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
1212. None of the ancient Pagans were as hostile to the Hebrews, as
the disciples of Mohammed have been to the Greek Christians. But not
even the Mohammedans have been so intolerant to those whom they call
infidels, as Christian sectarians have been, to such persons as they
have dogmatically adjudged to be heretics.
1213. It should be well considered whether any authority dependent on
human records can justify the inference that God, anywhere, or in any
age, ever authorized such cruelty as that exhibited at Sinope.
1214. Whenever men adopt the idea entertained by the Jews and
Mohammedans, and certain sects of Christians, that a peculiar creed is
necessary to salvation, it is deemed humane to inflict any temporal
evil in order to eradicate any other belief which will subject souls to
eternal punishment. When to the Catholics in the reign of Queen Mary
it was urged that burning heretics alive would not change their creed,
the reply was, that although the victims should not be converted, the
souls of their progeny would be saved from damnation by the extirpation
of the heresy with the heretics. Admitting the premises, the conclusion
was correct, and the auto-da-fé and the tortures of the inquisition
were even more excusable than a painful chirurgical operation, when it
preserves the temporal life of the patient.
1215. If the Czar is of opinion, that for every Christian who may
replace a Turk, a soul will be saved from damnation, he may conceive
himself as well authorized to extirpate the Turks, as were Moses and
Joshua to extirpate any heathen nation.
1216. Moreover, by some Christians, Jesus is considered as having
sanctioned the retention of that characteristic of the Hebrew
portraiture of Jehovah, which makes it right to exterminate unbelievers
in the orthodox creed. This must be a source of discord wherever it is
recognised, as it induces persecution from conscientious regard to the
salvation of the victims upon whom it acts, while in them it naturally
creates bitter resentment instead of gratitude.
1217. Having submitted the representations of Jehovah, given in the Old
Testament, I will subjoin those of the great modern philosopher Newton,
and those of Seneca, one of the most distinguished sages of antiquity.
The reader may, from these data, judge how far piety or morality would
suffer, were that ancient record to give way to the direct evidence of
Spiritualism.
_Opinions of God held by Sir Isaac Newton.—Enfield’s Philosophy, Page
638._
1218. “God has no need of organs; he being everywhere present to the
things themselves.
1219. “It appears from phenomena, that there is a being incorporeal,
living, intelligent, omnipresent, who, in infinite space, as it were
in his sensory, sees the things themselves, intimately and thoroughly
perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence
to himself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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