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DIVINATION & AUGURY IN A MODERN LIGHT 195 that the unseen operators were often only human beings possibly less advanced than themselves in intelligence and morality, thought, the workers of oracles were Gods, oinniscient and kindly disposed, and took to worshipping them. This had a very evil effect on excarnated humanity. Spirits of unprogressed intelligence and unbounded conceit set themselves up as gods and pretended to omniscience and power : more than this, they kept up after death their earthly bias of personality, nationality and sectarianism. Now the spirit world has to progress from the personal and finite to the universal and infinite conceptions of individuality, and any practices that bound one down to the ties of bodily limitation were to be avoided. No wonder the higher organizing intelligence checked the practice of fortune-telling, though they keep up the warning voice of conscience and genius.
The spiritualists assert further belief than even this. Not only are their unseen personalities influencing us by impression for better or worse, and these personalities excarnated human beings of every grade of progression from the lowest depths of animalism to the highest perfection of purity, but also these beings can, under extraordinary circumstances, gather material from living bodies and make their astral bodies manifest to the flesh or materialize entirely or partially. Sometimes they materialize only their voice-organs, sometimes only their hands. Those who accept these facts can accept some of the records of augury, which We classified in our fifth group.' Direct voices warning
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