hampstead, to occupy themselves with psychical matters. Not a few of the younger Congregational ministers can recall that strange hour in the library when Dr. Bradford seemed to challenge the Churches with the names of Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, and Dr. Russel Wallace. “These learned scientists,” he argued, “are trying to lift the fringe of the dark veil, and you young ministers ought to show an equal eagerness.” In the American Churches, he said, people were asking their pastors: “Cannot you reveal to us the secret of the world beyond the grave? Our scientific men are occupied with psychical research; what are you ministers doing? Ought not every divinity student to have his attention directed early to these occult mysteries which laymen are discussing in the privacy of their own homes?” As the audience streamed into the lobbies, it was admitted that no more surprising address had been delivered of late years in a London theological college. When the twilight of the June evening enwrapped the departing company, many must have been wondering, with Dr. Garvie, how the students were to find time for such highly-specialised and laborious researches as those conducted by the Psychical Society.
The Principals of our theological institutions are level-headed men, and they did not see their way to provide a dark-room for the séance, as hotels supply a dark-room for the amateur photographer. The Churches have rejected the proposal that they should enter into competition with the experts on whom it falls to investigate the phenomena of Spiritualism. Is their refusal based on cowardice? Very far from it. Sir Walter Scott, in “The Monastery,” has shown us once for all how a great Christian, before the dawn of modern science, met the onset of what seemed to him a supernatural being. When the Monk Eustace was challenged by the White Lady in the Vale of Glendearg, he answered in words which Christian teachers would use to-day, were a similar demand made upon them:
“In the name of My Master,” said the astonished monk, “that name before which all things created tremble, I conjure thee to say what thou art that hauntest me thus.… At the crook of the glen? I could have desired to avoid a second meeting, but I am on the service of the Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against me.”
On negative and on positive grounds the Churches decline to lift the gauntlet thrown down to them by Spiritualism.
I
(1) They note, in the first place, that the challenge comes in language of insult from some of their deadliest foes.
That well-known Spiritualist teacher, Professor James H. Hyslop, Secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research, denounced the Church for its “fatal genius in allying itself with decadent causes.” “The self-confidence of science,” he wrote, “is directly proportioned to the despair of religion. The ministry do not know what creed is safe to believe or assert, and the churches have become social clubs, and talk about the poor as an excuse for an existence that, so far as social efficiency is concerned, can as well be supplied by literature and art.” Enemies of the Church, who view with contempt her action throughout the Christian ages, are among the very people who are urging her ministers to become Spiritualists.
(2) Christian ministers have not the training, capacity, or experience requisite for the detection of conjuring tricks, which may account for the phenomena in a séance.
We may quote these propositions formulated by the late Mr. Frank Podmore in his “Studies in Psychical Research:”
(a) “The conditions under which the phenomena generally occur—conditions for the most part suggested and continually enforced by the medium—are such as to facilitate fraud and to render its detection difficult.
(b) “Almost all the phenomena are known to have been produced under similar conditions by mechanical means.
(c) “Almost every professional medium has been detected in producing results by trickery.
(d) “There are cases on record in which private persons, with no obvious pecuniary or social advantage to secure, have been detected in trickery.
(e) “The conditions of emotional excitement in which investigators have for the most part approached the subject … are calculated seriously to interfere with cold and dispassionate observation.”
The above passage is none the less impressive because it was written more than twenty years ago. The task of examination belongs to those who, while fully acquainted with the records of the past, possess the knowledge and trained powers of observation which such investigations require.
II
The Churches have positive duties, and may not turn aside from their chief business. (1) It is the fashion with Spiritualists to write as if their cult were the only alternative to blank Materialism, because they forget that the one sure message about the Unseen has been committed by our Lord Jesus Christ to His servants and friends. The Churches proclaim that message. Christian ministers, like the Shepherds of Bunyan’s Delectable Mountains, have in their hands a perspective glass through which the pilgrims may see the gates of the Celestial City. Their teaching, like that of the Shepherds, bears the mark of “other-worldliness,” which thirty years ago was applied as a term of reproach to the organised denominations in this country. The Churches can say, in the words of a saintly Wesleyan minister, William Arthur, “The last tunnel is on the east of the land of Beulah, towards the rising of the sun, and opens in face of the golden gate, where are the Shining Ones. How far off it is I cannot tell: the Everlasting Hills are covered with a golden haze. Glory be to God.”[44]
Goethe put the same thought somewhat differently in “Faust”:
“Then said the Shepherds one to another, Let us here show to the pilgrims the gates of the Celestial City, if they have skill to look through our perspective glass. The pilgrims then lovingly accepted the motion. So they had them to the top of a high hill, called Clear, and gave them their glass to look.”
The Church possesses to-day the gift of clairvoyance, but she exercises it like the Shepherds on bracing mountain-tops, not in dark and stifling rooms. Her messengers go among the sick, the dying, and the bereaved, speaking of eternal life through Christ.
(2) The Church has never denied that the blessed dead may in ways unknown to us influence the living and lead them upward. St. Teresa learned much from the devout monk, St. Peter of Alcántara. At the moment of his death, according to Teresa’s testimony, he appeared to her in great glory, and said he was going to rest. “It seems to me,” she added, “that he consoles me more than when he was here with me.”
To the mourning heart the Christian teacher may say in St. Paul’s words: “Perhaps he therefore departed from thee for a season that thou mightest receive him for ever.”
As Dr. J. D. Jones has written, “The dead who are so gloriously alive can hold fellowship with the living who have not yet died. The communion of saints is not to be limited to those who still dwell in this temporal and material world; it extends to those who have passed to the other side of death.… The only way in which we can combat Spiritualism is ourselves to rescue this truth about fellowship from the neglect into which it has fallen—to speak and think in a more Christian way about those who have passed on.… ‘Ye are come to the spirits of just men made perfect.’”