"PIFFLE AND DRIVEL."

Press, Volume LVI, Issue 16812, 19 April 1920, Page 2

"PIFFLE AND DRIVEL."

—. —* FATHER. BERNARD VAUGHAN ON SPIRITUALISM. (from our, own correspondent.* LONDOX, February IG. "The menace of Spiritualism" was the subject o* an address delivered at Manchester by Father J3ern;ird Vaughan, who said there were hundreds of thousands of countyfolk hopelessly entangled, like herrings enmeshed by trawlers along the coast. According to the spiritualists the "place" from whose bourne no traveller returns was but a poetic* fancy; the gates of death swung on their hinges, and the spirits of the departed passed to and fro as easily as people went in and out of their houses. Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir A. C. Doyle might, sneer at the Roman Catholic Church for forbidding the banns between religion and spiritualism, but perhaps the Church knew more about occultism, nccromancy, and spiritualism than the two gentlemen put together. After a comprehensive sketch of tho process of seances. Father Vaugh:m added, ."I wonder why spirits only revisit their friends in the dark, and when there is a good deal of furniture .about? Personally, I am inclined to attribute half of the seance phenomena to fraud, trickery, and the conjurer's sleight, of hand. A third I ascribe to telepathy, and other psychic gifts, while the remainder I pux down to the wiles and snares of him who was a liar from tlie beginning—Satan. Spiritualism is agamst the laws rf God and His Church. That is our position. It is very clear, strong, and sane. ' I believe that onesixth or these phenomena is devilish. If a music-hall artist can mimic the living so realistically- Vis to deceive us, the Eri] One can impersonate the dead so' i a> completely to bamboozle you. If he can't, he's not the devil I tock hi:n ' hccauso 1 could do it myself'. "''We don't deny the power of God to send messengers from the other world, hut we don't believe a medium can scratch up the dead and disembodied and make them talk piffle and drivel through the medium of a pan-to?hnicon-load of furniture. I condemn spiritualism as being 'against the .aws of Hod and His Church, both in its objective and subjective sides. It gives you nothing, and mav rob von of everything."