on and
self-restraint to union with higher intelligences. I can see no light or
love in the attitude of those professors of Christianity who denounce
all spiritualistic tendencies as anti-Christian. It seems to me that the
whole Christian faith is spiritualistic in the widest sense of the word.
The Old and the New Testaments are permeated with the belief in the
reality of communication between the living and the dead. The injunction
in the Old Testament against sorcerers and wizards was intended to check
tendencies to unreasonable and dangerous superstition.

Moses may have had excellent reasons for forbidding occult practices
amongst the Jews. Saul, who had put away those that had familiar spirits
and the wizards out of the land, was not unlike some modern adversaries
of spiritualism when in the day of his trouble and fear he consulted the
medium of Endor. The accepted prophets of Israel were, after all,
typical of mediumship. "And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee,
and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another
man." They practised bold fortune-telling in matters large and small,
national and cosmic. To-day they would surely be imprisoned as rogues
and vagabonds under the Vagrancy Act. The New Testament contains no
direct prohibition of the use of psychic powers and many stories of
dreams, visions, and premonitions.

"Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit," wrote St.
Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. "For to one is given, by
the Spirit, the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge, by the
same Spirit.... To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy;
to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to
another the interpretation of tongues.... And God hath set some in the
Church; first, apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after
that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities
of tongues." The praises of charity and prophecy are sung by the
Apostle--a strange combination in harmony to those who now seek to
separate the Christian faith from its supernatural origins. Christianity
exhorts us not to believe every spirit, but to "try the spirits whether
they are of God," whilst the ecclesiastic bids us chase away the
spirits, which he assumes to be of Satan.

The dull materialism which smothers all signs of independent spiritual
experience is the negation of all the forces which animated th