THE "SPIRITUAL MAGAZINE " AND THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION. To the Editor of the "Spiritual Magazine." SIR, Mr. W. H. Harrison, in his letter in your March number, has the fol lowing passage :- "When the principle was first mooted of union instead of dissension among Spiritualists, of publicly elected representatives instead of self-appointed would-be leaders of Spiritualists, managing their own affairs, expending their own funds, and obtaining properly audited balance sheets, the Spiritualist newspaper supported all these principles. The Spiritual Magazine placed every stumbling block it could in the way of carrying out these great purposes, but did not succeed. Page after page of abuse was printed for months in your periodical," &c. It is true that several articles from the pen of Mr. William Howitt, in opposition to any national organization of Spiritualists, appeared in this Magazine. Whether Mr. Harrison has rightly described the principles which he opposed and the character of his opposition, I am not called upon to consider. The reader of those articles can determine this for himself. But surely if any man had a right to be fully heard upon this or any question affecting Spiritualism it was Mr. Howitt, and on no journal had he a stronger claim, or could his articles have appeared more appropriately than in the Spiritual Magazine, the oldest journal of the movement in England, and to which from the first he has been a constant contributor. Had his views been as favourable to national organization as they were adverse to it they would equally have been inserted. But if the pages of this Mazagine were open to him they were also open to those who differed with him. And, in point of fact, letters in reply to his appeared from the Honorary Secretary of the British National Association of Spiritualists, and from a Member of its Council, and no letter sent to the editor on the question was refused insertion; while he carefully abstained from taking any part in the controversy on either side. That the views of the Council of the British National Association of Spiritualists do not coincide in this matter with those of Mr. W. H. Harrison may be inferred from the circumstances (among others) that its then editor received a pressing invitation from it to join the Council, and to take part in the first public meeting in London under its auspices, and received a letter of thanks from it for his compliance with the latter request. He has since, also by invitation, taken part in subsequent meetings and public conferences convened by it. I may add that the only advertisement of the British National Association of Spiritualists sent to him was inserted free of charge. I exceedingly regret that Mr. W. H. Harrison, in vindicating himself, should have gone out of his way to have this fling at the Spiritual Magazine, and, indeed, that such matters should be introduced at all into spiritual journals, which I hope in future will find better occupation. THOMAS SHORTER. AN ACROSTIC. GOD, in His love, hath set thy Spirit free, E MANUEL! name to mortal man most dear; E. P. THE Spiritual Magazine. ΜΑΥ, 1876. HAFED THE FALSE. BY WILLIAM HOWITT, THE champions of Hafed against my strictures make a very feeble defence of it. As I expected, the main hook on which they hang their argument, is the fact that I have not read the book in bulk which I have assailed. I shall speedily knock that poor hook out of the wall. True, I have not read the book; and what is more, I never intend to read it. I know a snake in the grass when when I see it, and seeing it, don't go any nearer to it, except to knock it on the head. I did not read the book at large. It was not at all necessary. Its falsehood is on its summary, issued by its publishers in characters so large, that it may be read a mile off. What I read was the summary of the book, carefully and skilfully compiled by the publishers to show the main facts and dogmas of the work. It consists of twelve closely printed pages, lucidly and copiously giving all the chapters or sittings, and presenting, as it was intended to do, a very distinct and full idea of the volume. In fact, you have there the sum and substance-the bone and muscle of the book. If a man brings putrid flesh into the market, it is not necessary to eat it wholly up to discover its putrescence; your eyes and nose are sufficiently acute detectors of the carrion. If one could not see the very character and learn the contents of this book, it would be the fault of our own stupidity, not of the substantial details of the publishers. I do not pretend to say that it gave all the falsehoods which the volume contains; it may contain more, but it does not contain less than what I noted. Nobody pretends to dispute the facts which I selected from it; they cannot without stultifying the publishers. There they are, and I maintain-and more firmly T.S.-II. N a and solemnly than ever-that these facts stamp the book beyond all contradiction to be a gilded pill; a flowery snare; cunningly seductive stratagem of the arch enemy. The idea of my highly valued friend, Mr. S. C. Hall, that my attack was premature, and that of the writer in the Christian News, that I appeared to have written in hot haste, are not correct. What I wrote was in the most deliberate mood, and after careful study of the facts before me and after two months of further reflection, I am more convinced than ever, that the book is "a cunningly devised fable," such as our Lord warned us would come. If it were painful for my friend, Mr. Hall, to read my opinion of the mischievous character of the book, it was no less painful for me to be compelled from conscience and duty to condemn what he and others approved. But I consider that this question concerns the very foundation of the Gospel, and in such cases all personal feelings vanish before the demands of truth. "Offences must needs come, but woe unto him by whom they come." Woe to those lying spirits who, clothing themselves as angels of light, mislead the incautious lovers of Christ by flowery diction and well-feigned story. Mr. Hall is enraptured by the style of Hafed. But is not the art and ability of the deceiver demonstrated by the air of beauty and reality which he diffuses over his subject? Is the poison less deadly because conveyed in the most delicious wine? Is not the old serpent, who for 6,000 years has been going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down on it, a master of deceit such as no subtlety of genius of only a mortal date, could compete with in vain. What are the arts of the most practised Jesuits to his arts? In this case he has deceived no few, if not of the very elect, yet of the genuine lovers of Christ and of the truth. I have no hesitation in pronouncing Hafed, notwithstanding its fair seeming, the work of the great adversary of our faith. In fact, the Rev. Henry Browning, Rector of St. George with St. Paul, Stamford, quoted by Dr. Sexton in the Spiritual Magazine of April, says that he found in Hafed an explicit denial of our Lord's Divinity. What says my friend, Mr. Hall, to this? Does he think a volume which expressly denies our Lord's Divinity worthy a place on our tables and by our bed-sides with the New Testament-the inspired and revealed Word of God?" But let us see what the Bible, Old and New, says, from the beginning to the end, of Christ and His mission; and how far it agrees with the pretended visits of Christ to the heathen priests and philosophers for instruction in His youth. From end to end, by patriarchs, prophets and apostles, by God Himself and by Christ Himself, the Bible is one solemn, glorious, and unmis takable proclamation of Christianity, as the revelation of God and Christ direct from heaven, and absolutely independent of denying every aid from the wisdom or learning of man. It is one grand demonstration that Hafed is a lying spirit; that every such attempted engraftment on the history of the Saviour is a lie and a blasphemy. Open the Old Testament, and at the very fall of man you come upon God's promise of a Redeemer, saying to the serpent, "The woman's seed shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." (Genesis iii. 15.) This Redeemer was promptly appointed by God to be of the seed of Abraham: "And in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed." (xii. 3.) The whole was to be blessed in the seed of Abraham; not in that of heathen priests and philosophers, however wise. Abraham, as the channel of this promised Messiahship, was separated from the heathen nations, to be the father of the isolated race in whom the knowledge of the true God and His Christ should be scrupulously perpetuated. Abraham knew this well, and the profound responsibility which is laid upon him, and, therefore, when he sent his steward to seek a wife for his son Isaac, from his own kindred, he warned him solemnly, saying "Beware that thou bring not my son thither again." (Genesis xxiv. 3.) Abraham knew well that the Divine truth must be held in direct and undivided commission from heaven; that the heathen must have no access to it, or influence upon it, till in the fulness of time, it should be revealed by Christ. When the Israelites came into the land selected for them, in which, to keep alive the true faith, they were strictly prohibited all communion with the Gentiles, lest they should learn their abominations. (Deut. xxiii. 9.) To keep the true knowledge apart from and uncontaminated by the Gentiles, God sent continually angels and prophets, refeeding, refreshing the fire of his Divine law in their souls. Moses told them that "No nation ever had God so nigh them in all things; giving them statutes and judgments of that so righteous law, speaking to them directly out of the fire and out of the cloud; and doing such wonders." (Deut. iv. 7,8-12.) Thus open intercourse with God continued a thousand years, through David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Daniel, and the other prophets. Such was the zealous and long-during care of God to preserve free from heathen admixture the dispensation of Divine life which was one day to come upon the earth. Job knew that his Redeemer lived and would stand in the latter day on the earth. (chap. xix.) Lived then: was not a mere man to be borne at his appointed time. David saw that nations should serve him, and that the Lord would say to him "Sit thou on my right hand." David saw in the Messiah the equal of God: but when we come to Isaiah, the most privileged herald of Christ, the eloquent delineator of His life and character, of His glory and His sufferings, then bursts upon us the full splendour of the dispensation. It was God Himself who, in the form of His beloved Son would descend upon earth, and work out the salvation of collective man. It was out of Zion that the law was to go forth, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. (Isaiah ii. 3.) It was not from Egypt, or Persia, or India, or Greece, that it was to come, nor out of the smallest part of it-No, on the contrary, God distinctly denounced and punished any such importation. "Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help." In the same chapter (ii. 6.) it says, "Thou hast forsaken thy people, the house of Jacob, because they replenished from the East, and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and they please themselves in the children of strangers." They are under the most rigorous penalties to keep themselves strictly apart in religion from the East and the children of strangers. Yet this is the very thing which Hafed makes the Saviour Himself do-" replenish from the East.' So severely strict was God in this system of keeping Israel entirely to His own teaching, keeping them from all admixture with the heathen, or adopting their ideas, that on this ground He completely cast out and abandoned for ever the Ten Tribes of Israel. The reason assigned for their expulsion being that they "had walked in the statutes of the heathen,” “and had done as the heathen, whom the Lord cast out before them." (2 Kings xvii. 7—12.) Such was the constant policy of the Lord to prevent His people learning anything from the Gentiles, however wise in their own wisdom. Was it likely that He would send His Son, who in some inconceivable manner is also Himself, to learn of the heathen? Can the faintest intellect believe such a thing? When, therefore, Isaiah says, "The people that walked in darkness saw a great light," surely this was the light of the Gospel which had been so jealously kept pure from heathen contact, and no part of it could come from the Gentiles to Israel, but must flow from Israel to the Gentiles; and in what wonderful terms Isaiah then describes the Messiah: "Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace; of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end." (ix. 6.) Nothing can be at once more distinct or more amazing than this announcement of God Himself, Father and Son in mysterious |