Wells Samuel Roberts - The Salem Witchcraft, the Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism стр 33.

It must also be admitted that most of the literature which has come into existence in this way is of a doubtful and disreputable kind, and of a tendency to degrade rather than elevate our conceptions of a spiritual state.

Yet such is the hunger, the longing, the wild craving of the human soul for the region of future immortality, its home-sickness for its future home, its perishing anguish of desire for the beloved ones who have been torn away from it, and to whom in every nerve it still throbs and bleeds, that professed words and messages from that state, however unworthy, are met with a trembling agony of eagerness, a willingness to be deceived, most sorrowful to witness.

But any one who judges of the force of this temptation merely by what is published in the Banner of Light , and other papers of that class, has little estimate of what there is to be considered in the way of existing phenomena under this head.

The cold scientists who, without pity and without sympathy, have supposed that they have had under their dissecting knives the very phenomena which have deluded their fellows, mistake. They have not seen them, and in the cold, unsympathizing mood of science, they never can see them. The experiences that have most weight with multitudes who believe more than they dare to utter, are secrets deep as the grave, sacred as the innermost fibers of their souls they can not bring their voices to utter them except in some hour of uttermost confidence and to some friend of tried sympathy. They know what they have seen and what they have heard. They know the examinations they have made they know the inexplicable results, and, like Mary of old, they keep all these sayings and ponder them in their hearts. They have no sympathy with the vulgar, noisy, outward phenomena of tippings and rappings and signs and wonders. They have no sympathy with the vulgar and profane

attacks on the Bible, which form part of the utterances of modern seers; but they can not forget, and they can not explain things which in sacred solitude or under circumstances of careful observation have come under their own notice. They have no wish to make converts they shrink from conversation, they wait for light; but when they hear all these things scoffed at, they think within themselves Who knows?

We have said that the strong, unregulated, and often false spiritualistic current of to-day is a result of the gradual departure of Christendom from the true supernaturalism of primitive ages. We have shown how Christ and his Apostles always regarded the invisible actors on the stage of human existence as more powerful than the visible ones; that they referred to their influence over the human spirit and over the forces of nature, things which modern rationalism refers only to natural laws. We can not illustrate the departure of modern society from primitive faith better than in a single instance a striking one.

The Apostles Creed is the best formula of Christian faith it is common to the Greek, the Roman, the Reformed Churches, and published by our Pilgrim Fathers in the New England Primer in connection with the Assemblys Catechism. It contains the following profession:

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the Holy Catholic Church; the Communion of Saints; the Forgiveness of Sins, etc.

To each one of these the good Bishop devotes some twenty or thirty pages of explanation.

But it is customary with many clergymen in reading to slur the second and third articles together, thus: I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints that is to say, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, which is the communion of saints.

Now, in the standard edition of the English Prayer Book, and in all the editions published from it, the separate articles of faith are divided by semicolons thus: The Holy Ghost; The Holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints. But in our American editions the punctuation is altered to suit a modern rationalistic idea thus: The Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints.

The doctrine of the Communion of Saints, as held by primitive Christians, and held still by the Roman and Greek Churches, is thus dropped out of view in the modern Protestant Episcopal reading.

But what is this doctrine? Bishop Pearson devotes a long essay to it, ending thus:

Every one may learn by this what he is to understand by this part of the article in which he professeth to believe in the Communion of Saints.

I am fully persuaded of this, as a necessary and infallible truth, that such persons as are truly sanctified in the Church of Christ, while they live in the crooked generations of men and struggle with all the miseries of this world, have fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost that they partake of the kindness and care of the blessed angels who take delight in ministrations for their benefit, that they have an intimate union and conjunction with all the saints on earth as being members of Christ; NOR IS THIS UNION SEPARATED BY THE DEATH OF ANY, but they have communion with all the saints who, from the death of Abel, have departed this life in the fear of God, and now enjoy the presence of the Father, and follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.

And thus I believe in the Communion of Saints.