SPIRITUALISM.

Evening Star, Issue 3598, 3 September 1874, Page 2

SPIRITUALISM.

To the Editor. Sir,— Will you kindly bear with me until I lay my condition before you and your readers, in the hope of some alleviation e£ my napless position. Some few years ago the subject of Spiritualism aro-e in our midst, and being, like most young men of the day. great upon progress, I hailed with delight what was promised to be “ a new and beautiful faith.” 1 attended the great meeting held in the Athenseum. and drank m with avidity the refreshing w«rds as they foil from the lips of a youthful and enthusiastic propagator of the tauh As he exclaimed: “We have now got a direct proof of the immortality of the soul; unbelief is an impossibility ; we only require time to develop the new faith 1” I supposed we had at last touched solid ground. I became a member of the Atkensa uu Debating Sociol y, and exerted all my powers to extend my knowledge, but with very limited results. A lecture was delivered on the Positive philosophy, wbieh promised great things ; but, alas 1 the more I probed the ideas propounded in it, the more did it collapse, until, by reading Professor Huxley’s lay sermon on “The Scientific Aspect of Positivism,” it has been reduced entirely to a negative quantity, and the lecturer to a demonstrated fool. Ihe two missionaries from A merica did nothing for me, except by their bitter raillery against orthodoxy to make me ashamed of my position. They seemed like two gaunt, hungry dogs, ready to gobble up every bit er form of religion that anybody had, but never a bit of their own to show or eat. They left more the better of us than we were of theta. The Athenaeum Debating Society has perished, I believe, primarily, by the deadly embrace of the Spir tualut Society, which has followed very qu ely in its train. Thesethings x a , v ? , en hard against the new and beautiful faith, and must have bitterly grieved the originators and followers of the movement but still the means of acquiring the precious knowledge was within our reach. The Athenaeum still kept a well-furnished table at which we could gorge to satiety. There you could learn the value of our social condition, the fascinations of free love, and the impossibility of oislinguishing between the blasphemy contained in the Thi.ty-Nine Articles and in the ‘ Dunolly Advertiser,’ but alas, even that is gone. We are left now without a single means of obtaining the precious progressive knowledge. I, along with many others, look now to the original propogatora of the faith, and urgently call upon them to take a decided step-come forward and preach or write deliverance from the orthodoxy of the Confession and the Thirty-nine Articles, under which the people are perishing. When all covert means have tailed, if ever they were in earnest and had no private purpose to serve, now is their time. Hundreds of young men in oup midst, who have learned through thei training to talk flippantly of the Christian religion, and to lightly esteem our social relations, have now a right to demand of them a statement of their principles and a full exposition of the new and beautiful faith flaunted before their eyes. Trusting that the original expositors of the new faith will see it to be their duty in common honesty to feed the hungry,—l am, &a, _ PROGRESSIONIST. Dunedin, August 21.