Spiritualism

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Title:     Spiritualism
Author: Richard King [More Titles by King]

All the same, I do not think I shall ever dare to become a spiritualist. If you can understand my meaning, so much, so very much depends upon the truth and veracity of its tenets that I cannot go blindly forward, as so many people seem to be able to do, because I realise that disillusion would mean something so terrible that a kind of instinctive faith in another life, without reason, without scientific demonstration, seems far safer for the peace of mind. To believe in spiritualism, and then to be deceived, would be so unsettling, so devastating to the "soul," that, in my own self-defence, I prefer to be sceptical unreasonably than to be equally unreasonably believing. So many people, who have loved and lost, rush towards spiritualism demanding no real evidence whatsoever, bringing to it a kind of passionate yearning to find therein some kind of illusion that their loved ones, who are dead, still live on waiting for reunion in another world. Such a yearning is very human, very understandable, very forgivable; but these people are the enemies of true spiritualism as a new branch of scientific speculation. I would not rob them of the glamour of their faith, since, as I have just written, I have reached that time of life when I realise that humanity does not necessarily want truth for the foundation of its happiness, but a whole-hearted faith, a belief sufficiently sublime to make the common Everyday significant in the march forward toward the Great Unknown. But I, alas! am not one of those who can merely believe because without belief my heart would be broken and my life would be drearier than the loneliest autumn twilight. I find a greater comfort in uncertain hope and a more uncertain faith. If I ever really and truly believed in spiritualism and then found, as so many people have done, alas! that the prophet of it was himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were, from all my spiritual bearings, to flounder hopeless and broken-hearted mid the desolate wastes of agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I am convinced that the sacrifice is for something which _I must believe_ in spite of all doubt; not entirely what I _want to believe_ because belief is full of happiness and comfort. I am of those who demand "all, or not at all." I cannot go on struggling to find security by just holding on to one false straw after another. I prefer to hope and to trust, and, although it is a dreary philosophy, I could not, if I would, exchange it for something which is false, however wonderful and beautiful.

[The end]
Richard King's essay: Spiritualism

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