There Is Nothing New In Unbelief

by Al Benson Jr.

Several years ago, when Ronald Reagan was still in office the spin masters in the “news” media were all agog over stories about Nancy Reagan having consulted an astrologer.  The “news” media picked up that story and ran with it because there were probably some useful idiots in the media that thought Reagan was much more conservative than he really was and this sort of story was their chance to get their leftist licks in at him. So Nancy and her astrologer were headline news for a few days. Christians and conservatives weren’t happy with the revelations, but they should have known.  They goofed with Nixon and didn’t learn anything and mostly they still haven’t based upon what I see going on in the current Republican run for president. You almost wonder if those that direct their attentions would rather have Obama back than a genuine conservative, but I digress.

However, let us not be naive enough to think that Nancy Reagan’s consorting with an astrologer is anything new. Consorting with mediums, astrologers, spiritualists and witches is strictly forbidden in the Old Testament and that prohibition has not changed. It stands today. It stood in the 1800s, when spiritualism  started to become “fashionable” in this country. Spiritualism and these other related activities are the result of apostasy–the result of a people having been exposed to God’s truth and then ignoring or disbelieving it in favor of something more “contemporary.”

I recently did an article on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s adventures into spiritualism.  Several years ago, upon my return from a trip to eastern California and western Arizona, I found in my pile of mail, an article from a man in Oklahoma that dealt with Mary Todd Lincoln’s excursions into this same murky area. The article was informative and, after doing a little research, I found other sources that corroborated the article’s findings.

According to many sources (and there are more now than there were years ago) Mrs. Lincoln was emotionally unstable at times. When her son, Willie, died she struggled with that loss for several years and arrived at the point where she started visiting spiritualists in an effort to contact her dead son.

The book Abraham Lincoln–A Biography by Benjamin P. Thomas (Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y.) recorded a friend of the Lincoln’s writing the following: “Mrs. Lincoln told me she had been, the night before…out to Georgetown, to see a Mrs. Laury, a spiritualist and she had made wonderful revelations to her about her little son, Willie…Among other things she revealed that the cabinet were all enemies of the President, working for themselves, and that they would have to be dismissed and others called to his aid before he had success.” Very interesting, and not totally inaccurate. Makes you wonder where Mrs. Laury got her information.

Another reference, though a short one, referring to Mrs. Lincoln’s dabbling in spiritualism  is found in the book Who Was Who In The Civil War  by Stewart Sifakis.  This large book contains biographical sketches  of most prominent people in the country during the “late unpleasantness” both North and South. In the section on Mary Todd Lincoln it has noted: “The loss of the idolized Willie deeply disturbed her and she refused to enter the room in which he had died and been embalmed. She even held at least one seance in the White House to try to make contact with his departed soul.”

It reminds you of the verse in Ecclesiastes (chapter one, verse 9) which says: “The thing which hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

To be continued.

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