Spiritualism: A Catholic View, By Fr. Herbert Thurston, S.J.

It would be hard to find a more astounding illustration of the degree in which religious doubt and unrest have pervaded our national life than the journalistic sensation which has recently centered round the so-called spirit messages of the Rev. G. Vale Owen, vicar of Oxford, Lancashire. No doubt most of the trumpeting and disturbance is nothing but the claque organized to develop the circulation of a particular Sunday newspaper. But the very fact that the extremely shrewd directors of the Harmsworth Press should select this means of capturing the attention of the British public is alone full of deep significance. And when we find a religious journal like the Guardian, albeit with due apologies, hiring out a large tract of its advertising columns to help to boom this pestilent rubbish among Church of England readers, it is hardly too much to say that the episode constitutes another way-mark in the decline and fall of the Church by law established.

To begin with, the document thus sedulously placarded is not even new. No doubt it is literally true (vide advertisement) that 'The Weekly Dispatch is the only paper in which these spirit messages will be published.' But large extracts from the script will be found printed with due acknowledgment in a book, The Undiscovered Country, compiled by Mr. Harold Bayley, and prefaced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which appeared in 1918. It would be rash, no doubt, to say that

all the passages which describe this 'Spiritual Universe of unimaginable immensity and grandeur, sphere upon sphere of the realms of light stretching away into infinity' (again vide advertisement), or that all 'the wonderful messages which portray the life beyond the grave with such intensity of vision that you may search the whole of modern literature in vain for any parallel,' have been incorporated in Mr. Bayley's little volume. But the book in question does make numerous and very considerable extracts, and they have been before the public for considerably more than twelve months without producing any noticeable convulsion in the literary world. One feck tempted to believe that those who have read them there will already have had enough of Mr. Owen's subconscious vaporings, and that even Sir Oliver (Lodge) would not be in the least inclined to ask for more.

Perhaps the most astonishing feature in the case is that Mr. Vale Owen and his backers, or exploiters, have apparently no conception that this sort of thing has ever been done before. But in point of fact the conditions of life beyond the grave have always been the favorite theme of all who made any pretensions to supernormal knowledge. Not to speak of Swedenborg, and still less of the long succession of Catholic mystics, most of the prominent clairvoyants, even before the coming of modern Spiritualism, such as, for example, Andrew Jackson Davis, or Dr. Haddock's servant 'Emma,' a Worcestershire girl who had never learned to read or write, were simply bubbling over with information about what happened to people when they woke up on the other side.

Naturally when automatic writing was introduced about the middle of the last century in the train of the spirit-rapping movement inaugurated by the Fox sisters, such communications from the world beyond multiplied a hundredfold. In a little bibliography of this kind of literature, which appeared in the Spiritual Magazine for 1867, I find an enumeration of some sixty-five printed works 'claiming to have been given by direct spiritual influence through human mediumship,' and this list was certainly not exhaustive. It does not, for exainple, include any of the more general treatises, such as those of Ballou, Edmonds, and Hare, which incorporate long spirit communications merely as a subordinate part of their contents. None the less, some of these last are among the best attested and most interesting we possess. Take, for example, the work of the Reverend Adin Ballou (1852), which was one of the very earliest and perhaps quite the sanest of the books written to expound the doctrine of communication with the spirit world....

When Professor Flammarion, the astronomer, began to practice automatic writing and found that his hand was continually writing out religious platitudes and astronomical speculations, signed 'Galileo,' he had the good sense to see that all this rubbish, as he himself called it, came from his own subliminal consciousness. It is a great pity that Mr. Vale Owen cannot be induced to look upon the matter in the same light.

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Fr. Herbert Henry Charles Thurston S.J.

(1856-1939)

Roman Catholic priest, historian, and writer on parapsychological subjects. He was born on November 15, 1856, in London. He was educated at Séminaire St. Malo, France; Mount St. Mary's, Derbyshire, England; Stonyhurst, Lancashire, England; Manresa House, Roehampton; and the University of London. He became a novice in the Society of Jesus in 1874. During his lengthy career he authored over 700 articles, essays, pamphlets, and translations.

In 1919 he joined the Society for Psychical Research, London, and was active in its deliberation for the rest of his life. He became one of its most widely read members, which compensated for the fact that as a practicing Roman Catholic he could not attend séances, even as an observer. He was particularly interested in poltergeist phenomena and Spiritualism, and also made a study of miraculous and paranormal events associated with holy people and saints in Roman Catholicism.

His books include: Beauraing and Other Apparitions (1934), The Church and Spiritualism (1933), Ghosts and Poltergeists (1953), The Memory of Our Dead (1915), Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (1955), Superstition (1933), and Surprising Mystics (1955).

He died November 3, 1939.

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