Spiritism

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1, 7 January 1909, Page 22

Spiritism

Our articles on spiritism (in our issues of December 10 and December 17) have elicited sundry letters of encouragement and inquiry from learned ecclesiastics both in Australia and New Zealand. One of the ablest, most learned, and most prudent and experienced ecclesiastics in Australia — one whose name is mentioned with respect throughout both the Commonwealth and this Dominion — in the course of an over-kind commendation of the articles in question, says in part : ' I have met with some sad cases of the evils of -this wretched superstition, and I fully agree with you that such Catholic works as you refer to, do tenfold more harm than good.' This learned and well-known churchman — clarum et venerabile nomen — urges us to ' tuck up (our) sleeves and set to work (on a book on spiritism), in nomine Domini. 3 Such a book is still in our hopes, although we cannot at present see how the leisure time for such a work is to be snatched from among the many occupations and preoccupations of a Catholic editor's life in these countries. However, while awaiting an opening for the fuller exposition of our views and convictions on mediumistic spiritism, we may from time to time give our readers some brief • and casual glimpses into the methods of this strange occupation. On pages 9-11 of this issue we raise a corner of the curtain that conceals from the uninitiated the tricks and artifices and stratagems of what many spiritists claim to be the crowning evidence of the reality of their 'manifestations' — namely the so-called ' spirit photography.' There was only one Witch of Endor, and one re-appearing Saul — who, by the way, behaved with a dignity becoming himself and the solemnity of death. But sundry Catholic writers ask us to believe that the world of demons is from moment to moment at the beck arid call of ten thousand ungrammatical and money-seeking mediums, or that our dead are daily swarming, at the word of command, into frowsy parlors in the back streets of practically every town and village, for no better object than to talk platitudinous nonsense or wheezy flummery, or to indulge in rough horseplay with chairs and tables. The halo of the preter-

natural thus cast around the mediumistic profession has been, to our knowledge, and to the knowledge of others of our fellow-clergy, the means of sending many foolish Catholic women to the unwholesome associations of the seance parlor. A very , different version of the facts of seances would have been given by the writers referred to, if they had but made" themselves acquainted with the cheats and manoeuvres of the mediumistic charlatan, who is Par'this mendacior, a past-master in the ungentle but more or less' profitable art of Humbug.