A new basis of belief in immortality / by John S. Farmer.

  • Farmer, John S.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new basis of belief in immortality / by John S. Farmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “The force of this objection has been entirely demolished by one whom the orthodox will accept as an authority—Bishop Butler. He has told us in his Analogy that we are no judges of what constitutes probability or improbabUity as applied to the divine mode of working. What may be strongly contrary to our expectation may, for all that, be the process adopted by God ; what may seem objectionable, or even ridiculous to us, may not be so in reality. ‘ The only question for us. therefore, concerning the truth of Spiritualism is whether these be real manifestations, not whether they be attended by every circumstance which we should have looked for; whether it be what it claims to be, not whether it be such a system and so promulgated as weak men might fancy a method of communicating with the unseen world should be. ... Since upon experience the course of nature is found greatly different from what before experience would have been expected, and liable, as men fancy, to great objections, this renders it highly credible that they may find the gift of communicating with spirits very different from expectations formed beforehand, and liable in appearance to great objections. It is highly credible beforehand that on the supposition that God should afford men some additional instruction by Spiritualism, it would be with circumstances against the credibility of which we should be apt to fancy we had strong objections.’ This i» Bishop But- ler’s own reasoning, in which, for revelation, we have only substituted spiritualism, and we are entitled to make this substitution, because if the argument is good in the one case it must be equally good in the other. If it is to be no bar to our accepting revelation that it contains many things unlikely to happen, and even absurd in our eyes, so like- wise the occurrence of the same sort of things in Spiritualism consti- tutes no objection to our receiving that. We are in both cases, as always happens, driven back upon the evidence, ‘Are these things true ’! ’ “But is there anything absurd in the table-turning, &c.? The absur- dity, if there be any, must consist in the idea of spirits being able to influence material substance ; because in a table, as such, I see nothing more ridiculous than in a house, or a tree, or a sun-dial, or a fleece of wool, or a mountain, or a herd of pigs. Now the Divine Spirit (from which the spirit of man is a direct emanation—Gen. ii. 7) is represented to us as continually acting upon matter, not only by means of those pneral and orderly laws by which we believe the worlds to have been fashioned and to be still upheld, but under exceptional circumstances, such action being marked by what we must term very trivial details. Thus I should suppose that if spirits were to make an answer to an enquiry by filling a fleece of wool with a basin full of water at one time, and drying it up at another, such a circumstance would be looked upon as very absurd aud ridiculous; yet this was precisely the means adopted by God for communicating with Gideon. Spirits, good aud bad, are represented in the Bible as constantly influencing material substances. As we have seen, an angel touches Elijah—an angel touches Daniel; again an angel wrestles with Jacob, and injures the joint of his thigh. Evil spirits rend and tear people, and throw them down, aud set in motion a herd of swine. . . .