DEAN INGE

Hokitika Guardian, 21 March 1931, Page 2

DEAN INGE

SPIRITUALISM AND NECRO- - LONDON, Feb. 7. Dean Inge, in an article in the “Church of England Newspaper,” affirms that Spiritualism and necromancy belong to the barbarous childh<?od of the human rooe, He states that Spiritualism is a miserable substitute .or religious hope, and asks why the bishops cannot say bluntly that t-he Church of England can have nothing to do with it. “The semi-regenerate mind craves for infallible declarations, the weak in laitli cling to signs arid wonders,” writes the Dean. “Superstition is the Nemesis of materialism: the water stands at; the same level in these two receptacles or error. It seems cruel to grudge to the bereaved even the most pitiful of consolations. But what Christian who has learned from St. Paul and St. John the meaning of the blessed hope of everlasting life can feel any patience with dabblers in occultism, these necromancers who oiler to us in place of that hope of existence as poor and shadowy as that of Sheol of Homer’s Hades, a supposed revelation of the habits of a disembodied ghost. ,If those stories were true they would add a new terror to death. But as they are not true, hut the residue of barbarous thought, habits which were old before Christianity was young, why cannot the bishops say bluntly that the Church of England can have nothing to do with this nonsense?”

Spiritualism and necromancy, he says, have nothing to do with Christianity, nor with any other of the higher religions; and he goes on:—“They are a miserable substitute for the religious hope, whioh, if we could under, stfinc} the truth, might not satisfy our unregenerate hankering for a mere continuance of the conditions which

we know, but of which we may say confidently that if they are not to be fulfilled it is because G’od has provided some better tiling. For the clergy to pander, to primitive superstitions, which surge up. powerfully enough sometimes, from die unconscious, jg to court a success w 1 1 >■ -li , v. ■ than a failure,” Preaching the University r rmon at Cambridge on Sunday, Dean Inge said that our generation believed in adventures, in kindness, in giving others a good time. In what else did it believe? Not very much. They needed something more heroic and more serious than that. This was a particularly difficult time, when a survey of the world showed u s that liberty was in great danger just because men had not enough character or wisdom to govern themselves, and were too narrow and selfish to govern others. “Do we not

see that our civilisation is threatened by the chaotic motives that sway the actions of men—by excessive love of pleasure and amusement, by aversion from hard work and by acquisitiveness, with the bitterness and jealousy which it fosters? ” he declared. “ T should be the last to deny that there are many good features in our post-war civilisation. notably the really civilising influences of some of the great discoveries, especially broadcasting, which puts the results of science, learning, and art within the reach of everybody and widens immensely the .mental horizon of at least half the population. This blight of secularism and trivialities is over it all. It just lacks the idealism, the aspirations, the hero-j ism which earnest conviction only can inspire,”