Suppressed Spirits

Nowhere in the world is Spiritualism so respectable as in England. There it rates as a real religion, has attracted some great names (Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Although England's 2,500 Spiritualist societies do not keep membership rolls, at least 250,000 believers go to Sunday-night meetings and probably 1,000,000 altogether call themselves Spiritualists. The Confraternity of Clergy, Ministers and Spiritualists claims that 100 Christian divines belong to the cult. Alarmed by this trend, the Archbishop of Canterbury more than four years ago appointed a committee to investigate Spiritualism.

Headed by Dr. Francis Underhill, then Dean of Rochester, now Bishop of Bath & Wells, the committee took testimony from psychic researchers, both believers and skeptics. Some committeemen secretly attended seances. Nine months ago the committee had its report ready. To the great dismay not only of His Grace of Canterbury but of his colleague the Archbishop of York, the report was not unfavorable to Spiritualism. That, at least, was the conclusion Spiritualists drew when it became known last month that the report had been suppressed. Said Fred Hawken, secretary of the Marylebone Spiritualist Association: "I am confident that the report would have appeared if it had been adverse."

The Bishop of Bath & Wells, hardly a dealer in magic and spells,* was said by Spiritualists last week to be "sympathetic or at least fair" toward Spiritualism. Another committeeman, Very Rev. Walter Robert Matthews, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, hinted at the tone of the report when he told the Society for Psychical Research that, discounting fraud and illusion, there remained a residuum of fact suggesting the possibility of life after death.

Said Editor Maurice Barbanell of Psychic News: "This suppression is just the usual trouble the Church of England has with anything unorthodox. It once opposed umbrellas on the basis of the Bible citation, He . . . sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. It is always 500 years behind the times, and this is the latest example." Said a representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury: "Further investigation is required."

* Like John Wellington Wells in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Sorcerer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.