MR BIRRELL ON SPIRIT COMMUNICATIONS.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXXIV, Issue 12752, 24 April 1909, Page 4

MR BIRRELL ON SPIRIT COMMUNICATIONS.

Mb Augustine Birrell, M.P., addressed the United Bible Classes of Bristol North last mouth on "What Happens to Us After Death?" Referring to some recent stories of alleged communications from the spirit world, he said that the stories did not even begin to satisfy him that those communications were really and truly twosided communications. He did not believe for a moment that the other person was there on the other side of that wireless telegraphy. If man or woman was to speak — stupendous thought after all those thousands of years from within the veil — it was not too much to ask that they should do so after an independent fashion of their own, and not be Content to be the mere tools and replicas of the persons with whom they were believed to confer. Those records left him unconvinced. They lacked the things of morality, of grandeur, of emotion — in a word, of Teligion. They dealt with petty things, mere prolonged egoism, as if the one thing they wanted to be assured of was continued existence and an endless capacity to interchange platitudes. A revelation of the life beyond the grave ought surely, if it was to do any good in the world, to be more stupendous than that — something of really first-class importance. Otherwise they were just as well without it. The immortality they pined for was not a continuance of doubt and confusion; it was a triumph of the spirit "over the body of this death,"' a complete unity of purpose and existence with the Eternal. How that was to be accomplished must ever remain a mystery. Only the life of the spirit could become part of the Spirit of God. The glory of war, the glory of oratory, the glory of honour, all the splendid things of earth, passed away. They could count for nothing in that life which could only be the continuance of the spiritual life begun here upon earth or begun by the mercy of God elsewhere. But wherever it was begun, the immortality of the spirit could only be the reward of those who could lead the spiritual life, and, therefore, those who would aspire to it must feed upon, live for, and accumulate for themselves a store of — it would be at the best a tiny store — the things pertaining to the spirit. The immortality worth having was not a mere continuance of their own defective and wretched individuality, but an absorption in and unity with the purposes and the mind of God.