ARTICLES BROUGHT TO YOU FROM SPIRITUAL NEWS
Barcelona Burning – And A Phoenix Rises From The Ashes
A curious item of irreligious history
By W.N. Eayes – Boston, Mass, USA, 1892
At half past ten o’clock in the morning of 9th October 1861, the great bell in the cathedral of Barcelona was tolling and the crowd that had collected on the Esplanada was waiting expectantly the consummation of act that had brought them to this place. On that day the ecclesiastical authorities were to perform, with all the pomp and ceremony of the Church, the solemn auto-da-fe. The spot chosen for the deed which was to be done, was that in which criminals convicted of capital offences suffered at the hands of the public executioner the penalty of their crimes.
The archbishop of Barcelona had already cursed, with bell, book and candle, the adherents of the new and dangerous heresy of Spiritualism; and now, to set the seal of the Church’s condemnation more plainly upon this damnable error, as it was called, he had ordered that the books relating to the subject should be burned in this place of infamy, by the public hangman. So it came about on that October morning the multitude had gathered to see the sentence executed upon three copies of the writings of Allan Kardec.
The great bell tolled the signal. Around the funeral pile the priestly dignitaries stood with banners flying and crucifix uplifted, and in the midst of anathema maranatha, the torch was applied; the last act of the Spanish Inquisition was done.
But He who sitteth in the heavens maketh the wrath and folly of men to praise Him. He turneth all their counsels to naught. In this moment, neither did He forsake His own. As the curling flames from the burning books leapt upwards towards the heavens their light shone all over Spain, and awoke to new life in every part of the kingdom, minds that had long lain dormant under the chilling influence of priestcraft and ecclesiastical tyranny. The demand for the condemned books enormously increased. Societies were formed for the investigation of the phenomena and the study of the philosophy of Spiritualism; and lastly, here is food for the thinker, just twenty-seven years after the auto-da-fe, which was to put an end to the heresy, and on the very spot where the hated volumes had been burned, there was held the first International Congress of Spiritualism. Can the guiding hand of the Spirit of Truth be seen in any result if not in this? Could retribution be more pointed?
Thirty-one years have passed since that day. From the ashes of the conflagration sprang a phoenix which has since covered, in her triumphant flight, the four quarters of the globe. Over whatever place her wings have spread, comfort has come to the mourning, strength to the weak, assured convictions to the doubting. Under the fostering care of the invisibles and by the heroic and noble co-operation of those mortals upon whom the light of Truth has shined, the small one has become great and the official lists of adhesions at the Second International Congress of Spiritualists held in Paris in September 1889, indicate that there were delegates from Societies in all parts of the world, representing more than 15,000,000 avowed Spiritualists.
The fires at Barcelona in 1861 made the Congress of Barcelona in 1888 possible. Neither the sneers of the press, the frowns of the law, nor the curses of the Church have stayed its march and today Spiritualism, recognised or unrecognised, is mightily working upon the minds and hearts of men, bringing them to nobler conceptions of God and creating juster ideas of man and his relations to his Maker and to his fellows and more rational and inspiring views of life both here and hereafter. |
