The Astral World and Higher Occult Powers: Clairvoyance, Spiritism, Mediumship, and Spirit-Healing Fully Explained

The relations of man to his God have occupied the first minds of every age, but without rendering those relations so understandable to the mass of mankind as to be admitted as true. It has been evident to many, although not to all, that some minds so engaged have been inspired to write beyond the current knowledge of their day, indeed to foretell truths which could only be recognized as such after centuries of progression. The natural propensity of the human mind in the exercise of its ingenuity has been constantly developing in the endeavor to theorize upon the writings of these inspired authors, so as to present an entire system for the consideration of man. Each of these systems so proposed has passed away, from the fact that it carried with it the elements of its own destruction, itself not arising purely from the absolute, and therefore subject to the analysis of progressed mind, and by such analysis found wanting. Those theories which might have seemed compatible with the ability to adjudge truth in the middle ages, were not truths to the more progressed minds of later times; so that truth, except to absolute consciousness, may be considered, when subject to the test of human comprehension, as not absolute even to such comprehension, except in degree, and that varying with the continued progression of the recipient. Thus the best minds at this time willingly admit that the writer of Job was inspiredthat he wrote truths beyond the comprehension of more than a thousand years beyond his time. One instance of this may be thus stated: To Galileo and Copernicus we have attributed the discovery of the fact that the world is round; and yet the writer of the Book of Job, who wrote a thousand years before them, tells us that the earth is round, that its north is frigid, that the waters are divided by the dry land, where the day becomes night, and the night becomes dayclearly indicating that the continents are twelve hours apart, and that the earth must revolve to enable the relative position of its parts to the sun to give the phenomena now so well understood. Plato was an inspired man. He wrote on the soul, far in advance of his day; and it is only a progressed mind at this time that can read and comprehend his views. With Plato, all admit that his normal progression might have been equal to the observance of the results of his inspiration. But the writer of the Book of Job could never have seen an ocean. He could not have known of the existence of another continent, and the sciences collateral to his text could not have rendered him the didactic aid which would have been necessary to have made him cognizant, in his normal condition, of the truths he uttered; and, therefore, it is at least possible, if not probable, that these truths were directly the result of inspiration, as much beyond his own comprehension as beyond the comprehension of others. Indeed, even at the present day, thousands of students of theology have read Job without perceiving that he had fore-run Galileo and Copernicus in their supposed discoveries. It is not to be wondered at, then, that modern Spiritualism and its truths, if credited to the source from which they are supposed to be derived, should be found to present truths not understood as such by every mind; and, notwithstanding its million converts, it seems to have embraced but few minds capable of presenting in a didactic form these truths. The various writers on the subject have rather spoken of its curiosities than its use; and we know of no book capable of instructing and satisfying even a progressed mind on either the precise use or exact advantages arising from a full belief in Spiritualism.

Dettagli