The Case Against Spiritualism

Part 1

The Case Against Spiritualism

BY JANE T. STODDART

HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

MCMXIX

Contents

CHAPTER I NEW VOTARIES OF SPIRITUALISM 17

CHAPTER II DISTURBERS OF THE DEAD 31

CHAPTER III THE MEDIUM 43

CHAPTER IV THE MEDIUM’S “CONTROL” 57

CHAPTER V TABLE PHENOMENA 71

CHAPTER VI AUTOMATIC WRITING 85

CHAPTER VII IS THERE DANGER FROM THE OTHER SIDE? 99

CHAPTER VIII SPIRITUALISM AND CHRISTIANITY 111

CHAPTER IX QUALITY OF THE ALLEGED MESSAGES 133

CHAPTER X THE CHURCHES AND THE SÉANCE 147

CHAPTER XI THE APPEAL TO SCIENCE 159

Preface

Rudyard Kipling, with his robust common sense, has warned intruders who seek to establish a traffic with discarnate beings that they are entering on a dangerous path.

“Oh the road to En-dor is the oldest road And the craziest road of all. Straight it runs to the Witch’s abode, As it did in the days of Saul. And nothing has changed of the sorrow in store For such as go down on the road to En-dor!”

That old road has never been more crowded than it is to-day. The merchants who travel on it appear to ignorant onlookers laden with balm and spicery and myrrh. Owing to the propagandist activities of honoured men like Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir W. F. Barrett and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the cult of Spiritualism has received a new advertisement, and is proving itself, in certain quarters, a rival to Christianity. Its literature is growing rapidly, and the wish has often been expressed for a brief, comprehensive, up-to-date exposition of the arguments on the other side. This book is designed to supply that need. While the writer is well acquainted with the older historical works, both of Britain and America, the publications of the Society for Psychical Research, and the standard Continental treatises, these chapters deal mainly with Spiritualism in the war-period and after. The strongest arguments against “dabbling” are to be found, as will be seen, in the writings of Spiritualists themselves. Warnings are heard from many pulpits, though with the exception of Dr. Barnes in his admirable short pamphlet, “Spiritualism and the Christian Faith,” none of our leading preachers seems to have grappled with the subject in detail. The writer may therefore claim to have broken new ground. “The Case Against Spiritualism” is set forth under many aspects, and it is hoped that the book may prove acceptable to Christian teachers, as well as to inquirers in general.

Chapter I

NEW VOTARIES OF SPIRITUALISM

Expert writers believed twenty years ago that Spiritualism was declining. The late Mr. Frank Podmore, about the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, called attention to the disappointing results attained by the Society for Psychical Research. The number of believers, he said, had been much larger in the seventies, and the things they believed much more difficult of acceptance. There was a time, he thought, when the number of avowed Spiritualists in this country and the United States might fairly have been reckoned by tens of thousands, but between 1882 and 1897 (the first period of the Society’s investigations) zealous students had been brought up against defeat. “No positive results,” he said frankly, “have been obtained worthy of record.” There was a “cooling-off” in public interest. Sir William Crookes, though a believer in Spiritualism, had seemed to discourage intrusive curiosity in a famous passage. “In such an inquiry,” he wrote, “the intellect demands that the spiritual proof must be absolutely incapable of being explained away; it must be so strikingly and convincingly true that we cannot, dare not, deny it.”

The truth is that Spiritualism breaks like waves on the modern world; and when each successive wave has spent its force there follows a period of lassitude. Can we wonder that a tidal wave should have followed the late war? Three classes, at least, have felt themselves strongly attracted towards psychical studies.

There are, first, the idle, curious gazers who under the late Roman Empire would have been thronging to the worship of Isis or Mithra. Sir Samuel Dill and Dr. Reaveley Glover have painted these men and women, some of whom had great possessions. Their successors were found in Paris under the Second Empire, when society, for a short time, was bewitched by the revelations of Douglas Home. Neither time nor space, it was believed, had any existence for him. Through his means the spirits of St. Louis, Pascal, Rousseau, and even ancient Greeks like Aristides and Solon, were consulted, and if we may trust French memoir-writers of the period, they replied with touching alacrity. Père Lacordaire, the foremost preacher of his time, was almost deceived by the phenomena. He wrote to Madame Swetchine in 1853 that he had heard tables talk and made them talk. “They have told me some very remarkable things about the past and the present.” “A poor and vulgar phenomenon,” was his verdict, yet he did not think it was all imposture. The Roman Catholic Church, in our own day, speaks with sharper condemnation. Under the Second Empire, about the time of the Crimean War, table-turning and spirit-rapping were the amusements of every drawing-room. While our great war lasted the need for distraction was felt by those who in normal times are known as “the pleasure-loving classes.” Individuals among these classes--hundreds, nay thousands, of them--were occupied to the limit of their strength in public service. Crowded theatres and music-halls proclaimed their need of respite and excitement. Spiritualism had its distractions to offer to the weary rich.

It has drawn recruits, in the second place, from that large body of the middle and working-class population which has no link with any of the organised Churches. Mr. George Haw, writing in the Daily News census volume of 1904, gave a picture of Sunday as spent by non-churchgoers in greater London. Among the artisans “the day opens with an idle morning, divided between nap and newspaper. After a late dinner the afternoon sees a saunter, sometimes with wife and children, through the streets, or a walk into Epping Forest ... or by the banks of the Lea. An early supper and a pipe close the day.” That section of the working classes represented by clerks, shop assistants and warehousemen spent Sunday, as Mr. Haw had observed, in visiting and entertaining. “Thoughts of taking part in public worship are as far from their minds as thoughts of taking part in public life.” “Games and concerts in their little parlours beguile many a Sunday night.” Spiritualist lecturers to-day are teaching such people to “form home circles” for the evocation of spirits.

III

From all these classes, whether rich or poor, is drawn a companionship of the bereaved. It is from them that the new Spiritualism expects a multitude of recruits, for their eyes are looking towards the shadows. Sunday morning in greater London was once “a time for tending little gardens,” but the boy who used to “help father” with his spade and pail may be resting now in a hero’s grave by Somme or Tigris. Perhaps he has no sleeping-place, even among the undistinguished dead. His body may have been utterly obliterated, his end may be a subject for mysterious surmise. If the Churches cannot speak to the mourners words of Divine consolation, Spiritualism will rush in with its false and fatal comfort. Shallow writers have told us in recent months that “the dead are sleeping in their graves, already half-forgotten.” So it seems, because life’s routine proceeds as usual in homes where “one is not.” If Mr. George Haw’s description of the day of rest in outer London could be brought up to date, we should doubtless hear of nap and newspaper, country walk and evening concert, with a cigar as the breadwinner’s treat in the after-dinner hour. But the clay cottage of materialism has begun to rock and crumble. Every incident of the war is marked and dated according to its bearing on the personal sorrow. Nor is it surprising that ignorant persons should brush aside contemptuously vague warnings as to the peril of dabbling in Spiritualism. There is no more superstitious peasantry in the world than that of Brittany, nor any with a darker array of ghostly legends. Yet we are told that on St. John’s Eve, when the bonfire is lit and the priests and choir have gone past in long procession with banners and relics, places are set beside the glowing embers for those whose bodies are in the churchyard, that they, too, may look in at the dancers. In every land which war has visited arms are stretched out towards the young and beautiful who have fallen, and the cry is heard from mourners’ lips, “I am determined to take the hazard of the night along with you.”

Part 2

New inquirers are, for the most part, wholly ignorant with regard to the history of Spiritualism, which Mr. Waite, our chief living occultist, has called “a masque of anarchy.” The most respectable leaders of the movement are only too anxious to break with the ugly, disreputable past. A well-known authority says in Light: “It has been the misfortune of Spiritualism that many of its public expositions have been conducted in circumstances the reverse of dignified. It has suffered from contact with stupidity and cupidity, and its enemies have made the most of their numerous opportunities of holding it up to ridicule.”

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