THE ROMAN CATHOLICS AND SPIRITUALISM. THE Dublin Review is the quarterly organ of the English Romanists, and we find in the September number of it, the first great public avowal of the truth of modern Spiritualism by the heads of any class of Religionists. Honour is due to the Roman Catholics for being thus the first to cease breaking themselves against the rocks of fact; but it is a wonder why they did not find it out and proclaim it long ago, for it has been a fact all the time, both when they ignored it, and now when they admit it. There is a great disbelief in miracles at the present day, but there is hardly a greater miracle than to see a mass of people who profess to believe in the Bible, and whose religion is utterly based upon it and upon the miracles it relates, deny the whole range of analogous facts which are not only found throughout all history, but are actually occurring constantly in their midst, and are supported by ten times the testimony of those in the Scriptures. Such a power of rejecting facts by the human mind is of itself a miracle and greatly to be wondered at. But we know enough of the mind to be sure that such an absurd position cannot last for ever, and so when we commenced the work of placing the facts before the public, we were able to predict that they would prevail. The prediction is now fulfilled in the case of the large body of Roman Catholics, so far as the public admission in their great organ can be taken as evidence, that the facts have become too big and too patent to be longer. ignored. It was likely to come first, too, from the Roman Catholics, seeing that they have kept on hand so large a stock of winking Madonnas, apparitions of the Virgin, miraculous healings, and chapels of Loretto. We have often reminded them of the relationship between us, though they have shewn no alacrity in claiming our acquaintance. One reason for their backwardness, perhaps, was that we have not looked on their so-called miracles as proving the correctness of their dogmas, but only as evidence that there exists an innate power in human nature, which for want of a better term is called mediumship. According to their ideas, mediumship amongst Roman Catholics becomes saintship, and everywhere out of their body it becomes devilship. We predicted also that in this country, the belief in Spiritualism would go through the phase firstly of admitting the facts, and secondly of attributing them to the devil. Into this groove the Dublin Review quietly walks, and talks to us from the ruts which wall it in on each side. The September number contains not fewer than three articles to which we refer our readers. The first, "Spiritism in the Modern World," argues for all the facts as earnestly as we have ever done in these pages. It admits them all, and shews the stupidities of scientific men who deny them, and it analyzes the reasons which are at the bottom of their ignorance and their wilfulness. It acknowledges the all-pervading power aud variety of the manifestations, and the easy way in which they adapt themselves to all classes of minds, and herein it sees both the greatest danger, and the reason for the rapid spread of Spiritualism. Characteristically, too, it attributes its birth as a natural offspring of Protestantism, of which the primary assertion is the independence of man's reason. This assertion, which it finds so wicked, has two extreme, and both of them fatal, consequences. "Either man will lack subjective evidence of the supernatural, and flatly deny its existence; he will be a Materialist, a Rationalist, a Pantheist, according to the mode and degree in which error has developed itself in his mind, or he will possess subjective evidence through the influence of the spirits of darkness, and then he will become superstitious; he will be a visionary, a spiritist." These are neither of them very comfortable horns of our dilemma, but the way out of them is simple enough. By his very condition the Catholic is shielded from this peril, for "he does not believe because he sees, but because the church attests to him that God has revealed to the world the truth which he believes." Only become a Catholic and your medium becomes a saint. Only believe on the assurance of the church, and then you will believe, and the facts will add nothing to your assurance. The recom mendation shapes itself at once into a platitude, for it ignores the patent, blatant fact that it is not given to all men to believe in the Roman Church, and we trust in God that it never will be; and assuredly that will be the last church that will ever wish or insist, or allow that its followers shall deny their reason in order to follow their faith. There will in every true church be a holy marriage between reason and faith, which will make it no longer possible to separate the two greatest powers of the soul. There is a truth, however, in this, that the solifidian dogma of Protestantism, and its other hardnesses, have been a part of the cause of the pendulum having swung too far in the other direction, but it has already attained its greatest divergence, and will now have to travel back again a portion of its journey. The Romish Church, which is devoured by the dogma of its infallibility, and of its being the only true church, cannot see this; and it is driven by its position to find outside of it none but devils either in esse or in posse. The mere fact of supernatural visions, predictions and healings occurring out of its body, determines their origin to be diabolic, and they are able to draw an easy geographical line outside themselves, beyond which is hell, whilst within is heaven. Their arguments, therefore, are both simple and absurd, and do not accord with either every-day fact, or with the common sense and observation of mankind. Neither can they accord with the justice and the love of our Heavenly Father. We The Dublin Review sees in the spread of the belief in spiritual phenomena a proof that the "last times" are upon us. should be very glad if that were at all likely to be true, for the "last times are only the beginning of the first times, and the new birth is sadly needed, though we fear we shall have to wait some time for it yet, and when it does come, it will not be through the portals erected by Roman Catholics. With their ideas, it is not surprising to find that the writer promises, in a future article, to prove that his church has the inheritance which gives it the power over hell, and that it will be able to reduce these manifestations into order. The first step towards this, however, must be taken after it shews that it understands their nature and origin, and that so far from belonging to any particular church, they are generic in man, and that they must be ruled and judged of from their intrinsic values, instead of being attributed wholesale to either God or the Devil, according as they may happen to come from the inside or the outside of a particular church organization. Our readers will remember the startling and eloquent description given some time back in our pages by Mr. Howitt, of the miracles of healing and feeding the people performed by Jean Baptiste Vienney, the Curè d'Ars, near Lyons. A translation has recently appeared from the French of M. Monnin, The Spirit of the Cure of Ars, and in noticing this book in the same number of the Dublin Review, the writer forgets what he has just been writing against Spiritualism, and tells of the height of sanctity of the good Curè "who attained such a mastery over the powers of nature, in the region of inanimate matter, and his state of sublime perfection." He is to be made a saint; and we are told "The Holy Father (the Pope) has expressed great interest in the beatification of the Curè of Ars, and has desired that his cause may be introduced to the Roman congregation as soon as possible." The performance of miracles is essential to the manufacturing of a saint, and truly there are plenty in the case of the good Curè, but there is not one of them that is not common to the inquirers into modern Spiritualism, In the same article are mentioned the names of Ignatius, Francis Xavier, and Teresa, all of whom exhibited amongst other strange powers that of being lifted, like Mr. Squire and Mr. Home, and many others, into the air. Why in one case should the fact betoken a heavenly and in the other a demoniac power? Are they not equally the evidences of a power generic in the soul which proves no doctrine? To hold otherwise is running into needless contradiction; and yet this good Catholic cannot see how untenable are his pretensions. We, on the contrary, are the students of a subject which we have at least had the wit to make large enough to cover and include all the facts which appear in every religion, and which are common to all history, both before and after Christianity was divinely given to men. There is Christian Spiritualism, and there is the contrary; but we judge of them, each by its own intrinsic evidences, and we find a great mixture in all. None are altogether and finally good, and none altogether and finally bad. Our inquiry is into the whole subject, and not into a part of it; and if some proceed from hell it is just as necessary to investigate them and prove their hellship, as to search into Roman miracles, and find the divine value of a winking Madonna, or of the transport from Nazareth to Loretto of the house in which the Divine Child was born. We have now touched upon two of the articles, and proceed to the third, which is a review of Mousseaux's Les Mediateurs et les Moyens de la Magie. It is written in the same style, and will not detain us. The devil again is at the bottom of all that is not Catholic, including Magnetism and Somnambulism in the list. "The history of all times exhibits to us the idolatrous pontiff (the devil) as the principal agent in the production of preternatural phenomena, but above all in the character of the curative and divining medium. Satan has his religion and worship, the counterfeit and caricature of the divine." We have met before with the strange, grotesque dogma of the Roman Catholics, that the healing of diseases is one of the worst signs of the devil, and here it is produced again in the fullness of the writer's absurd prejudices. We sit in wonder as we read his next words, "The medium even has his holy counterpart in those occasional (Roman) ministers of God's healing mercy, whom He has from time to time invested with powers above nature. There is a permanent example of this sort in the cures operated by St. Hubert's intercession on cases of the most incurable of maladies-for instance, cancer, insanity, but especially of hydrophobia. The priest of the church of St. Hubert, in the province of Luxembourg, in Belgium, has been the permanent 'mediator' (we will not use the desecrated appellation of medium) for many centuries of these wonderful cures, and St. Hubert's shrine is still visited from all parts of Europe." This is enough to take one's breath away. A succession of priests for centuries, have been the mediums for curing hydrophobia and other diseases through the intercession of St. Hubert. How is it that St. Hubert was not a child of Satan, he having in himself this devilish power of healing the sick, in common with the other modern mediums? It is passing strange to find Christian and educated gentlemen thus expressing their ideas, and that their madness should only attack them when they write on religious subjects. What a blinding power has dogmatism! CHRISTMAS. The trees are leafless now and bare, The sky an ashen grey, The snow lies heavy in the air, The wind is keen and piercing cold, And pile the Yule log higher. We tell of many a gallant deed, Of shipwrecked men in sorest need, We tell of sprites of guilty men That wander o'er the earth, Where fearful crimes had birth. And then we pause awhile, and muse And that first Christmas Day's glad news— "On earth, to men of peace, good-will: "The Saviour Christ is born!" And Ages shall re-echo still The Angels' song that morn. T. S. |