"STRANGE DEATH PACT."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20986, 24 September 1931, Page 12

"STRANGE DEATH PACT."

Sir,— I The report in your issue of September 22, of the deliberate murder by a man in Australia of his wife and five children, because lie and his wife, through studying Spiritualism, imagined a short road fo an attractive hereafter, brings strikingly before us the fearful nature of this strange supernatural tiling which has stolen in upon civilisation, and now numbers many practitioners and adherents, none of whom—l venture to say know its real nature, or they would keep as far from it as possible. Spiritism is not new; it is as old as the human race. The Word of God alone shows its real nature. "You know that we have been convinced of the continuity of life," wrote the murdered woman hefore she died. This is the fundamental tenet of Spiritism, and a fundamental and fatal error. God distinctly declares that "The dead know not anything;" and that plain stalcintait from the Creator holds good from Genesis to Revelation. Tlio doctrine of tho immortality of the sou l_utterly unknown to the Bible, and distinctly contradicted by it—blinds tho minds of real Christian people from seeing that the spirits ~ which operate in Spiritism cannot possibly bo human, but arc (lie "seducing spirits" teaching doctrines of demons, which tho Apostle Paul warned ifs would lead many astray in the latter days. Their teachings, however high-flown, religious, sentimental, or seductive, have a two-fold aim: (1) To prepare the world for the coming of the Satanic Ruler; and (2) to vent their malignity upon a raco to which God, in His mercy, has given the hope of salvation through Jesus Christ. The latter aim clearly broke out in the Australian tragedy. Wm. Casifbeul.