SHEER DEVILTRY.
A few days after this last conversation, I was visited by Judge Preston,
whom I had slightly known in former years,—a man of very respectable
gifts and attainments, and of high standing in the community. He had
been a politician, lawyer, legislator, and was now a Justice of the
Supreme Court of his native State. He was moral, upright, candid, and
sincere, but like too many of his class, as well as of mine, had grown
up and lived without any fixed or determinate views of religion. To say
he had rejected Christianity, would be hardly just; but he had only
vague notions of what is Christianity, and if he did not absolutely
disbelieve a future state, he had no firm belief in the immortality of
the soul. He rather wished than hoped to live again. He had not long
before lost his wife, whom he tenderly loved, and her death had plunged
him into an inconsolable grief. He wept, and refused to be comforted. A
friend drew him one evening into a circle of Spiritualists or
Spiritists, and after much persuasion, induced him to seek through a
medium an interview with his deceased wife. What he saw and heard
convinced him, and he soon found that he was himself a medium—a writing
medium, I believe.
Judge Preston, in connection with a physician of some eminence, and his
friend Van Schaick, formerly a member of the United States Senate, a
prominent politician a few years since, and in religion a Swedenborgian,
had just published a work, of large dimensions as well as pretensions,
on Spiritualism and Spirit-manifestations, very well written, and not
without interest to those who would investigate the subject of demonic
invasion.
He said that he had called to see me in obedience to an order given him
by Benjamin Franklin, who assured him that I could, if I chose, give him
some information on the subject of the spirit-manifestations, for I had
had more to do with them than any man living.
I replied that I was very glad to see him; but, as to the conversation
on spirit-manifestations, I must decline taking part in it myself. I was
very weak, and I did not think I could give him any information of
importance. He could probably learn much more from the shades of
Franklin, William Penn, or George Washington, than from me. George Fox
and Oliver Cromwell could tell him many things; Swedenborg and Joe Smith
more yet. I advised him to call up the Mormon prophet, who could
probably give him more light on the subject than any one who had gone to
the spirit-world since Mahomet. I should, however, be most happy to hear
him and my highly esteemed friend Mr. Merton, who was present, converse
on the subject.
“Mr. Merton,” said the Judge, “I perceive is not a believer, and I am
not fond of conversing with sceptics.”
“Judge Preston,” said Mr. Merton, “can hardly call me a sceptic, and I
think, were we to compare notes, he would find me believing too much
rather than too little.”
“It may be so,” said the Judge, “but I feel as if I was in the presence
of an unbeliever, and an enemy of the spirits.”
“We must not place too much reliance on our feelings; and the habit of
carefully noting them, and taking them as our guides, is not to be
encouraged,” answered Mr. Merton. “Our feelings become warped, obscure
our perceptions, and mislead our judgment. I certainly do not deny the
facts, or the phenomena which you call spirit-manifestations, although I
may not, and probably do not, admit your explanation of them, nor the
doctrines concerning God, the universe, and man and his destiny, which I
find in your book.”
“But do you believe that spirits from the other world do really
communicate with the living?”
“That there is in many of the phenomena, I say not in all, which you
call spirit-manifestations, a real spiritual invasion, I do not doubt;
but whether the spirits are the souls of the departed, or really demons
or devils personating them, is a question to which you do not seem to
me, from your book, to have paid sufficient attention. You are
necromancers, diviners with the spirits of the dead. Necromancers are
almost as old as history. We find them alluded to in Genesis. Moses
forbids necromancy, or the evocation of the dead, and commands that
necromancers shall be put to death. In all ancient and modern pagan
nations, necromancy is found to be a very common species of divination.
The African magicians found at Cairo practise it even at the present
time, as we find testified to by an English nobleman and a French
academician, though by a seeing medium, not, as is the case with you, by
rapping, talking, and writing mediums. The famous Count de Cagliostro,
or rather Giuseppo Balsamo, at the close of the last century, professed
to enable persons of distinction to converse with the spirits of eminent
individuals, long since dead; and evocation of the dead has long been
practised at Paris by students of the University. You are real diviners,
attempting, by means of evoking the dead, to divine secrets, whether of
the past or the future, unknown to the living. You practise what the
world has always called divination, and that species of divination
called necromancy. Thus far, all is plain, certain, undeniable, and
therefore you do that which the Christian world has always held to be
unlawful, and a dealing with the devils. This, however, is nothing to
you, for you place the authority of the spirits above that of Jesus
Christ, and do not hesitate to make Christianity give place to
spiritism. But what I wish you to tell me is, the evidence on which you
assert that the invading or communicating spirits are really the souls
of men and women who once lived in the flesh?”
“They themselves expressly affirm it, and prove it by proving that they
have the knowledge of the earthly lives of the persons they say they
are, which we should expect them to have in case they were those very
persons.”
“The question, you will perceive, my dear Judge, is one of identity—a
question with which, as a lawyer and a judge, you must have often had
occasion to deal. Is the evidence you assign sufficient?”
“On my professional honor and reputation, I say it is.”
“Do you find the spirits always tell the truth?”
“No. I have said in my book they frequently lie.”
“Then the simple fact that a spirit says he is Franklin, Adams,
Jefferson, Washington, George Fox, William Penn, or Martin Luther, is
not a sufficient proof that he is.”
“I concede it. But I do not rely on his word alone. I examine the
spirit, and I conclude he is identically Franklin only when I find that
he has that intimate acquaintance with the earthly life of Franklin
which I should expect to find in case he really were Franklin.”
“But that intimate acquaintance does not establish the identity, unless
you know beforehand that the spirit could not have it, unless he were
Franklin. The spirits, I find by consulting your book, have told you the
most secret things of your own past life, and secrets which could by no
human means be known to any one but yourself. Yet the spirit who knew
these secrets was not yourself, but an intelligence distinct from you.
Now, if the spirit could show himself thus intimately acquainted with
your earthly life without being you, why might he not be intimately
acquainted with Franklin’s earthly life without being Franklin?”
“That is a point of view under which I have not considered the question.
But, nevertheless, I have subjected the spirits to severe tests, and
compelled them to confirm what they say by extraordinary visible
manifestations.”
“But the difficulty I find is, that there is nothing in those
manifestations that necessarily establishes the identity pretended; for
they do not necessarily establish the credibility of the power
exhibiting them, as you yourself allow, when you acknowledge that the
spirits are untruthful, and not unfrequently lie to you. Miracles
accredit the miracle-worker, establish his credibility, only when they
are such as can be performed only by the finger of God. If they are such
as can be performed by a created power, without special Divine
intervention, or such as might be performed by a lying spirit, they
prove nothing as to the credibility of their author. A messenger, or a
person claiming to be a messenger from God, performs a miracle which can
be performed only by the hand of God, and thus establishes his
credibility, because he proves by the miracle that God is with him,
vouches for what he says; and God, we know, can neither deceive nor be
deceived, and therefore will not endorse a deceiver. But prodigies,
though superhuman, which do not transcend the powers of created
intelligence, do not accredit the agent who performs them, certainly not
when it is conceded the agent can, and in many cases does, lie and
deceive. I must think, my dear Judge, that you have been hasty in
concluding the identity pretended. All you can conclude, from the
phenomena in the case, is, that there is present a superhuman spirit,
personating or pretending to be Bacon, Franklin, Penn, Swedenborg, or
some other well known person who has lived in the flesh, and is able to
speak and act in the character assumed.”
“My attention, I grant, has not been so specially turned to the question
of identity of the spirit with the individual personated, as it has been
to establishing the reality of the spiritual presence,” said the Judge.
“And you have been mainly intent on and carried away, I presume, by the
revelations you have received, or doctrines on the greatest of all
topics taught you by the spirits.”
“That is true. I have been much more impressed and confirmed by them
than by the visible or physical manifestations which I have witnessed.
The sublime doctrines and pure morality which the spirits teach have
chiefly won my conviction.”
“But these, however much they may seem to you, are very little to the
Christian believer. In their most favorable light, they do not approach
in sublimity and purity, human reason alone being judge, the Gospel of
our Lord. There is nothing new in your spiritual philosophy, and your
morality merely travesties a few principles of Christian morality. You
assert the immortality of the soul, never, in ancient or modern times,
denied by the heathen world; but the peculiar Christian doctrine of the
resurrection of the dead, and of future rewards and punishments, you do
not recognize. You hardly stand on a level with Cicero or Seneca. You
travestie the Christian doctrine of charity, or substitute for it a
watery philanthropy, or a sickly sentimentality. There is in your system
some subtilty, some cunning, chicanery, and ingenuity, but no deep
philosophy, no lofty wisdom, no broad, comprehensive principles, no
robust, manly virtue. The point on which you place the most importance
is that of infinite progression, which is an infinite absurdity; and
inasmuch as it denies the doctrine of final causes, denies God himself,
and is, in the last analysis, pure atheism.
“That some true and good things are said by the spirits, I do not deny.
The devil can disguise himself and appear as an angel of light. He is a
great fool, no doubt, but not fool enough to attempt to seduce men by
evil as evil. He must present falsehood in the guise of truth, and evil
in the guise of good, if he would do evil. It is not likely that he
would begin by shocking the moral sense of the community, and we should
expect him to recognize and appeal to the moral sentiments and dominant
beliefs of the men of the age; and this is all that you can say of the
teachings of the spirits. But, except the confirmation of the fact
taught by religion in all ages, that there are spiritual beings,
superior to man, who surround us and may invade us, nothing they teach
can be relied on, because their veracity is not established, and their
unveracious and lying character is conceded.”
“There are lying spirits, I concede, but all are not,” interposed the
Judge.
“Be that as it may, in what transcends your own knowledge, or is
verifiable by your own natural powers, you have no means of
distinguishing them, or of determining when the communication is true,
or when it is false. When a spirit unfolds to you a system of the
universe,—a system which comes not within the range of scientific
investigation,—you cannot say that he is not deluding you, and giving
you fairy gold, which will turn out to be chips or vile stubble.”
“You think us deluded, then?”
“In what you see and hear, no; in regard to what lies beyond, yes. I
believe you honest; I believe you really receive communications from
invisible spirits; I believe you fabricate, simulate nothing. I give you
full credit so far as regards the mysterious phenomena you relate; I
agree with you in the conclusion that these phenomena are produced by
spirits; but I regard as not proved the identity of these spirits with
the spirits who were once united as human souls to bodies; and what they
teach of God, the universe, and human destiny, I regard as a delusion—a
Satanic delusion, designed to seduce you from, or to prevent you from
returning to, your allegiance to God and his Christ.”
“That this is the fact,” said I, “I am quite sure. If any proof of
it were wanting, it might be found in the fact that these
spirit-manifestations are even by Judge Preston himself identified
with those which have always been opposed to Christianity, and by it
pronounced Satanic; and by the further fact, that they teach as
truth the principal doctrines which the movement party of the day
oppose to the Gospel. Take the doctrines set forth by the Seer
Davis, those which you find in the _Shekinah_, and even in Judge
Preston’s own book, and you find them in substance the prevailing
infidelity of the times, dressed out in a spiritual garb. I have
very good reasons for knowing that these spirit-manifestations have
been started for the very purpose of overthrowing Christianity by
means of an infidel superstition. The prime mover had precisely this
object, and no other.”
“We have,” said the Judge, “only your word for that. I regard these
phenomena from God.”
“So the devil wishes you to regard them, for he seeks, by means of them,
to carry on his war against the Christian’s God, and to get himself
worshipped as God,” said I.
“The devil,” said Mr. Merton, “can go only the length of his chain, and
that chain is much shorter than it was in old heathen times. He can do
only what he is permitted, and it is very possible that what he is now
doing will turn out to his signal discomfiture. It will give a serious
blow to the materialism and Sadducism of the age, lead men to believe in
the reality of the spirit-world, and when that is done, they will have
made one step towards believing in Christ. The age is so infirm as to
deny the existence of the devil; and even becoming able to believe once
more in the reality of his Satanic majesty, will be a symptom, slight
though it may be, of convalescence.”
“We,” remarked the Judge, “are no Sadducees. We believe in both angel
and spirit, in good angels and bad angels.”
“That is something,” said Mr. Merton; “and, if you open your hearts, and
keep them open to the light, you may in time believe more, and escape
the meshes in which Satan has now entangled you. Your great mistake is
in supposing that these good and bad angels are departed souls. I do not
say that departed souls may not revisit the earth; they have done so,
and they may continue to do so, but the human soul never becomes an
angel or a demon. It is all very well to say of a departed dear one, he
or she is an angel in heaven, but taken literally, it is never true. In
the resurrection, our Lord says the just are like the angels of God, in
the respect that they are neither male nor female, and neither marry nor
are given in marriage, but he does not say that they are angels; and the
Scriptures distinguish between the company of the angels and the spirits
of just men made perfect. Men were created a little lower than the
angels, and they are of a different order. The demons or devils are not
wicked souls separated from their bodies, and wandering on this or the
other side of the dark-flowing Acheron, but the angels who kept not
their first estate, and were cast out of heaven.
“These fallen angels, under their chief, Lucifer or Satan, carry on
their rebellion against God by seeking to seduce men from their
allegiance to their rightful sovereign. They can and do invade men,
because they are superior to men, and are malicious enough to do it. But
the good angels never do it, for they work not by violence, but by
moral, persuasive, peaceful, and gentle influences; and human souls
cannot do it, for the _strong_ keepeth the house till a _stronger_ comes
and binds him. Nothing remains then, my dear Judge, but to regard these
spirit-manifestations, in so far as real, as the invasions of Satan, as
produced, not by good angels or departed souls, but by the fallen
angels, called demons by the Gentiles, and therefore, all these
mysterious phenomena, in so far as they are not produced by natural
agencies, as sheer deviltry. This is the only conclusion to which I, as
a Christian philosopher, can come respecting them.”