THERE are times when, looking only on the surface of things, one is
almost ready to regard Lowell as a sort of sacred city of Mammon,--the
Benares of gain: its huge mills, temples; its crowded dwellings, lodging-
places of disciples and "proselytes within the gate;" its warehouses,
stalls for the sale of relics. A very mean idol-worship, too, unrelieved
by awe and reverence,--a selfish, earthward-looking devotion to the
"least-erected spirit that fell from paradise." I grow weary of seeing
man and mechanism reduced to a common level, moved by the same impulse,
answering to the same bell-call. A nightmare of materialism broods over
all. I long at times to hear a voice crying through the streets like
that of one of the old prophets proclaiming the great first truth,--that
the Lord alone is God.
Yet is there not another side to the picture? High over sounding
workshops spires glisten in the sun,--silent fingers pointing heavenward.
The workshops themselves are instinct with other and subtler processes
than cotton-spinning or carpet-weaving. Each human being who watches
beside jack or power loom feels more or less intensely that it is a
solemn thing to live. Here are sin and sorrow, yearnings for lost peace,
outgushing gratitude of forgiven spirits, hopes and fears, which stretch
beyond the horizon of time into eternity. Death is here. The graveyard
utters its warning. Over all bends the eternal heaven in its silence and
mystery. Nature, even here, is mightier than Art, and God is above all.
Underneath the din of labor and the sounds of traffic, a voice, felt
rather than beard, reaches the heart, prompting the same fearful
questions which stirred the soul of the world's oldest poet,--"If a man
die, shall he live again?" "Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?"
Out of the depths of burdened and weary hearts comes up the agonizing
inquiry, "What shall I do to be saved?" "Who shall deliver me from the
body of this death?"
As a matter of course, in a city like this, composed of all classes of
our many-sided population, a great variety of religious sects have their
representatives in Lowell. The young city is dotted over with "steeple
houses," most of them of the Yankee order of architecture. The
Episcopalians have a house of worship on Merrimac Street,--a pile of dark
stone, with low Gothic doors and arched windows. A plat of grass lies
between it and the dusty street; and near it stands the dwelling-house
intended for the minister, built of the same material as the church and
surrounded by trees and shrubbery. The attention of the stranger is also
attracted by another consecrated building on the hill slope of
Belvidere,--one of Irving's a "shingle palaces," painted in imitation of
stone,--a great wooden sham, "whelked and horned" with pine spires and
turrets, a sort of whittled representation of the many-beaded beast of
the Apocalypse.
In addition to the established sects which have reared their visible
altars in the City of Spindles, there are many who have not yet marked
the boundaries or set up the pillars and stretched out the curtains of
their sectarian tabernacles; who, in halls and "upper chambers" and in
the solitude of their own homes, keep alive the spirit of devotion, and,
wrapping closely around them the mantles of their order, maintain the
integrity of its peculiarities in the midst of an unbelieving generation.
Not long since, in company with a friend who is a regular attendant, I
visited the little meeting of the disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Passing over Chapel Hill and leaving the city behind us, we reached the
stream which winds through the beautiful woodlands at the Powder Mills
and mingles its waters with the Concord. The hall in which the followers
of the Gothland seer meet is small and plain, with unpainted seats, like
those of "the people called Quakers," and looks out upon the still woods
and that "willowy stream which turns a mill." An organ of small size,
yet, as it seemed to me, vastly out of proportion with the room, filled
the place usually occupied by the pulpit, which was here only a plain
desk, placed modestly by the side of it. The congregation have no
regular preacher, but the exercises of reading the Scriptures, prayers,
and selections from the Book of Worship were conducted by one of the lay
members. A manuscript sermon, by a clergyman of the order in Boston, was
read, and apparently listened to with much interest. It was well written
and deeply imbued with the doctrines of the church. I was impressed by
the gravity and serious earnestness of the little audience. There were
here no circumstances calculated to excite enthusiasm, nothing of the
pomp of religious rites and ceremonies; only a settled conviction of the
truth of the doctrines of their faith could have thus brought them
together. I could scarcely make the fact a reality, as I sat among them,
that here, in the midst of our bare and hard utilities, in the very
centre and heart of our mechanical civilization, were devoted and
undoubting believers in the mysterious and wonderful revelations of the
Swedish prophet,--revelations which look through all external and outward
manifestations to inward realities; which regard all objects in the world
of sense only as the types and symbols of the world of spirit; literally
unmasking the universe and laying bare the profoundest mysteries of life.
The character and writings of Emanuel Swedenborg constitute one of the
puzzles and marvels of metaphysics and psychology. A man remarkable for
his practical activities, an ardent scholar of the exact sciences, versed
in all the arcana of physics, a skilful and inventive mechanician, he has
evolved from the hard and gross materialism of his studies a system of
transcendent spiritualism. From his aggregation of cold and apparently
lifeless practical facts beautiful and wonderful abstractions start forth
like blossoms on the rod of the Levite. A politician and a courtier, a
man of the world, a mathematician engaged in the soberest details of the
science, he has given to the world, in the simplest and most natural
language, a series of speculations upon the great mystery of being:
detailed, matter-of-fact narratives of revelations from the spiritual
world, which at once appall us by their boldness, and excite our wonder
at their extraordinary method, logical accuracy, and perfect consistency.
These remarkable speculations--the workings of a mind in which a powerful
imagination allied itself with superior reasoning faculties, the
marvellous current of whose thought ran only in the diked and guarded
channels of mathematical demonstration--he uniformly speaks of as
"facts." His perceptions of abstractions were so intense that they seem
to have reached that point where thought became sensible to sight as well
as feeling. What he thought, that he saw.
He relates his visions of the spiritual world as he would the incidents
of a walk round his own city of Stockholm. One can almost see him in his
"brown coat and velvet breeches," lifting his "cocked hat" to an angel,
or keeping an unsavory spirit at arm's length with that "gold-headed
cane" which his London host describes as his inseparable companion in
walking. His graphic descriptions have always an air of naturalness and
probability; yet there is a minuteness of detail at times almost
bordering on the ludicrous. In his Memorable Relations he manifests
nothing of the imagination of Milton, overlooking the closed gates of
paradise, or following the "pained fiend" in his flight through chaos;
nothing of Dante's terrible imagery appalls us; we are led on from heaven
to heaven very much as Defoe leads us after his shipwrecked Crusoe. We
can scarcely credit the fact that we are not traversing our lower planet;
and the angels seem vastly like our common acquaintances. We seem to
recognize the "John Smiths," and "Mr. Browns," and "the old familiar
faces" of our mundane habitation. The evil principle in Swedenborg's
picture is, not the colossal and massive horror of the Inferno, nor that
stern wrestler with fate who darkens the canvas of Paradise Lost, but an
aggregation of poor, confused spirits, seeking rest and finding none save
in the unsavory atmosphere of the "falses." These small fry of devils
remind us only of certain unfortunate fellows whom we have known, who
seem incapable of living in good and wholesome society, and who are
manifestly given over to believe a lie. Thus it is that the very
"heavens" and "hells" of the Swedish mystic seem to be "of the earth,
earthy." He brings the spiritual world into close analogy with the
material one.
In this hurried paper I have neither space nor leisure to attempt an
analysis of the great doctrines which underlie the "revelations" of
Swedenborg. His remarkably suggestive books are becoming familiar to the
reading and reflecting portion of the community. They are not unworthy
of study; but, in the language of another, I would say, "Emulate
Swedenborg in his exemplary life, his learning, his virtues, his
independent thought, his desire for wisdom, his love of the good and
true; aim to be his equal, his superior, in these things; but call no man
your master."