CONVERSION.
My story, like my life, draws to its close. The change which my
religious views have undergone has been more than once hinted. On
religion, as on most other subjects, I no longer think or feel as I did
in the day when I fancied I possessed more than human science, and
wielded a more than human power.
I grew up without any decided religious doctrines, though inclining to
what was called Liberal Christianity, that is, a Christianity kept up
with the times, and conformed to the ever-changing spirit of the age. I
was not an avowed unbeliever; I was not an open scoffer; I even thought
it well to pay a decent external respect to religion, to attend church
when convenient, and to patronize the Gospel, providing it was not
preached with too much earnestness and devotedness, and not promulgated
as a law which must govern all my thoughts, words, and deeds, but was
proposed simply as a speculation, as a theory, or as an opinion, which I
was at liberty to accept, modify, or reject, as seemed to me good.
Before my mesmeric experiments and acquaintance with Priscilla, I was a
sort of Rationalist, accepting Christianity in name, and explaining its
miracles and mysteries on purely natural principles. Afterwards, after
my philanthropic schemes had miscarried, my worship of humanity as God
had proved a failure, and my belief in progress had expired in the
crucible of experience, I fell into a sort of despair, and would fain
have persuaded myself that I believed in nothing. If I did not
absolutely deny God, my belief in him became so obscured by the mists of
my speculations and the corruptions of my heart, that I was in reality
no better than an atheist. The devil was a bugbear invented by the
priests, and men were mere motes in the sunbeam. I have already
described the state into which I fell—a state from which I would risk my
life to save my bitterest enemy.
Prior to the absolute crushing of all my hopes, which followed my having
finished all the work I had marked out for myself to do, and found it
nought, I regarded myself as a Free-Thinker, because I had either
allowed myself to think, or had made myself acquainted with the thoughts
of others, against religion. My freedom and independence of mind were in
denying, not in believing. I was not free to think in favor of religion,
nor sufficiently independent to believe Christianity, and labor in
earnest to serve God and save my own soul. To have done so would have
been sheer superstition, would have been sinking myself to the level of
the vulgar, and to have exposed myself to the gibes and sneers of my
scientific associates.
Nevertheless, my unbelief, my scepticism, and my radicalism, were a sort
of violence done to my own better feelings and graver judgment. They
never came natural to me, and I am sure I was never cut out for a
philanthropist or a world-reformer. There was always something in the
views and practices of my associates that disgusted me, and often was I
obliged to hold my nose when they were discussed, as it is said Satan
does when he encounters a confirmed sensualist. I had no natural relish
for “the Newness,” and when at worst retained a secret reverence for the
past, and dwelt with pleasure on the time-hallowed, over which for ages
had flowed the stream of human affection, human joy, and human sorrow. I
stood in awe before the shadow of the hoary Eld, and wished always to
find myself bound by indissoluble ties to what had gone before me, as
well as to what might come after me. Half in spite, and half under the
charm of Priscilla, I embraced philanthropy, but not inwardly, for her
sophistry never for a moment deceived me. Never was there a moment when
I did not see through the philanthropists, radicals, and revolutionists
with whom I associated, or when with a breath I could not have swept
away their cobweb theories; never for a moment was I deceived as to the
actual character of the devilish movements I myself set on foot.
It may be thought strange, such being the fact, that I could or would
have played the part I did. It might be enough to say Satan had power
over me; but I associated with the prophets of “the Newness,” and led on
the movement, partly because I did not know what else to do, and partly
because I could not endure absolute idleness. I saw indeed the
destructive character of my movements, but I cherished a hope that by
making things worse, I should prepare the way for making them better.
You must demolish, I said, the old edifice, and clear away its rubbish,
before you can erect a new, a more beautiful, or a more convenient
structure on its site. I accepted, after a manner, the opinions and
theories of the Neologists, not because they satisfied me, but because I
knew not what else to accept; and, though not true, they might conduct
me to truth. The road to the temple of Purity runs through the Bower of
Bliss, the path to heaven crosses the devil’s territory, and error is
the prodrome of truth. Such were the maxims I adopted, not indeed
because I believed them, but because they were convenient, and because I
saw not otherwise how to justify myself, or solve the problem of
experience. I adhered to my philanthropy, infidelity, and radicalism,
not because I loved or believed them, but because I saw nothing true in
the principles and reasonings I was accustomed to hear opposed to them.
The religious and conservative people I knew, and I supposed them the
most enlightened and the least irrational of their class, seemed to
believe and retain either too much or too little. On one side they
seemed to accept and act on the principles which I and my party
professed, and on the other to insist on conclusions which could be
logically obtained only from a contradictory set of principles, and
which they with one voice condemned as false, mischievous, and leading
only to superstition, idolatry, and spiritual thraldom. Their denials
struck me as too sweeping for their affirmations, and their affirmations
as quite too broad for their denials. I found myself in the unpleasant
predicament, either of divinizing humanity, or of embracing a religion
which they held to be worse than the rankest infidelity.
For a time, while I was in good health, while I possessed and wielded a
more than human power, and had not yet exhausted the world in which I
did believe, or despaired of recasting it after my own image, I got
along without much difficulty; but when I no longer saw any object in
life, when there was from my own point of view no longer any work for me
to do, and I was thrown back on my own failing godship, and left to
devour my own heart, I became wretched, more wretched than I can
express. The blow which prostrated me, and the disease which it
developed, and brought me to handgrips with Death, changed the current
of my thoughts, but unhappily only to render them for the time still
more painful. “You know, O Socrates,” says Cephalus in Plato’s
_Republic_, “that when a man thinks that he is drawing near to death,
certain things, as to which he had previously been very tranquil, awaken
in his bosom anxiety and alarm. What has been told him of hell and the
punishment of the wicked, the stories at which he had formerly laughed
or mocked, now fill his soul with trouble. He fears that they may prove
true. Enfeebled by age, or brought nearer to the frightful abodes, he
seems to perceive them with greater clearness and force, and is
therefore disturbed by doubts and apprehensions. He reviews his past
life, and seeks what evil he may have done. If he finds, on examination,
that his life has been iniquitous, he awakes often in the night,
agitated and shuddering, as a child, with sudden terrors, trembles and
lives in fearful expectation;” or, as I may add with St. Paul, “a
certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation.” As I
found myself on my dying bed, things began to wear to me a very
different aspect from what they did when I was in the heyday of youth,
in the full flow of my animal spirits, or filled with the vain and
delusive hope of subjecting all nature to my will. The lessons which I
had heard in my childhood, and which I had ridiculed or forgotten, came
back with startling power; and in my lonely reflections I was forced to
ask what, if that which they tell us of death and judgment, of heaven
and hell, the rewards of the good and the punishment of the wicked,
should turn out to be true?
My trouble, my anxiety, and my alarm increased in proportion as Mr.
Merton forced upon me, by his conversations, the full conviction that I
had really been dealing with devils, that Satan is really a personal
existence, and that I had made a covenant with him, and had acted under
his influence. My rationalism had led me to question his personal
existence, and to attempt to explain the demonic phenomena without the
supposition of his interposition. Denying Satan, I had denied Christ;
and being now forced to recognize Satan, I was forced to confess Christ,
and all the Christian mysteries. By the same process by which I had
explained away the demonic phenomena, I had explained away the miracles
and the supernatural character of Christianity. By that same process of
reasoning by which Mr. Merton compelled me to admit the false miracles,
the lying signs and wonders of Satan, I was forced to admit the true
miracles, therefore the Divine commission, and therefore the Divinity of
Christ, because Christ claimed to be the Son of God.
Here is, I apprehend, the principal source of that difficulty which so
many people find in admitting the reality of the demonic phenomena. They
cannot admit Satan and his works, without admitting Christ and
redemption, purchased with his own blood on the cross,—in a word,
without admitting all the Christian mysteries and dogmas,—Christianity
itself, and that not as an opinion, not as a speculation, but as the law
of God for conscience. Most men have, at least, a dim perception of this
fact; and as they do not like to admit Christianity in a Christian
sense, they will not suffer themselves to believe that there is any
thing Satanic in the dark phenomena of human history. For, whatever may
be the professions we hear, whatever the apparent zeal displayed in the
cause of a bastard Christianity, our age is an unbelieving age, and
hates, I may say, with a perfect hatred, Christ and his Church. The age
is blind to the perception of Christian truth, but sharp-sighted to
whatever is requisite to prevent that truth from making its way to the
heart. It sees very clearly what it must concede, if it accepts Mr.
Merton’s doctrine; and therefore, with all its energy and astuteness, it
insists on explaining the demonic phenomena on natural principles, or on
denying them outright.
But detached from the world by experience of its hollowness, and by my
mortal illness, I became less disposed to resist the grace of God, and
in some measure prepared to listen with candor to Mr. Merton’s
reasoning. I very soon became convinced that I had really fallen into
the error of calling good evil, and evil good. I had really substituted
Satan for God, and in doing so had committed the precise error the
Christian clergy had always laid to my charge. I saw that they had been
right in advocating what I called, with Priscilla, the system of
repression, and I wrong in advocating the contrary system. I saw that,
as a reasonable man, I must abandon the whole order of ideas which I had
cherished in my Satanic pride and lust, and embrace that order of ideas
which I had hitherto rejected as false and mischievous. There was no
room for compromise. I must say decidedly either “Good Lord” or “Good
Devil,” and as I could no longer say the latter, I must say the former.
Many people, knowing my order of thinking when I was well and in the
world, may blame a change so complete and so universal; but only because
they are people of confused, incomplete, and disjointed thought, whose
views are always dim, obscure, and incoherent, and who can never
understand the operations of a mind that reduces all its views to their
fundamental principle, to a clear, well-defined, and self-coherent
whole, so that any change at all must be change of principle, and
involve an entire change of system. Philosophical and logical minds may
err, but in their premises, not in their conclusions from them. No
question with them is ever a question of detail, and none ever turns on
a collateral issue. If they start from infidel premises, they will come
to the conclusion that Satan is God, and adjust their theory of the
universe accordingly. If they assume, as their point of departure, that
liberty is in the absence of all restraint, and that liberty in this
sense is good, they must come to the conclusion so earnestly insisted
upon by my instructress Priscilla, and of course reject that whole order
of ideas which asserts the need of law, the utility of government, or
the necessity of restraint. That, in doing so, they go against common
sense, they are as well aware as are their opponents; but that fact
cannot move them, for the legitimate conclusion from it, if their
premises are right, is that so-called common sense is wrong, and needs
to be corrected. If the common opinions, doctrines, or judgments of
mankind are against them, they are indemnified by finding a common
feeling, a secret but real feeling, of all men in their favor; for the
very fact that restraint is necessary, proves that perverse nature
demands, when left to itself, universal liberty or unbounded license.
They have but to adopt the doctrine of the innate purity and sanctity of
nature, to call this natural feeling a pure and holy instinct, and bid
us follow nature, in order to make out their complete logical
justification. They are simply consequent, to use a logical term; and
their opponents, who accept their premises but deny their conclusions,
are inconsequent.
The common run of men, who oppose this class of thinkers and
speculators, not by a complete and coherent system constructed on the
principle of law and authority, and who are constantly saying Good Lord
and Good Devil, Good Devil and Good Lord, trying forever to conciliate
both at the same time, and endeavoring with all their might to serve
both God and Mammon, which He who “spake as never man spake” declares to
be impossible, whenever they are hard pushed, cry out against them as
logic-choppers, hair-splitters, narrow-minded system-mongers, and
represent them as wanting in broad and comprehensive views, in liberal
and generous feelings, as mere theorists, destitute of plain, practical
common sense. What is really a merit in them, is denounced as folly or
crime, and the whole pack,
“Tray, Blanche, Sweetheart, little dogs and all,”
are let loose against them. This is wrong. Either our feeling, our
sensitive and affective nature, is to be made subordinate and
subservient to our reason, or our reason is to be subordinated and made
subservient to feeling. To attempt to maintain them as two equal,
coördinate, and mutually independent powers, after the manner of the
Gallicans in relation to Church and State, is only to prepare the way
for internal anarchy and disorder. The fool makes reason subservient to
his feelings, emotions, affections, or passions, and as to his proper
manhood, lives as a slave; the wise man subjects these to his reason,
that is, to understanding and will, and lives, moves, and acts as a
freeman.
Now I had one of those minds which reduce their views to system, or to
their fundamental principle. My starting-point, my fundamental principle
was false, and therefore my whole system or theory of the universe was
false. This once discovered, I necessarily embraced the opposing
principle, and as necessarily embraced it in all its legitimate
consequences. I never was so constituted as to be able to strike a
balance between truth and falsehood, or to accept a principle and deny
its consequences. In matters of practice, I can understand, where no
principle is sacrificed, what are called compromises, and I have never
needed to be told that true prudence usually forbids us to push matters
to extremes. When we act, we must consider the practicable, and the
expedient, as far as principle leaves us any discretionary power; but in
asserting principles, in the question between truth and falsehood, right
and wrong, I have always felt it necessary to be on one side or the
other. It ought not therefore to be considered strange that, forced by
Mr. Merton and my own serious reflections to deny that Satan is God, I
should swing round to the other extreme, and assert that God is God; or
that, starting from this bold proposition as a first principle, I should
adjust, or endeavor to adjust my whole order of thought to it. I am
aware that my having done so will, with the mass of my countrymen, bring
reproach upon my memory, and induce some who may cherish a regard for me
to attempt to apologize for my want of inconsistency and incoherency;
but, happily, the praises or the censures of men cannot affect me any
longer, and I shall soon be where they cannot reach me.
Brought back to an intellectual conviction of the truth of Christianity,
my trouble increased; for if Christianity be true, it is not simply the
revelation of a truth to be believed, but also of a truth to be
practised—of a law to be obeyed. I had not obeyed that law; I had
deliberately, systematically violated all its precepts for years, and
had taught others to do the same. I had fallen under its condemnation,
and had incurred its severest penalties. The prospect that now opened
before me was not pleasing. There was a vision of blackness and despair.
The judgment I derided, the heaven I had scorned, the hell I had braved
or treated as a fiction, were all realities. I must soon appear before
my Judge, loaded with crimes and sins innumerable, and of the blackest
dye. It was impossible to imagine one more wicked or guilty than myself.
I could plead nothing in excuse or extenuation of my guilt. I had proved
myself the enemy of my race, a foul-mouthed and black-hearted rebel
against God, my sovereign, who had done nothing to me but load me with
benefits. It was no pleasant thought. I had consorted with devils. I had
chosen them for my associates, and what more fitting than that I should
be left to my own choice, to reap the fruits of my own doings, and be
doomed to dwell eternally with them in hell? It was what I deserved,
what immaculate Justice might well inflict. The thought was not to be
endured.
I had made a covenant with death. I had entered into an agreement with
hell, and had by a solemn pact given myself to the devil, and who had
ever heard that such a one had ever received grace to repent? Had I not
blasphemed the Holy Ghost, committed the unpardonable sin? My accomplice
had been rescued, it was true, but she had been less guilty than I. She
had been deceived, seduced by the wiles of the serpent, and struggled to
break the meshes he had cast around her as soon as she fully understood
their real character. Guilty she certainly had been, but there was some
limit to her guilt. I can hardly say that I was deceived. From the first
I suspected the truth, and when I remained blind, I remained so
wilfully. I had acted deliberately;—not from the strength of feeling, or
the heat of passion, but coolly, from calculation, with full assent.
There was a great difference between us. What hope, then, remained for
me?
The world will laugh at me for all this, and wag their heads at the
mighty magician starting back with fear of death and dread of hell. The
world has no faith. If it can make sure of this life, it thinks we may
jump, as Macbeth proposed, that which is to come. But the world is
nothing to me now, and I am not moved by its mockeries. I am not ashamed
to own my fears. I fear not dying. I fear what may come after death. I
fear the last judgment. I fear hell. I fear being condemned to dwell
forever with the damned. The salvation of my soul to me now is the
great, the all-absorbing question—the question of questions.
Mr. Merton continued to visit me, and to unfold to me the scheme of
Christian Redemption, and assured me that, if I willed it, there was
salvation even for me, for Christ had died for all, had made ample
satisfaction on the cross for the sins of the whole world, and that
great as my sins were, they were surpassed by the Divine Mercy. He
instructed me in what I had to believe, and in what I had to do. The
baptismal waters were poured over me, and I was confirmed by the Holy
Chrism, and I hope that my pact with Satan is broken, and my soul
delivered. But I know not whether it be so or not; I know not whether I
deserve love or hatred. I still fear and tremble, but will not despair.
I am trying, as far as in my power, to undo the wrong I have done, and
have dictated with that view these my confessions, which will see the
light as soon as may be after I am no more.
All are kind to me. My friends, those who have known me in my pride and
wickedness, strange to say, do not desert me; and those I love best are
constantly near me, and do all they can to relieve my pain, and to
strengthen my good resolutions. Priscilla is not unfrequently my nurse,
and James is most kind and affectionate to me. If human aid or sympathy
could avail me, I should have nothing to fear. But here I lie waiting my
departure. How it will fare with me hereafter, God only knows. His will
be done.
My story is told. My confessions, as far as I can make them to the
public, are made. Let no man see in me an example to be followed, or
regard me otherwise than as a miserable wretch who, in manhood and
health, abused all God’s gifts, and has nothing to relieve his character
from utter detestation but a late death-bed repentance. My life can
serve as a beacon; let it so serve. Yet I beg all whom I have wronged to
forgive me, for I would, as far as possible, die in peace with all the
world. I have nothing to forgive, for I have received no wrongs. I have
done wrong to the world, but I have suffered no wrong from it. I cannot
ask that my memory should be cherished, for it deserves only to be
execrated. Yet is it pleasant to feel that there are some who, bad as I
have been, still love me, and will drop a tear of sincere grief over my
lifeless remains. There are, too, some who, from the abundance of their
charity, will, as they pass by my final resting-place, breathe the
prayer, so consoling to the living at least,—“May his soul rest in
peace.” After all, good is greater than evil, and love stronger than
hell.
THE END.
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Transcriber’s Note
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
19.25 that [“/‘]occult power,[”/’] as an earlier Replaced.
philosophy
20.17 [“]There is something fearful Added.
103.27 endeavoring to look killing.[”] Added.
144.8 More[o]ver, I did not wish Inserted.
156.25 per Deum sanctum,[”] Added.
161.25 would expla[i]n all this Inserted.
185.13 the _stat[u]s quo_ Inserted.
202.21 author[r]ity may modify without danger Removed.
209.13 république d[e/é]mocratique Replaced.
251.2 sitt[t]ing-room Removed.
269.11 [“]was one of the most learned Added.
286.21 is the prin[ci]ple of all things Inserted.
308.18 Then a flint[s t/ st]one Space
shifted.
401.30 from utter detesta[ta]tion Removed.