MESSAGES
FROM SPIRITS OF GREAT MEN FALL BELOW THEIR EFFORTS IN EARTH LIFE
Great minds are great, first because
of their own powers, and second because they are intensely susceptible
to the influence of spirits. They are centers—vortices—of spiritual
force.
Tennyson, according to his own words,
wrote in a state of trance; in other words, was intensely sensitive to
the thoughts of the spirit world. Were he to attempt to write through a
medium, if that medium was under perfect control, he would only rise to
his own unaided capabilities. If that medium was like himself when on
earth, capable of becoming, by wonderful susceptibility a center of
spiritual thought and power, then even
a greater than Tennyson would pour
forth enrapturing song.
Edison is a center for the expression
of the inventive skill of a spirit host. Were he a spirit and should
attempt to communicate some great invention, he might search the nations
over to find a single sensitive sufficiently like himself to receive it.
An objection: An individual receives
a blow on the cranium, injures an organ or faculty of the brain, and
becomes a raving maniac. A month or year afterward he has a surgical
operation performed on the affected organ, and immediately he is in
possession of all his former characteristics, but the intervening time
is a blank. Now, if this physical organism is only an instrument through
which the spirit acts, as a musician plays on a musical instrument, why
is it the spirit or ego knows nothing of what transpired during the time
its instrument or body was undergoing repairs?
The problem presented by the above
question has in various forms been the most perplexing that has met the
Spiritualist. The instances have furnished specious arguments for
materialists. They say triumphantly, when the
strong intellect succumbs to the
ravages of disease, or appears to decrease and expire with old age, that
the mind is a product of the physical body, and perishes with it. The song
of the bird might as well be listened for after the bird is dead, as
manifestations of mind after the body has perished!
