Всего за 5.99 руб. Купить полную версию
I. I admit that the facts you state about the Churchs warfare in these latter days have not the most favorable aspect; but how the needed elements of theology and religion are to be supplied by demonstrations afforded by these latter-day phenomena, I do not yet quite see.
P. If religious teachers will but study these facts, simply as facts, in all the different aspects which they have presented, from their first appearance up to this time study them in the same spirit in which the chemist studies affinities, equivalents, and isomeric compounds in the same spirit in which the astronomer observes planets, suns, and nebulæ in the same spirit in which the microscopist studies monads, blood-discs, and protoplasm always hospitable to a new fact, always willing to give up an old error for the sake of a new truth; never receiving the mere dicta either of spirits or men as absolute authority, but always trusting the guidance of right reason wherever she may lead if, I say, they will but study these great latter-day signs, providential warnings and monitions, in this spirit, I promise them that they shall soon find a rational and scientific ground on which to rest every real Christian doctrine, from the Incarnation to the crown of glory miracles, the regeneration, the resurrection, and all, with the great advantage of having the doctrine of immortality taken out of the sphere of faith and made a fixed fact . Furthermore, I promise them, on those conditions, that they shall hereafter be able to lead science rather than be dragged along unwillingly in its trail; and then science will be forever enrolled in the service of Gods religion, and no longer in that of the worlds materialism and infidelity.
I. Planchette, your communication has, upon the whole, been of a most startling character; tell me, I pray you, what do you call all this thing, and what is to come of it?
I. I really know not; I will try;
let us have it.
P. Well, then, I call it a Fourth Great Divine Epiphany or Manifestation; or what you will perhaps better understand as one of the developments characterizing the beginning of a Fourth Great Divine Dispensation. What is to come of it, you will be able to judge as well as I when you understand its nature.
I. What! so great an event heralded by so questionable an instrumentality as the rapping and table tipping spirits?
P. Be calm, and at the same time be humble. Remember that it is not unusual for God to employ the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, and that when He comes to visit His people, He almost always comes in disguises, and sometimes even as a thief in the night. Besides the spirits of which you speak are only the rough but very useful pioneers to open a highway through which the King is coming with innumerable hosts of angels, who, indeed, are already near you, though you see them not. It is, indeed, an hour of temptation that has come upon all the world; but be watchful and true, prayerful and faithful, and fear not.
I. Please tell us then, if you can, something of the nature and objects of this new Divine Epiphany which you announce; and as you say it is a Fourth , please tell us, in brief, what were the preceding Three , the times of their occurrence, and how they are all distinguished from each other.
P. The First appealed only to the affections and the inner sense of the soul, and was the Dispensation of the most ancient Church, when God walked with man in the midst of the garden of his own interior delights, and when Enoch walked with God and was not, for God took him. But as this sense of the indwelling presence of God was little more than a mere emotion , for which, in that period of humanitys childhood, there was no adequate, rational, and directive intelligence, men, in process of time, began to mistake every delight as being divine and holy; thus they justified themselves in their evil delights, or in the gratification of their lusts and passions, considering even these as all divine. [The sons of God marrying the daughters of men. Gen. vi. 2-4.] And as they possessed no adequate reasoning faculty to which appeals might be made for the correction of these tendencies, and thus no ground of reformation, the race gradually grew to such a towering height of wickedness that it had to be almost entirely destroyed. The Second age or Dispensation, commencing with Noah, was distinctively characterized by the more special manifestation of God in outward types and shadows, in the adyta of temples and other consecrated places and things, from which, as representative seats of the Divine Presence, and through inspired men, were issued laws to which terrible penalties were annexed, as is exemplified by the law issued from Mount Sinai. The evil passions of men were thus put under restraint, and a rational faculty of discriminating between right and wrong that is to say, a Conscience was at the same time developed. But the sophistical use of these types and shadows (of which all ancient mythology is an outgrowth), and the accompanying perversion of the general conscience of mankind, gradually generated Idolatry and Magic with all their complicated evils, against which the Jewish Church, though belonging to the same general Dispensation, was specially instituted to react. Furthermore, as the mere restraints of penal law necessarily imply the existence in man of latent evils upon which the restraint is imposed, it is manifest that such a dispensation alone could not bring human nature to a state of perfection; and so a Third was instituted, in which God was manifested in the flesh . That is to say, He became incarnate in one man who was so constituted as to embody in himself the qualitative totality of Human Nature, that through this one Man as the Head of the Body of which other men were the subordinate organs, He might become united with all others so that by the spontaneous movings of the living Christ within, and thus in perfect freedom, they might live the divine life in their very fleshly nature, previously the source of all sinful lusts, but now, together with the inner man, wholly regenerated and made anew. Here, then, is a Trinity of Divine manifestations, to the corresponding triune degrees of the nature of man the inner or affectional degree, the intermediate, rational, or conscience degree, and the external, or sensuous degree.