Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations: Demonstrating the existence of spirits and their communion with mortals. Doctrine of the spirit world respecting heaven, hell, morality, and God. Also, the influence of Scripture on the morals of Christians.Hare, Robert
Religion
Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations: Demonstrating the existence of spirits and their communion with mortals. Doctrine of the spirit world respecting heaven, hell, morality, and God. Also, the influence of Scripture on the morals of Christians.
Hare, Robert
Bible and spiritualism; Spiritualism
1153. Could any one believe that an experienced farmer would sow a
field with garlic when intending to have a crop of wheat? Would not
the conclusion be that if a field upon his farm were occupied by that
objectionable weed, it must have been the spontaneous production of
the soil, not of a mistake so gross on his part? Yet our prescient God
is represented as so much inferior in foresight to an ordinary farmer,
that while the religious soil of Christendom was for ages occupied with
crops of Catholicism, in the Grecian or Roman modification, the seed of
Protestantism was sown by God through his son and vicegerent, Christ,
intending to have the soil occupied by Protestantism. Manifestly,
either it was intended that Catholicism should prevail, as above
described, or an omnipotent, omniscient, and prescient God did not
preside over the seeding.
1154. Yet notwithstanding this diversity as to the true import of
Christianity between the most distinguished Christian sectarians,
each sect conceives itself justified in propagating its own peculiar
opinions among ignorant pagans. The principle being thus sanctioned,
that those who _believe_ themselves to have become acquainted with
religious truth, are justified in propagating a knowledge of it,
wherefore should not that privilege be exercised by a spiritualist as
well as a Christian?
1155. Humility is one of the virtues inculcated by Christ; but if
his disciples assume to themselves a peculiar capacity to know what
is true, and an exclusive right to teach what they thus assume to be
truth, there will be no humility in their practice, however it may be
blazoned among their professions.
1156. The view which I have presented in the preceding pages is
corroborated by a personage of no less authority than William Pitt,
afterward the Earl of Chatham, and prime minister of England. His
opinions, alleged to have been originally published in the London
Journal for 1733, are as follows:
_Letter of William Pitt._
“_Pure Religion and undefiled before God and the Father, is this: to
visit the Fatherless and Widows in their afflictions, and to keep one’s
self unspotted from the World._”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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