Asas, Couch
Fredonia

SCIENTIFIC RELIGION

OR

HIGHER POSSIBILITIES OF LIFE AND PRACTICE
THROUGH THE OPERATION OF

WITH AN APPENDIX BY A CLERGYMAN OF THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

AUTHORIZED AMERICAN EDITION.

BUFFALO:

CHARLES A. WENBORNE.

1889.

Entered in the office of the Librarian of Congress, in the year 1889, by

CHAS. A. Wenborne.

The

UNIVERSITY

OF CHICAGO

LIBRARY

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

My husband, having been ill for a number of weeks, is as yet unable to put pen to paper; it therefore devolves upon me to write a short introduction to the present edition of "Scientific Religion."

Among the long and numerous criticisms which the book has called forth in this country, one objection is often repeated. The title is not considered suitable. My husband gave the book this name, not because he claimed to have fully discovered and formulated a new science, but because he considered that he had sufficient data upon which a religion might be founded, resting not merely on ephemeral emotion, or on blindly dogmatic faith, but on an experimental series of spiritual developments which may by degrees be reduced to law.

He believes that religion and science are in no wise antagonistic, provided religionists will recognize the fact that psychical phenomena are law-governed and not miraculous, and that scientists will recognize the fact that spiritual things are discerned, not by the senses of the flesh, but by a subsurface consciousness which can only be developed through a long and arduous spiritual training. Men do not read with their ears, nor listen with their eyes, neither can the scientist who learns through his surface senses become an authority upon that which can only be apprehended through an entirely different process of investigation. It is like the student with the microscope claiming authority to teach him who uses the telescope.

In this sense, therefore, my husband claims his book to be scientific because it sets forth in an orderly manner a theory which may be proved by experimental effort, provided the student have the courage, the endurance, the perseverance, and above all the self-abnegation, to carry his investigations to their ultimate results.

It may, perhaps, be of service to my husband's readers to know that the same knowledge had come to me quite apart from him, before I had met him or seen his books. On reading a letter to a mutual friend in Paris, before "Scientific Religion" was published, he recognized that we had much in common, so much that he decided to visit me in Southern Indiana. We found on comparing the manuscript I had written with his newly issued work, that the inspiration was identical with regard to the whole atomic theory of the universe, and the descent of the "Sympneumatic Life" in these latter days. This corroborative testimony given to a spiritual laborer on Mount Carmel, and a fellow-worker in a Western village of America, is not only valuable to ourselves, but we hope that it will be cheering evidence to others, and I am therefore led to make it public.

It further increases our Hope and Faith in the new dispensation, when we trace the mysterious way in which the hand. of God has led us one to the other, across thousands of miles, in order that we may become fellow-laborers in His Kingdom. Although bred in entirely different surroundings, and taught through entirely different means, we find that we have unconsciously been trained in a common school, and that our unity is not only absolute in thought and purpose, but even in the sensational consciousness revealing the dual life.

New and unlooked-for developments have been vouchsafed to us since our marriage, chief among them a realization of the exquisite union awaiting humanity when all jealousies and divisions shall have been merged in the supreme desire to become one with our fellow-creatures, and through them with our God. We realize that our union, instead of separating my husband from the sainted wife whose influence overshadowed him as he wrote the pages of this book, has, in

truth, bound him only the more closely, for she has become so atomically welded with me, that we, the wife in the unseen and the wife in the seen, have become as one; her life is poured through me as an instrument doubling my own. affectional consciousness.

Truly, when we come to realize that all sense of division between the fragments of God, called human beings, is an utterly false sense, then shall we be prepared for the in-pouring of the perfect, the universal life.

Whether God purposes to associate my husband and myself in long years of labor in the flesh, or whether we shall be in an even closer companionship as fellow-workers in the visible and invisible worlds, none can tell; but of this we are convinced, for each day's experience makes it more manifest, a new revelation is bursting upon the Earth, and wherever men and women are found ready, the consciousness of the "Sympneumatic" Life will develop in an ever-increasing force and purity.

ROSAMOND OLIPHANT,
(born Dale Owen.)

London, November 16, 1888.