CONCLUSIONS.
Our conversations were continued, but they threw no additional light on
the main subject of our investigations, and I may well dispense myself
from the labor of recording them. I found my early suspicion confirmed,
and finally adopted Mr. Merton’s conclusion, that the class of phenomena
which had for several years occupied my attention, and to which,
according to the spiritists themselves, the recent spirit-manifestations
belong, are real, are facts which actually take place, and are, under
certain relations and to a certain extent, superhuman in their origin
and character. As these phenomena cannot be ascribed to God or to good
angels, they must be ascribed to Satan, to evil spirits, the enemies of
God and man.
I am well aware that this conclusion will be received by my brother
savans with great derision, and that they will look upon me as having
lost my wits. Even many who are not savans, who are sincere and firm
believers in Christianity, and who, in a general way, admit the fact of
Satanic invasion, will laugh at the supposition that the phenomena of
spirit-rapping, table-turning, &c., are any thing more than very
bungling pieces of humbuggery and sleight-of-hand. Be it so. Their good
or bad opinion, their esteem or contempt, is of very little importance
to me, who have not many days to live, and who have so soon to face
another and a far different Judge. He who fears God, cannot fear man. My
conclusion has not been hastily adopted, and it is, as far as I can see,
the only conclusion to which a Christian philosopher can come.
Mr. Cotton had preserved, what so many have lost, the Christian
tradition as to evil spirits, and was right in the main. His error was
in ascribing _all_ the phenomena exhibited by the practice of mesmerism
to the devil and his angels. Mesmerism, though abnormal, is to a certain
extent susceptible of a satisfactory explanation on natural principles.
Man, as Mr. Merton, after the elder Görres, maintained, has a twofold
development, the one normal, in which he rises to spiritual freedom by
union with God, the other abnormal, in which he descends to spiritual
slavery by descending to union with created nature. In the former he
tends continually to escape from the fatalism of nature, and to ascend
to the pure and serene atmosphere of spiritual freedom, in which the
spirit becomes supreme over the body. In the latter he follows the laws
of fatal or unfree nature, loses his spiritual dominion, becomes, or
tends to become, subject in his soul to his body, while the body falls
under the operation of the general forces of necessary nature, and
responds fatally, or without freedom, to the pulses of the external
universe.
In the ascending development, by the aid of grace and good angels, the
man, the Christian mystic, like St. Catharine, St. Theresa, or St.
Bernardine of Sienna, and so many others of the saints of the Church,
rises to spiritual freedom, and even to a certain extent, liberates the
body from the fatalism of nature. The body itself seems to enter into
the freedom of the spirit, and, through the free soul informing it, to
be able to resist the action of necessary or unfree nature, as the vital
principle enables the living body to resist and overcome the action of
chemical affinity. The body is as it were spiritualized, not absolutely
indeed, but partially, as if in anticipation of the resurrection, or
rather, as pointing to a resurrection and its glorious transformation
hereafter. It is baptized, participates, if I may so say, in the
sanctifying grace infused into the soul, becomes pure, and even when the
soul leaves it, emits a fragrant odor.[7]
-----
Footnote 7:
I do not forget here, nor do I intend to assert any thing against the
doctrine of the Holy Council of Trent, that concupiscence remains
after baptism, for the combat, or that the _fomes_ of sin remain, and
that as long as one lives there is the possibility of sin. The body,
in this life, is never wholly liberated and restored to its integral
state; but that it is liberated in some measure, and that it in the
saints, (in some saints at least,) in a degree participates, even this
side the grave, in the freedom of the soul, I think is undeniable.
-----
In the descending development, that is, in the abnormal development, in
which we turn our backs on our Maker, who is at once our Original and
End, our Creator and our Supreme Good, and tend in the direction from
him, our soul lets go its mastery, and our body falls under the dominion
of unfree nature, enters into the series of its laws, and is exposed to
all its necessary and invincible forces. We become not merely sensual,
but, in some sense, physical men, and act under and with the great
physical agents of the universe. We become feeble and strong as the
lightning whose bolt rends the oak, and is turned aside by a silken
thread. Now to this abnormal development, mesmerism, in my judgment,
belongs; and therefore, though abnormal, it is not necessarily
preternatural. It belongs not to healthy but unhealthy nature, and its
phenomena are never exhibited except in a subject naturally or
artificially diseased. I have never known a person of vigorous
constitution and robust health mesmerized. The experiments of Baron
Reichenbach were all made on persons in ill health, for the most part on
patients under medical treatment. The seeress of Provost was sickly, and
suffering from an incurable malady; and it may be asserted as a general
rule, that no one is a _subject_ of mesmerism whose constitution,
especially the nervous constitution, is in its normal state.
I have no doubt that many of the phenomena regarded by the vulgar as the
effect of Satanic invasion, are to be explained by reference to this
abnormal development, without the supposition of any direct agency of
evil spirits. The precise limits of the power of this abnormal
development we do not know, and therefore we are always to be
exceedingly slow to assume the direct invasion of the devil to explain
this or that extraordinary phenomenon, as Mr. Merton has already
explained. The error of Mr. Cotton was in not distinguishing between
abnormal phenomena artificially produced, and the phenomena of real
demonic presence. He asked too much of us, and we gave him nothing. He
failed to command from us the respect he deserved, and I am sorry for
it. He was a worthy man in his way, and far less superstitious, and far
more philosophical than those who thought it a mark of their superiority
to ridicule him. But he is gone, and has in his own denomination left
few behind who are worthy to step into his shoes.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to infer, from the fact that the proper
mesmeric phenomena are explicable on natural principles, that the
practice of mesmerism is lawful or not dangerous. It is an artificial
disease, and injurious to the physical constitution. It moreover
facilitates the Satanic invasion. Satan has no creative power, and can
operate only on a nature created to his hands, and in accordance with
conditions of which he has not the sovereign control. Ordinarily, he can
invade our bodies only as they are in an abnormal state, and by availing
himself of some natural force, it may be some fluid, or some invisible
and imponderable agent like electricity, or what Baron Reichenbach calls
od, and Mesmer animal magnetism, and the older magnetists called spirit
of the world. The practice of mesmerism brings into play this force, and
thus gives occasion to the devil, or exposes us to his malice and
invasions.
But, though it is unwise, as well as unscientific, to ascribe to Satan
what is explicable on natural principles, the contrary error is the one
which in our times is the most necessary to be guarded against. Nothing
is more unphilosophical than to treat the dark facts of human history as
unreal, or to attempt to explain them all without resort to demonic
influence. Many of the facts recorded, no doubt, never took place. Many
were the result of fraud, imposture, jugglery, and many are explicable
by reference to the abnormal development of human nature; but after
making all reasonable deductions for these, there remains a residuum, as
Mr. Merton has said, which it is as absurd to attempt to explain without
the action of evil spirits, as to explain the light of day without the
sun, or the existence and preservation of the universe without God. Not
otherwise can you ever succeed in explaining the introduction,
establishment, persistence, and power of the various cruel, filthy, and
revolting superstitions of the ancient heathen world, or of pagan
nations in modern times. No genuine philosopher will attempt to explain
them on natural principles alone.
They reveal a more than human power, and we have no alternative but to
ascribe them either to God or to the devil. We cannot ascribe them to
God, for they were too foul and filthy, too deleterious in their
effects, too debasing and enslaving in their influence, to be ascribed
to a good source. They were, then, from Satan, operating upon man’s
morbid nature, and permitted by Infinite Justice as a deserved
punishment upon the Gentiles for their hatred of truth, and their
apostasy from the primitive religion. Men left to themselves, to human
nature alone, however low they might be prone to descend, never could
descend so low as to worship wood and stone, four-footed beasts, and
creeping things. To do this needs Satanic delusion.
The same must be said of Mahometanism. The old theory, which made
Mahomet an out-and-out impostor, who said, deliberately, “with malice
aforethought,” “Go to now, let us make a new religion and impose it upon
the world,” no man, accustomed to philosophize, can for a moment
entertain. No man ever yet went to work deliberately to devise and
impose a false religion, or if any one ever did, he never succeeded. He
who founds a new religion is never an impostor in his own eyes. He works
“in a sad sincerity,” and imposes on himself before imposing on others.
Mahomet evidently believed in himself, in the sanctity of his own
mission, and worked from an earnest conviction, not from simple craft or
calculation. I am pleased to find the author of that admirable poem,
_Mohammed, a Tragedy in Five Acts_, a work of rare sagacity and true
poetic genius, rejecting the old theory of downright imposture. The
estimable author maintains that he was sincere in part, and in part
insincere. He was sincere in his assertion of the unity of God, and in
his hostility to idolatry, but insincere in the assertion of his
prophetic mission. I am not, however, satisfied with this. I do not deny
that men may be half sincere, and half knavish, or that they be sincere
and earnest as to the end, and wholly unscrupulous as to the means. But
in nothing was Mahomet more sincere than in his belief in his own
mission, and in the supernatural origin of the Koran. Never, without
that conviction, could he have inspired his followers with it, or have
himself persevered for so many years, amid the ill success and
discouragements that he experienced. His gratitude, evidently unfeigned,
to Cadijah, his first consort, and to Medina, which received him on his
flight from Mecca, cherished to the last moment of his life, proves that
he believed in his own mission.
The same thing is proved by his open vice and profligacy after his
success. A man conscious that he is playing a part, that he has a
character to sustain, that he is acting the prophet, would have been
more circumspect, more wary in the indulgence of his lusts, and affected
a life of more rigid asceticism. He would have been on his guard against
scandalizing his followers, and would never have dared insert in his
Koran those scandalous provisions which specially exempt him from
obedience to the laws which he professed, by Divine authority, to impose
upon his followers. Imposture can never afford to abandon itself openly
to the empire of the passions. Heretics are usually more careful than
the orthodox in regard to appearances. They usually affect great purity
of life, a decorous exterior, and a grave and sanctimonious face and
tone. Hypocrisy is austere, maintains in its look and tone an awful
gravity, and never relaxes in public. It is only innocence that dares be
light and frolicsome, and yield to its varying impulses. Nobody is so
shocked with the imaginary impurities of Convents and Nunneries as your
debauched old sinners, steeped in corruption, and the miserable slaves
of their own morbid passions and prurient imagination.
What deceives the excellent and gifted author of the Tragedy, is the
fact that so far as Mahomet asserted the unity of God against the
polytheism of the unconverted Arabs, and opposed idolatry, he was on the
side of truth and religion, and consequently was so far opposed to
Satan. He thinks that thus far he could not have been under the
influence of an evil spirit. Has he forgotten the demon of Socrates? Has
he forgotten that the devil can disguise himself as an angel of light?
Paganism, in its old form, was doomed. Christianity had silenced the
oracles and driven the devils back to hell. How was the devil to
reëstablish his worship on earth, and carry on his war against the son
of God? Evidently only by changing his tactics, and turning the truth
into a lie. There is nothing to hinder us from believing that Satan
himself taught Mahomet the unity of God, and inspired him with horror of
the prevailing forms of idolatry. The strong keeps the house, as our
Lord says, till a stronger binds him and enters into possession. The
devil would expel polytheism and the grosser forms of idolatry, no
longer in harmony with the spirit of the times, that he might make the
last state worse than the first; and whoever has studied history knows
that Mahometanism has proved a far more formidable enemy to Christianity
than was the paganism braved by the Apostles. The truths of the Koran
are introduced only to sanction its errors, and its moral precepts, many
of which are good, only to give countenance to its immorality, to its
Satanic abominations.
Mahomet in his life was subject to what we call in these days the
mesmeric trance, as was Socrates. He would often be suddenly arrested,
fall prostrate upon the earth, and in this attitude and in these trances
he professed to receive his revelations. Here are evidently the mesmeric
phenomena which in some form always accompany the presence and invasion
of demons. Mr. Miles has introduced these, and described them with great
spirit, truth, and propriety, in the opening scene of his tragedy. The
time is the night of Al Kadir, the place is the Cave of Hara, three
miles from Mecca, where Mahomet was accustomed to resort and spend much
time alone. Mahomet is seen prostrate upon the slope of a rock,
resembling a rude pedestal, his face concealed by his turban. He is
visited by Cadijah, his affectionate and beloved wife. To her he seems
asleep. She calls him, she approaches him, she embraces him, and tries
to awaken him. All in vain. Finding her efforts fruitless, she exclaims,
“Alas, this is not sleep! Some evil spirit
O’ershadows thee.”
When finally the vision departs, and Mahomet awakes, he breaks out,
“Gone! gone! celestial messenger,
Angel of light!
. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . Yes—’twas there—’twas there
The angel stood, in more than mortal splendor,
Before my dazzled vision!—I have heard thee,
Ambassador from Allah to my soul,
Have heard and will obey.”
To the question of Cadijah, “What mystery is this?” he answers,
“Ah! the tremendous recollection bursts
So vividly upon me, that my tongue
Grows cold and speechless. I was here alone,
Expecting thee, when, suddenly, I heard
My name pronounced, with voice more musical
Than Peri warbling in my ear.
Ravish’d, I turned, and saw upon that rock,
Resplendent hovering there, an angel form;
I knew ’twas Gabriel, Allah’s messenger.
Celestial glories compassed him around;
Arched o’er his splendid head, his glistening wings
Shed light, and musk, and melody. No more
I saw—no more my mortal eye could bear.
_Prone on my face I fell_, and, from the dust,
Besought him quench his superhuman radiance.
‘Look up,’ he said; I stole a trembling glance;
And then, a beauteous youth, he stood and smiled.
Then, as his ruby lips unclosed, I heard—‘Go
teach what mortals know not yet,—THERE IS
NO GOD BUT ONE—MOHAMMED IS HIS PROPHET!’
E’en as he spoke, his mantling glories burst
With such transporting brightness, that, o’erawed,
I sunk in dizzy trance, which still might thrall
My inmost soul, had not those impious names,
Breathing of hell, dispelled it.”[8]
-----
Footnote 8:
_Mohammed_, a Tragedy in Five Acts. By George H. Miles. Boston, 1850,
pp. 1-6.
-----
Here are presented, very clearly, the phenomena which precede or
accompany the demonic approach and invasion. When the false god took
possession of Balaam, he threw him to the earth; and it was in a sort of
somnambulic state that he prophesied, or rather that the demon in him
was compelled, against his will, to bless instead of cursing Israel, and
to prophesy his glory. “There is no God but one,” in the sense intended
by Mahomet, and understood by his followers, is by no means a truth, for
in that sense, it denies not merely polytheism, but was intended more
especially to deny the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The Koran
repeatedly so explains it, and therefore the unity of God, as taught by
the false prophet, is not a truth but a lie, and the Mahometans worship
not the true God, but a false god, as do all who deny that God is at
once three distinct persons in one Divine Essence or Being.
Nothing is less philosophical than the tendency in modern times,
especially since the time of Voltaire, to explain great effects by petty
causes, as the peace of Utrecht by Mrs. Masham’s spilling a little water
on the Duchess of Marlborough’s dress. The stream cannot rise higher
than the fountain, or the effect exceed the cause. A little fire can
kindle a great matter, but that little fire is the occasion, not the
cause of the wide-spread conflagration. Nothing more surely indicates a
narrow, superficial, and unphilosophical spirit than the attempt, as is
the case with most writers, to explain the origin, progress, and power
of Mahometanism by the fanaticism, the cunning, the craft, or the
superior genius and ability of Mahomet, even though we suppose him aided
by a Jew and a Nestorian monk. There were fraud, craft, trickery, and
all the means of imposition employed; yet never can they suffice alone
to account for the terrible phenomena of Islamism, which, for twelve
hundred years has waged battle with the cross, and possessed itself of
the fairest regions of the globe. Whoever studies it calmly and
profoundly must come to the conclusion that there has been at work in it
a more than human power, and that, if not, as the Moslems believe, from
God, it must be from the devil.
Do not ascribe so much to mere human power, wisdom, craft, fraud,
dexterity, or skill. These are far feebler than it is customary in our
days to regard them. In general men are duped themselves before they
undertake to dupe others. Never yet was there a noted heresiarch who did
not believe in his own heresy, and hence there is no instance on record
of a real heresiarch, the originator and founder of a new heresy, being
reclaimed to the orthodox faith, unless we except the doubtful case of
Berengarius. I have never been able to sympathize with those Catholic
writers who would persuade us that the Protestant Reformation originated
in petty jealousies and rivalries between the Dominican and Augustinian
monks. That view is too narrow and superficial; nor can we ascribe it to
the pride, the vanity, and the ambition, or the intelligence, the
virtue, the wisdom, and the sanctity of the monk Luther. Luther was a
man terribly in earnest, a genuine man, and no sham, as Carlyle would
say; and so were all the prominent chiefs in that terrible movement of
the sixteenth century. The cool, subtle, dark, persevering Calvin, the
fiery, energetic, and ferocious John Knox and their compeers were no
petty tricksters, no _dilettanti_, no shrewd calculating hypocrites.
They were terribly in earnest; they believed in themselves; they
believed in the spirit that moved them, that spoke in their words, and
struck in their blows against the old Papal edifice. It is nonsense to
repeat, age after age, that the denial by the Holy See of the divorce
solicited by Henry the Eighth, caused the separation of England from
Catholic unity. That wily and lustful monarch, who must live in history
as the “wife-slayer,” found in that denial only an occasion of
withdrawing his kingdom from its spiritual subjection to Rome, and of
uniting in the crown the pontifical with the royal authority. Whoever
looks beneath the surface of things, whoever studies, in a truly
philosophical spirit, that fearful Protestant movement, must recognize
in it a superhuman power, and say that either the finger of God, or the
hand of the devil is here, and that its chiefs must have been inspired
by the Holy Ghost, or driven onward by infuriated demons.
So, it seems to me, we must reason with regard to Cromwell and the stern
old Puritans, fierce and terrible as the old Berserkirs from the North.
There was something superhuman in the English rebellion and revolution
of the seventeenth century; and if Cromwell and his party were not
specially moved by the Holy Spirit, as they believed, they must have
been animated and driven on by the old Norse demon. So also of the old
French Revolution, and of all those terrible convulsions which have
ruined nations and shaken the world. Men are indeed in them, with their
wisdom and their folly, their beliefs and their doubts, their virtues
and their vices, but there is more in them than these. There is in them
the fierce conflict of invisible powers, ever renewing and carrying on
that fierce and unrelenting war which Lucifer and his rebel host dared
wage against the Most High, and which must continue till time be no
more. All history, if we did but understand it, is little else but the
history of the conflict between these invisible powers; and till we
learn this fact, in vain shall we pride ourselves on our philosophies of
History.
Carlyle has well exposed the shallow philosophy and absurd theories of
our popular historians. Would he had himself gone deeper, and recognized
the demonic and also the providential element in history, and not have
attempted to explain its philosophy on human nature alone. Your Odins,
Thors, Socrateses, Mahomets, Cromwells, Bonapartes, are not simply
exponents of true, living, energetic manhood, and owe not their success,
or their place in history to their clear perception and their
instinctive adherence to the laws of true and genuine nature, as Carlyle
would have us believe. The nature he bids us worship is the devil, the
dark, subterranean Demon, that seizes us, blinds our eyes, and carries
us onward, whither we know not, and by a power which we are not. It is
the demon of the storm, the whirlwind, and the tempest, the volcano and
the earthquake, and the Carlylean heroes are energumenes, Berserkirs,
who spread devastation around them, who quaff the blood of their
enemies, from human skulls, in the orgies of Valhalla, and leave as
their monuments the ruins of nations. Carlyle has himself been touched
with a German devil, and received a slight manipulation from the old
Norse demon. But he has done well to say, “No sham can live;” he might
have added, No sham is or can be productive. It is not by petty passions
and petty tricks that nations are shaken to their centre, and fearful
revolutions, which change the face of the world, are effected. Only what
is real is, and only what is, can do. Under all the heavings and
tossings of nature, there is a reality of some sort; and only by means
of that reality can you explain the historical phenomena that arrest
your attention.
I have just been reading, in order to relieve my weariness, Sir Walter
Scott’s _Woodstock_, not surely one of his best, but one of his most
serious novels, in which he has endeavored to be something of the
philosopher, as well as the unrivalled romancer. Poor man! wizard of the
north, as he has been called, his magician’s wand fails him here. How
was he, with the shallow philosophy of the eighteenth century, to
explain such a phenomenon as Cromwell and his Major Generals, those
furious Berserkirs, true descendants of the old Vikings of the North? To
say that Oliver and the Independents were mere long-faced, psalm-singing
hypocrites, moved only by the ordinary motives and passions of human
beings, is a libel on history. Long-faced, sanctimonious, and
long-winded, famous for their dark cloaks and steeple-crowned hats,
their psalm-singing, their Biblical phraseology, their speaking through
the nose, and turning up the white of the eye, they certainly were; but
whoso supposes they were so by virtue of subtle, calculating hypocrisy,
knows them not. Whatever else Cromwell and the Puritans were, they were
no hypocrites; their manners, their dress, and address, however
objectionable we may choose to regard them, were not affected to cloak
conscious vice or iniquity, or to deceive either their friends or their
enemies. Never were men more serious, more deeply in earnest; and it was
in obedience to what they held to be the voice of God that they
preached, fasted, sung psalms, prayed, and—kept their powder dry. It was
not by their snivel, their nasal twang, their Biblical phraseology, nor
by an affectation of piety and dependence on the Lord, nor by any form
of hypocrisy or cant, that they made mincemeat of the drinking, swearing
rakehell, but brave and loyal cavaliers at Marston Moor, Edgehill, and
Worcester. A chorus of spirits, black or white, joined in their
psalm-singing, and invisible powers sped their balls to the hearts of
their enemies, and gave force to the well-aimed strokes of their swords.
Certainly the hand of Providence in the affairs of nations is not to be
denied, and certain it is that God visits nations in mercy and in
judgment. A sound theology, an enlightened piety sees the providence of
God in the growth of the infant colony, in the prosperity of states, and
the revolutions and fall of empires. But he works by ministries; and the
most terrible exhibitions of his wrath, the most fearful of his
judgments are those in which he lets loose the demons, and permits a
people to fall under their power. These demons work their own will, but
are at the same time the executors of his vengeance—of his justice. The
good, even in the greatest national calamities, are never injured, for
nothing but sin ever injures; but the wicked are punished. They had
chosen the devil for their master, and it is fitting that he whom they
had falsely worshipped as God, who is no God, should be made the
instrument of their punishment. The national sins of England were great;
her kings had betrayed their trust—had led the people into error, and
forgotten what they owed to the King of kings and Lord of lords. The
Lord had a controversy with them, and he permitted the old Puritans to
triumph over them; and whether they did so by simple human strength, or
by the willing assistance of evil spirits, inflaming them with a
preternatural courage, and driving them on by a preternatural fury, the
principle is one and the same. So also of France, in her terrible
revolution of 1789, and of Europe in 1848.
I read with sorrow the puny attempts of the author of _Woodstock_ to
explain away, as mere jugglery or trickery, the strange phenomena which
disturbed the sequestrators of the Royal Lodge. He would, on the
strength of an anonymous pamphlet, explain them as a trick played off
upon the parliamentary commissioners by Dr. Rochecliff, Albert,
Tompkins, Joceline, and Phebe. It may have been so; but the machinery he
supposes is clearly inadequate to explain all the mysterious phenomena
he acknowledges. The trick could hardly have failed, if trick there was,
to be detected either by Colonel Everard or the Commissioners. But even,
if his explanation of that particular case is to be accepted, or if a
thousand instances are to be referred to trickery, it says nothing as to
the general fact of demonic vexations and invasions. As Christians, we
know that we are constantly beset by evil spirits, and the mysterious
occurrences at the Royal Lodge of Woodstock, even if real, are only a
step beyond ordinary Satanic temptations, as possession is only a
further extension of obsession.
If much harm is done by superstition, perhaps even more is done by the
denial of all demonic influence and invasion, and the attempt to explain
all the so-called Satanic phenomena on natural principles. It generates
a sceptical turn of mind, and the rationalism resorted to will in the
end be turned against the supernatural facts of religion, and the same
process which is adopted to explain away the Satanic prodigies, will be
made use of to explain away the miracles of the Old and New Testaments.
In fact it has been so done, and we have seen grave commentators
laboring, as they believed, to explain these very miracles on natural
principles; thus reducing Christianity from its high character of a
supernatural religion to a system of mere naturalism, at best a simple
human philosophy, perhaps inferior to many other systems. Jefferson,
writing to Priestley, speaks, as he supposes, very well of our Lord, but
disputes his merits as a philosopher, and says, in substance, “Jesus was
a spiritualist, I am a materialist.” How many men in our days regard
themselves as very commendable Christians because they recognize the
beauty and worth of certain moral precepts of the Gospel, precepts which
are only the universal dictates of reason, and recognized by the common
sense of all nations—heathen as well as Christian! Thomas Paine was more
honest, for though he could say Jesus taught very pure morals, which
have never been excelled, he refused to call himself a Christian. I have
met many a professed minister of the Gospel who would find Tom Paine’s
creed, meagre as it was, too big for him: “I believe in one God and no
more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe that
religious duties consist in justice and mercy, and endeavoring to make
our fellow-creatures happy.” The Gospel, as it is preached by some
“godly” ministers in New England, is too meagre to have satisfied a
Rousseau, or even a Voltaire.
In the case of the Spiritists of our own times, much harm is done by
telling them the spirit-manifestations are all humbuggery, imagination,
fraud, or trickery. These people know that it is not so. They know that
they are not knaves, that they practise no trickery, and have no wish to
deceive or be deceived. They are not conscious of any dishonest
intentions, and they have no reason to think that they are less
intelligent or less sharp-sighted than they who abuse them as impostors,
or ridicule them as dupes. The worst way in the world to convert a man
from his errors is to begin by abusing him, and denying what he knows to
be true. Except in the teachings of God, or what is the same thing, the
teachings of men appointed, instructed, and supernaturally assisted by
him to teach, we never find unmixed truth, for to err is human; and on
the other hand, we never find pure, unmixed falsehood. Unmixed falsehood
is universal negation, and no negation is possible but by an
affirmation. Error is the misapplication of the true. These Spiritists
are deceived, are deluded, I grant, for they are the sport of a lying
and deceiving spirit; but they are not deceived or deluded as to the
phenomena to which they testify, nor, as a general thing, do they wish
to deceive others. Among them there may be knaves and fools, there may
be quacks and impostors, but I have no reason to suppose that the mass
of them are not as intelligent and as honest as the common run of men,
as the world goes. Their error is in their explication of the phenomena,
not in asserting the reality of the phenomena; and to begin by telling
them that no such phenomena have ever occurred, that the
spirit-manifestations are all humbug, is, to say the least, a very
unwise proceeding. If you are a minister of religion, by doing so you
are only playing into the hands of the devil, for you outrage the
natural sense of justice and truth which these people still retain, and
dispose them in turn to look upon religion itself, as held by the
Christian Church, as a humbug.
I have known many apparently sincere and pious persons driven to
apostasy by the scepticism with regard to the phenomena they have
themselves seen. The very worst way in the world to deliver ourselves or
others from the power of Satan, is to deny his existence. Resist the
devil, and he will flee from you; laugh at him, if you will, and he will
hie himself back to hell, for he cannot endure contempt; but deny his
existence, persuade yourselves that there exists no devil, and he in
turn will laugh at you, and take quiet possession of you. Oppose the
Spiritists we certainly should, but not where they are strong and we are
weak. The true way is to concede the facts, concede all that they really
and honestly observe, concede even their mysterious and superhuman
character, and then explain to them their principle and origin, and show
them that they proceed not from good angels, even when apparently they
are pure and unobjectionable, but from the enemies of Christ, from Satan
and his angels carrying on, with devilish malice, their never-ending war
against Heaven.
Such at least are the conclusions which I have been forced in my own
mind to adopt, and such, it seems to me, all must adopt who study the
question in the light of Christian theology. I am at least honest in
these conclusions, and, though I may err now, as I have so often erred
before, yet I am not more likely to err than others. Err indeed I may,
but, if I must err at all, I would rather err on the side of
superstition, than on the side of scepticism and irreligion.