Psychical science and Christianity, a problem of the XXth century

Part II

VII. Spiritualism — Its Use and Abuse

VIII. Occult and Otherwise

IX. Automatic Writing — Its Use and X. On Some Misconceptions XI. The Bridge of Ether .

XII. In Conclusion

Abuse

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Build thee more stately mansions, oh, my Soul ! As the swift seasons roll ; Leave thy low-vaulted Past, Let each new Temple, loftier than the last, Shut thee from Heaven, with a dome more vast ; Till thou at length art free ;

Leaving thine outgrown shell, by Life's unresting Sea" From " The Chambered Nautilus."

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Yet if it be that something not thy own,

Is even to thy unworthiness made known,

Thou mayst not hide, what yet thou shouldst not dare

The real seem false — the beauty undivine.

So, weighing duty in the scale of prayer,

Give what seems given thee — it may prove a seed

Of Goodness, dropped in fallow grounds of need."

J. G. Whittier.

Desperate diseases need desperate remedies. The time has surely come when silence on certain subjects is no longer discreet and advisable, but absolutely criminal.

" If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no more flesh while the world standeth/' said St Paul in one of his moments of magnificent self-surrender.

Perhaps we have quoted this text sometimes too liberally ; as an excuse for our silence, as well as a reason for our discretion. There is a time for all things : a time for silence and a time for speech ; a time for discreet reserve, and a time for speaking out — and speaking boldly — even at the risk of offending some of our " brothers' ' and sisters.

A man once passed an artist who was working in the midst of splendid mountain scenery. He saw him put down his brushes, get up, and step slowly backwards, the better to judge of

vii the effect of his work. Absorbed in this, the artist had forgotten the precipice behind him, and was quietly stepping further and further back, to get just the right light upon his picture.

The stranger, grasping the situation and realising that a word of warning would only precipitate the calamity, seized one of the artist's paint-brushes and, with great presence of mind, daubed the paint over the beautiful picture which had cost him so many hours of patient work. The latter naturally sprang forward to save his beloved picture and to punish the " wicked outrage," and was himself saved from a hideous death.

The Churches have built up a beautiful picture, founded on tradition, both true and false, as to our Lord's life and mission ; true and false because the groupings in the picture do not always harmonise, but are often indirect contradiction, the one to the other.

The noble lines of the most divine Life ever lived are all there — easily filled in by the devout and reverent soul. Our Lord said quite enough of Himself and of His mission to give the true idea of both. That accretions and additions should be found, due to the necessary limitations or the inherited prejudices of His recorders, must be true of any book, however sacred, that has not dropped from the skies, with leather binding and gilt edges complete. The critic may say, " What right have you to take certain records and reject others ? You must take all or reject all."

I do not think this is a reasonable remark, although of course it is a very general one, and for many centuries has effectually silenced all criticism.

When a beautiful, holy and consistent character is portrayed for us — when such teachings as the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount are given to us in the name of Jesus of Nazareth — then I think we have a perfect right to reject any interpolations that contradict the spiritual simplicity of these precepts, and to courageously declare that we stand by our Lord's teachings as a whole, and not by every text in which they have been conveyed to us.

It is "the letter that killeth.,> How many stock arguments have been used by superficial critics, anxious to belittle a character too far above their spiritual apprehension ?

We are continually told that Jesus of Nazareth was hard, indifferent and wanting in reverence for His parents and in sympathy with their natural anxiety about Him ; as, for example when He was lost to them for three days and found at last in the Temple.

It is by clinging to the letter whilst rejecting the spirit, that all these absurdities have been made possible : misapprehensions on the part of His friends, and futile criticisms (such as the one just quoted) on the part of His foes — foes only through lack of spiritual perception.

The clerical world as a whole, both in Anglican and Roman Catholic communities, is stepping backwards instead of forwards, admiring its own handiwork in the Past, so absorbed over the details of its craft that it is absolutely blind to the fact that a few more steps will bring it to the brink of the precipice.

If it is not to be Spiritual Evolution in the

Churches, then it will most certainly be Spiritual Revolution outside of them! Is it not time for all those who know that this accurately describes the present crisis to come forward boldly and attempt to save the situation, even though this can only be done by becoming a cause of offence to many ?

Some day we shall be judged more justly and therefore more leniently.

It is a small matter that we shall then be beyond the judgment of men.

E. KATHARINE BATES.

PART I CHAPTER I

In all thoughtful lives there must be critical moments — revealing moments, when a new truth flashes across our mental screen or an old truth takes on sinews and flesh and the breath of life comes into the dry bones, as in the valley of Ezekiel's vision, and that special truth lives for us for the first time in our experience.

These revealing moments appear to come to us " out " of the blue," but it is not so in reality. For long months — often for long years — the seed has been lying and germinating under the soil of our subconscious being, and then comes at last the

A critical moment when it is strong enough and sufficiently developed to push aside its old environment and emerge into the sunshine of the upper air. These moments come to the individual and they come also to the Race.

It seems to many good and earnest and capable men and women that such a racial moment has now arrived. It is impossible any longer to ignore that push from the heavy superincumbent soil into the light of day. The only question now is, How shall we deal with it ?

" Crush it down by all means — at any cost" has been the cry of many in past years. " 7/ is a poisonous weed — not a healthy and edible plant — ignore it or crush it. We will have none of this insidious poison in our well-ordered garden plots"

But if the time is past when such growths can be ignored, it is equally past when such growths can be crushed. Root out the green shoots in one place — they will inevitably crop up in still greater force and number in a dozen other spots.

To drop metaphor, new truths are coming into the world, and the burning question for all of us is no longer whether we can go on ignoring and crushing them. Experience has surely proved by this time the futility of either course ? No ! What we need to find is some means of readjusting the old bottles to the new wine.

Now I think hitherto we have been doing the best we knew in the way of patching up these old bottles, and trying to make them capable of holding the strong, new wine that is being poured into them daily, both by Science and by what has been clumsily designated as the New Theology.

The attempt to accommodate the old to the new, and to squeeze the new into the old is in its way praiseworthy, and was almost inevitable under recently past conditions. There is, in fact, an evolutionary instinct involved. We feel that there must be no gaps — no violent break in the chain of events, either mental or physical, and this tinkering up of the old to receive the new is proof of this very sound instinct. I venture to think, however, that we have rather overdone matters in this direction.

We have been so busy in assuring people that nothing essential is lost ; in stretching texts to cover new conceptions of truth ; in an almost Spartan pulling out or chopping off process, in the wild attempt to fit new facts into old sockets, that we have not always taken time to notice the real outcome of our laudable endeavours.

Now I think one result has been that orthodox people feel, and quite rightly feel, that they have not been treated fairly. Dust has been thrown in their eyes, but after a short period of bewildered vision they have washed it out, and are prepared to affirm with imperturbable decision that nothing has been really altered by our explanations and ingenious suggestions — that the Bible says one thing and we say another, and pretend that the two are really one, looked at from the proper angle. Such persons may have honestly tried to be open-minded, but the end of it is that they feel they have been hoodwinked, that symbolism and analogy have been played for all they are worth, and that the result has been complete failure, so far as they themselves are concerned, and a failure accompanied by quite unnecessary mental and spiritual confusion, forced upon them by our methods. Black is black and white is white, and although you may get some shades of grey by mixing up the two, it is useless to contend that the grey and the original black, or the grey and the original white, are identical

I have great sympathy for those amongst the orthodox who feel that they have been unfairly treated in this way. Our intentions have been good, but I think our methods have often been extremely bad. We have taken texts and given them a symbolical meaning when it suited our purpose, and we have taken texts and given them a literal meaning when that suited our purpose. The fact that the purpose itself has been an excellent one, i.e., to reconcile old texts with new truths, does not affect the question except so far as motive is concerned.

It was perhaps the only possible method some years ago, by which to avoid the undoubted disasters attending all iconoclastic movements. But ever-increasing light has been thrown upon many matters since then, and I do not think it is any longer honest to fool ourselves or to attempt to fool others into the belief that the Evangelists and the Apostles said one thing, but that they really intended all the time to convey an entirely different meaning — often a contradictory one — and that exaggerated Eastern symbolism, plus types and analogies, will cover the whole ground.

They will not, and I think the sooner we are honest enough to admit this, the better both for ourselves and for those we may endeavour to teach.

That Christ's personal teaching should have come down to us so practically intact, so little stained by the orthodox beliefs of the " milieu " in which He lived, is proof positive of the Divine Spirit brooding over the work of His recorders. But apart from this, we have numerous examples of the " stained - glass " element which accompanies, more or less, all inspirational or automatic writing of the present day. We have had volumes written to try and prove that the disciples did not look forward to a speedy and almost immediate second coming of their Lord to reign in majesty upon the earth. What does it all amount to? Is anyone really convinced by these ingenious suggestions? Has not the time come when it is truer and therefore wiser to acknowledge that the same difficulties which all psychics experience in keeping the channel unstained by the personality, must have affected these recorders also ; in a lesser degree, doubtless, because we must believe that a book with such a mission would have very special guardianship. But the writers were human as ourselves, and liable to make mistakes with the best of us.

I do not wish to plead for a broader theology. We have that, thank God. Scarcely any educated man nowadays would get up in his pulpit or on any public platform to preach or teach the old crude horrors of a physical and eternal Hell — terms which are in themselves mutually destructive. For how could a Hell of physical flames and physical torture be everlasting ? The very idea is absurd in a scientific age. As an old Scotch lady said to me once in New Zealand — not intending to be blasphemous, I am quite sure — "Why, my dear, if you come to think of it, it is impossible ! Either it would kill us, or it wouldn't kill us. If we were put out of existence it wouldn't matter to us, and if we were not, why then, we should be bound to get used to it in time" I quote this to show the very bathos to which such teaching must lead, so soon as our mental conceptions are ahead of it, and so soon as we have learnt to think.

I have heard my friend, the late Dr Alfred Williams Momerie say more than once to his congregation : €t My dear friends, I'm afraid you really must think. I am extremely sorry for you, because I know how you hate thinking, and it is a nuisance sometimes, but I see no way of avoiding it. I cannot do the thinking for you."

The fact is, many of us don't think and 7 won't think, simply because we are afraid to contemplate where it must leave us.

We know now that we have only exchanged a physical Hell, of endless and impossible torture, for a very real Hell, which begins here and now, so soon as we become sensitive enough to realise it, and will continue just as long as we live in separation from and antagonism to, the Divine Source of our being, whose presence with us spells Love and Life Eternal, and whose absence means Darkness and Hate and Separation and Remorse.

An old friend of mine, one of our greatest Mutiny heroes, who was more terribly wounded than almost any other man who has lived to tell the tale, said to me once when I was quite a young girl : a How much more terriblef mental suffering may be than physical, and yet how little sympathy one receives with the former as compared with the latter ! " He continued : "When I was cut to pieces out in India, everyone was full of sympathy and goodness to me. Yet I have suffered infinitely more in my mind and spirit, and no one has shown the slightest sympathy."

There are two obvious reasons for this, which I was too inexperienced in my schooldays to suggest. One is, of course, that mental scars don't show as physical wounds generally do, and the other that many people have not yet reached the point where they themselves are capable of any deep mental and spiritual suffering. But the words made a deep impression upon me at the time, and they occur to me now in connection with the orthodox Hell, and the modern conception of spiritual separation and remorse. Many, in the terrible grip of the latter, might also be inclined to think that any physical suffering would be a relief from the spiritual torture.

That which makes even a spiritual Hell impossible from the point of view of Retribution rather than Reformation, is the undoubted fact that only the most spiritually advanced, and therefore what we should call " the best " people, are capable of realising such a Hell at all. The sensualist, the materialist, the man of crude and cruel impulses, would be proof (either in this sphere or any other) against the gnawing of remorse, or the agony of separation from the more divine part of his nature ; which is obviously at present a sealed book to him.

Therefore we are at once confronted by the awkward fact that only the most highly organised and sensitive people can ever be in the most acute form of spiritual Hell, whereas the least developed and most wicked men and women would live in a sort of base material Heaven of their own, absolutely protected from all spiritual suffering when once they have left the theatre of their evil deeds, where material penalties might reach them. These two states suggest little difficulty when looked at from the evolutionary point of view, for they are obvious and inevitable.

" The wicked man " may hug his base Heaven to his breast for centuries or even aeons, but some day the turning-point must come ; if only because Evil has no life in itself, and is only galvanised into temporary life by its victims. When that day comes — no matter where or when — then Hell begins for the emerging soul, and will continue until the purging process is complete.

We sometimes hear people talk about the " New Theology " as a sign of the times — of the lazy, luxurious, selfish, motor-car times! " They even want to get rid of Hell, with their nasty, selfish, luxurious ways."

I have actually heard this said. It seemed to me just a step in advance of the more general remark of a few years ago, which has been addressed to me personally

IO many times : Ohy then if you don't believe in Hell, why should we not all be as wicked as we like ? "

The last time this was said to me, I felt justified in answering the lady thus :

" If that is really your view of the matter, I am thankful that you do believe in a physical Hell ; and what you say shows me that, repugnant as the idea is to most progressive minds,rthe old orthodox teaching has had its^**/wc'< uses from the police-office point of view." d£t *»&&■*£

Then again with regard to the old beliefs 2M- cidJy t in the Atonement as a Blood sacrifice to (J^Aa €*& propitiate an angry God whose laws had been broken. I remember when I was quite a tiny child, with possibly a fairly logical head on very small shoulders, how that question of the Atonement worried and perplexed me. At times it seemed quite clear that only my own wicked obstinacy and stupidity prevented my being absolutely satisfied with the explanations given me on the subject. But at other moments something stronger than myself seemed to rebel and to say, " No ! it isn't clear, and it isn't fair, and all the faith in the world won't make it clear, any more than it could make two and two equal five.'' The puzzle for me was this : I was told in the

ii

Bible and in church that Jesus Christ had died to save us and that God had promised Him every soul in the human race as a consequence of and reward for His death upon the cross. Then again I was told that a great many people would not be saved, because they would die without performing some act of faith or being converted — whatever that might exactly mean — a process at any rate which appeared a very dim chance, so far as I was personally concerned. Even at seven or eight years of age I had tried hard — and often succeeded — in working up some kind of religious emotion, which made me hope that this mysterious " conversion " might some day take place — but it never did. One was always naughty again under normal temptations, and the exalted mood passed and left a poor, little, lonely child, with no one to confide in, and with less and less hope of this mysterious event taking place in her life. Then despair and depression gave way to honest childish indignation. It was all so horribly unfair ! What nonsense it was to talk about God's promise to His Son that every single human soul should be saved, and then this mysterious f - belief and conversion " were smuggled in somehow, to account for so many people having to go to Hell on account of their flagrant sins and wickedness ! It may sound very blasphemous, but I am sure a great many more children of a thoughtful turn, used to worry and perplex themselves over such questions than any of the <c grownups " realised. Again I say, " Thank God ! " that however selfish and materialistic we may be nowadays, the poor little children at least have no such heavy burdens to bear. At eight years of age I could have provided material for another Cry of the Children, from some such point of view, had Mrs Barrett Browning been available to put it into words for me. And how many of the children of those days might say the same ! Now that the hideous old dogma of the Atonement has merged by slow degrees into the beautiful and inspiring doctrine of the At-onement, through the fruition and the example of the One perfect human life lived upon earth, a life which must needs lead those who can be inspired by it into still closer conscious union with the Source of their being, have we not reason to rejoice in the grand example given to us of the continuity of Evolution ?

As in the physical world, inferior forms are always being replaced by superior organisations, so we can trace — even within the last thirty or forty years —how the crude and often cruel dogmas of the past have been ever tending towards higher forms of Belief and nobler conceptions of Truth. Some great truth has lain at the basis of all these crude theological ideas, just as the protoplasm and the amoeba have lain at the basis of all organised human life. We don't hold that protoplasm and those earliest forms of life in contempt, if we are normal and intelligent beings — we acknowledge our debt to them, and this is just what I think we ought to do with regard to the beliefs and dogmas of earlier centuries. They have been, after all, a sort of theological protoplasm, which has formed the basis for our spiritual life, without which the latter, so far as we know, might not have been possible to our slowly evolving consciousness. That many men and women would disown such indebtedness has little significance. It simply means that they are taking short and strictly personal views of a very big subject, and prefer to ignore the unity of all life, physical and spiritual, and the links by which they are held in the great universe of Spirit, as well as in the great universe of physical conditions.

Chapter II

A revolution in the domain of religious thought, as radical, as far-reaching and, perhaps, even more important than the revolution in astronomy connected with the name of Copernicus, has set in. It has practically taken place within the memory of many living men and women, in fact during the last fifty years. The first feeble notes of protest were sounded when the once famous volume of Essays and Reviews was published. That seems such a far-away cry, that it is almost difficult to realise that our well-known Mafeking hero, General Baden- Powell, is the son of one of the chief contributors to that well-known and much-abused book. Some years ago I was crossing the Atlantic with Mr Warrington Baden- Powell (another of the professor's sons), and we chanced upon this subject of Essays and Reviews. I said to him : " It is years since I read the book, but I suppose now it would be considered quite mildly unorthodox, compared with later literature of the same kind ? "

" Dear me, yes," he replied, laughing. " I should go further than that, and say it would be considered a quite mildly orthodox contribution to religious thought in the present day." Yet the authors were Anathema Maranatha for many years, after this early indiscretion, although one of them, as we all know, lived to be Archbishop of Canterbury.

Then came poor Bishop Colenso, who was howled down by an infuriated mob of religious enthusiasts for his sinful arithmetical calculations touching the Levitical books of the Bible. I remember as a child thinking that he must be a terribly wicked man if he deserved half the abuse that was poured upon him so freely in my presence.

/ was brought up as a child in the strongly Calvinistic section of the Church of England, and later in what used to be called the religiousaristocratic world ; but the essential doctrines were much the same in High Church as Low Church. The chief difference lay in the more or less ornate form of the services and in the fact that the High Church clergymen being often men of more culture and education than their Evangelical brothers, were less addicted to " pulpit thumping " and the sensational methods and lurid descriptions which were sometimes summed up graphically as the " fireand-faggot " style of oratory.

There were many good, earnest and kindhearted men amongst them ; as also amongst the High Church party, and in those days all were equally happy in one important particular. Nothing very essential had happened to shake their faith, to rouse awkward questions, to suggest difficulties — in a word to make them think. Essays and Reviews and Colenso's embarrassing numerical calculations, were but as voices crying in the wilderness, which made the warm nests of the orthodox Christians appear more cosy and desirable than ever by contrast. Faith in " Revealed Truth " was the test of all goodness ; I had almost said of all morality. Certainly good deeds, and even character, without this special faith, were scarcely considered respectable, and most certainly not admirable.

It has been said that Truth is always born in a manger and reared in fear of Herod. The Herod of the mid- Victorian days took the colour of social degradation and disabilities, and very often of unmerited and cruel abuse.

Even good, kind people, who would not b 17 have injured a free - thinking acquaintance physically for all the world, were much too free-speaking in their condemnation, and the opprobrious terms "Infidel" and "Atheist/' too often hurtled through the social atmosphere — winged arrows dipped in gall.

We have changed all that — again, thank God ! We have learned some respect for the opinions of honest men, even when these differ from our own in religious matters.

Thanks to the early pioneers of whom mention has been made, men have learnt to think, to question, to realise that God asks for an intelligent love, not for grovelling adoration or a faith born of wilful ignorance. f How can He who is All Truth fear Truth ? Then why should we, His children, do so, and think to curry favour by such an attitude ?

The apotheosis of ignorance is past, but there are many difficulties still in the path of any intelligent clergyman who has thought for himself, reverently and yet courageously, and would fain make his flock do likewise, if he dared !

I think clergymen nowadays receive scant sympathy for what is, in fact, an extraordinarily difficult position. I am not speaking of the seventy or eighty per cent, who have taken orders without experiencing the slightest difficulty in doing so, or in subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles and anything else included in the doctrine of the Church of England. Some of these may be so saturated by tradition and custom that their minds are incapable of facing facts which would seem to throw the smallest doubt upon any of their cherished beliefs. Others have what I should call comfortable consciences, and their mentality is non-inflammable. It is fire-proof, so far as Science, Literature and Philosophy are concerned, when such subjects menace their religious tenets. (These latter have been settled once for all.) Many are excellent men, doing most valuable work, and enabled to do it with a cheerful heart, owing to the very limitations of their outlook.

But then we come to the twenty per cent. — have I put the figure high enough for these days ? — who cannot look upon things from this comfortable standpoint.

They have minds that must be fed — that cry out for food as persistently as their bodies do. Unfortunately for themselves these minds are acute and analytical. It is impossible for them to accept scientific conclusions when they concern chemical combinations or other facts of physics, and to reject them when they speak with just as certain a voice regarding the approximate age of man on this earth, or the sun standing still whilst Joshua finished his battle, and a dozen other matters where modern knowledge and ancient tradition are hopelessly divorced from one another.