Under this heading, the author of Outlines, tells us that the spiritual body has the senses of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and feeling; in addition, he describes the means taken by their spirit friends, in reality personating demons, to convince people of the reality of the spirit-world. He enumerates clairvoyance, that is, seeing spiritual beings and things; clairvoyance, that is, hearing spiritual voices and music; trance-speaking, in which the mediums are quite unconscious of what is being said through them (if they were conscious they might object to the utter nonsense often put into their mouths); speaking in unknown tongues (this is rapidly spreading in other connections, and is a sign of the last times); the power to describe the identity of the spirit-world; the gift of inspiration, which enables people to deliver discourses on almost any subject; the gift of writing, where the hand writes long messages, without the medium paying the least attention to what they are writing (we can understand that claim when we see the meaningless nonsense ascribed to the supposed spirits of clever men); the gift of drawing with bandaged eyes in a dark room; the gift of physical manifestations, that is, the moving of tables, chairs, etc., about the room when no one is near them, the carrying of instruments about the room and playing on them by invisible fingers, the bringing of flowers and fruit into the room, when the doors are securely locked; levitation, that is, the medium is able to rise and float in the air with no one touching him; the writing between closed slates; fire taken into the naked hand without injury, placed on people's heads, and muslin dresses; materializing, when spirit friends (drop out the letter " r " in " friends " for accuracy) can be seen with the naked eye; spirit photography, when spirit people appear on the picture by the side of the sitter; gift of healing by laying on of hands.
Mr. Home was a very leading medium, who is said to have done very wonderful things. Yet the late Mr. Reader Harris, K.C., narrates how he went with his father, who was summoned to Dr. Cully's house in Malvern, where Home lay dying, in order to make his will. He testifies that the rapping of spirits and general turmoil among the furniture rendered the task impossible. The demons were already claiming their victim with noisy exultation.
Is there anything uplifting or helpful in all this? Anything spiritual or ennobling? Is there anything to redeem the whole thing from sordidness, anything to proclaim a celestial source? Absolutely nothing. It carries its own condemnation on its face.
Then we are told in Outlines that in the spirit-world souls may do wrong there, as they do here. When they do, they reap what they sow, and are punished, and thus they are gradually purified and blessed-they become their own saviors, though why they should need to be saved seems a mystery.
The Problem Shirked.
In Outlines, while there is a stout refusal of the doctrine of total depravity, and the fall of man is denied, there is no attempt whatever to adequately explain the awful sorrow and suffering in this world, and the still more awful sorrow of death. We are told God is too good to allow man's fall or the existence of what is malevolent, like Satan and his demons; but the present awful state of things, which God has allowed for His own wise and inscrutable purpose, the Author of Outlines shirks and must shirk. He throws away the only lamp of truth-the Word of God. Can we wonder that he walks in darkness, and that his wisdom is folly indeed, fraught with awful consequences?
Dr. P. B. Randolph, a celebrated medium, during the time that he seceded from this awful system, said with terrible sarcasm and biting truth in an address given in New York, speaking of Spiritualistic beliefs, that- " God, nature, love, panthea, rarefied gas, sublimated oxygen, and ether by this lexicon are convertible terms and essences."