SPIRITUALISM.
In the _Morning Star_, a few months since, appeared a letter from William
Howitt, intimating that if the religious public wished to hear a man
truly eloquent and religious, a Christian and a genius, they could not do
better than go and hear the Rev. Mr. Harris. Accordingly, one Sunday in
January, we found ourselves part of a respectable congregation, chiefly
males, assembled to hear the gentleman aforesaid. The place of meeting
was the Music Hall, Store-street; the reverend gentleman occupying the
platform, and the audience filling up the rest of the room. It is
difficult to judge of numbers, but there must have been four or five
hundred persons present. Mr. Harris evidently is an American, is, we
should imagine, between thirty and forty, and with his low black
eye-brows, and black beard, and sallow countenance, has not a very
prepossessing appearance. He had very much of the conventional idea of
the methodist parson. I do not by this imply that the conventional idea
is correct, but simply that we have such a conventional idea, and that
Mr. Harris answers to it. As I have intimated that I believe Mr. Harris
is an American, I need not add that he is thin, and that his figure is of
moderate height. The subject on which he preached was the axe being laid
at the foot of the tree, and at considerable length--the sermon lasted
more than an hour--the reverend gentleman endeavoured to show that men
lived as God was in them, and that we were not to judge from a few
outward signs that God was in them, and, as instances of men filled and
inspired by God's Spirit, we had our Saxon Alfred, Oliver Cromwell, and
Florence Nightingale. In the prayer and sermon of the preacher there was
very little to indicate that he was preaching a new gospel. The
principal thing about him was his action, which, in some respects,
resembled that of the great American Temperance orator, Mr. Gough. Mr.
Harris endeavours as much as possible to dramatise his sermon. He stands
on tiptoe, or he sinks down into his desk, he points his finger, and
shrugs up his shoulders. He has a considerable share of poetical and
oratorical power, but he does not give you an idea of much literary
culture. He does not bear you away "far, far above this lower world, up
where eternal ages roll." You find that it was scarce worth while coming
all the way from New York to London, unless the Rev. Gentleman has much
more to say, and in a better manner, than the sermon delivered in
Store-street. Of course I am not a Spiritualist. I am one of the
profane--I am little better than one of the wicked, though I, and all men
who are not beasts, feel that man is spirit as well as flesh; that he is
made in the image of his Maker; that the inspiration of the Almighty
giveth him understanding. Spiritualism in this sense is old as Adam and
Eve, old as the day when Jehovah, resting from his labours, pronounced
them to be good. But this is not the Spiritualism of Mr. Harris, and of
the organ of his denomination, _The Spiritual Magazine_. That spirits
appear to us--that they move tables--that they express their meaning by
knocks, form the great distinctive peculiarity of Spiritualism, and they
are things which people in our days are many of them more and more
beginning to believe. At any rate the Spiritualists of the new school
ought not to be angry with us. Mr. Howitt writes, "Moles don't believe
in eagles, nor even skylarks; they believe in the solid earth and
earth-worms;--things which soar up into the air, and look full at the
noon sun, and perch on the tops of mountains, and see wide prospect of
the earth and air, of men and things, are utterly incomprehensible, and
therefore don't exist, to moles. Things which, like skylarks, mount also
in the air, to bathe their tremulous pinions in the living aether, and in
the floods of golden sunshine, and behold the earth beneath; the more
green, and soft, and beautiful, because they see the heavens above them,
and pour out exulting melodies which are the fruits and streaming
delights of and in these things, are equally incomprehensible to moles,
which, having only eyes of the size of pins' heads, and no ears that
ordinary eyes can discover, neither _can_ see the face of heaven, nor
hear the music of the spheres, nor any other music. Learned pigs don't
believe in pneumatology, nor in astronomy, but in gastronomy. They
believe in troughs, pig-nuts, and substantial potatoes. Learned pigs
_see_ the wind, or have credit for it--but that other [Greek text], which
we translate SPIRIT, they most learnedly ignore. Moles and learned pigs
were contemporaries of Adam, and have existed in all ages, and,
therefore, they _know_ that there are no such things as eagles, or
skylarks and their songs; no suns, skies, heavens, and their orbs, or
even such sublunary objects as those we call men and things. They _know_
that there is nothing real, and that there are no genuine entities, but
comfortable dark burrows, earthworms, pig-troughs, pig-nuts, potatoes,
and the like substantials." If this be so,--and Mr. Howitt is an old man
and ought to know, especially when he says there are not in London at
this time half-a-dozen literary or scientific men who, had they lived in
Christ's time, would have believed in him--well, there is no hope for us.
Spiritualism is beyond our reach; it is a thing too bright for us. It is
high, we cannot attain unto it. The other Sunday night, Mr. Harris was
very spiritual, at any rate, very impractical and unworldly. At the
close of the service he informed us that some few of his sermons,
containing an outline of his religious convictions, were for sale at the
doors, and would be sold at one penny and a half, a mere insignificant
sum, just sufficient to cover the expense of paper and printing. On
inquiring, we found, of the three sermons, one was published at
three-halfpence, one at twopence, and one at fourpence, prices which, if
we may judge by the copy we purchased, would yield a fair profit, if the
sale were as great as it seemed to be on Sunday night.
But Mr. Harris is a poet--there is not such another in the universe.
_The Golden Age_ opens thus:--
"As many ages as it took to form
The world, it takes to form the human race.
Humanity was injured at its birth,
And its existence in the past has been
That of a suffering infant. God through Christ
Appearing, healed that sickness, pouring down
Interior life: so Christ our Lord became
The second Adam, through whom all shall live.
This is our faith. The world shall yet become
The home of that great second Adam's seed;
Christ-forms, both male and female, who from Him
Derive their ever-growing perfectness,
Eventually shall possess the earth,
And speak the rythmic language of the skies,
And mightier miracles than His perform;
They shall remove all sickness from the race,
Cast out all devils from the church and state,
And hurl into oblivion's hollow sea
The mountains of depravity. Then earth,
From the Antarctic to the Arctic Pole,
Shall blush with flowers; the isles and continents
Teem with harmonic forms of bird and beast,
And fruit, and glogious shapes of art more fair
Than man's imagination yet conceived,
Adorn the stately temples of a new
Divine religion. Every human soul
A second Adam, and a second Eve,
Shall dwell with its pure counterpart, conjoined
In sacramental marriage of the heart.
God shall be everywhere, and not, as now,
Guessed at, but apprehended, felt and known."--p. 1.
I will take, says Mr. Howitt, as a fair specimen of the poetry and broad
Christian philosophy of this spiritual epic, the recipe for writing a
poem. In this, we see how far the requirements of Spiritualism are
beyond the standard of the requirements of the world in poetry. They
include the widest gatherings of knowledge, and still wider and loftier
virtues and sympathies.
"To write a poem, man should be as pure
As frost-flowers; every thought should be in tune
To heavenly truth, and Nature's perfect law,
Bathing the soul in beauty, joy, and peace.
His heart should ripen like the purple grape;
His country should be all the universe;
His friends the best and wisest of all time.
He should be universal as the light,
And rich as summer in ripe-fruited love.
He should have power to draw from common things
Essential truth!--and, rising o'er all fear
Of papal devils and of pagan gods,
Of ancient Satans, and of modern ghosts,
Should recognise all spirits as his friends,
And see the worst but harps of golden strings
Discordant now, but destined at the last
To thrill, inspired with God's own harmony,
And make sweet music with the heavenly host.
He should forget his private preference
Of country or religion, and should see
All parties and all creeds with equal eye;
His the religion of true harmony;
Christ the ideal of his lofty aim;
The viewless Friend, the Comforter, and Guide,
The joy in grief, whose every element
Of life received in child-like faith,
Becomes a part of impulse, feeling, thought--
The central fire that lights his being's sun.
He should not limit Nature by the known;
Nor limit God by what is known of him;
Nor limit man by present states and moods;
But see mankind at liberty to draw
Into their lives all Nature's wealth, and all
Harmonious essences of life from God,
And so, becoming god-like in their souls,
And universal in their faculties,
Informing all their age, enriching time,
And blinding up the temple of the world
With massive structures of eternity.
He shall not fail to see how infinite
God is above humanity, nor yet
That God is throned in universal man,
The greater mind of pure intelligence,
Unlimited by states, moods, periods, creeds,
Self-adequate, self-balanced in his love,
And needing nothing and conferring all,
And asking nothing and receiving all,
Akin by love to every loving heart,
By nobleness to every noble mind,
By truth to all who look through natural forms,
And feel the throbbing arteries of law
In every pulse of nature and of man."
The peculiar doctrine of the Spiritualists seems to be the belief in
Spiritual intercourse, and in mediums; as _The Spiritual Magazine_ tells
us "the only media we know accessible to the public are Mrs. Marshal and
her niece, of 22, Red Lion-street, Holborn," we need not give ourselves
much trouble about them. Concerning intercourse with departed spirits,
an American Judge writes, "The first thing demonstrated to us is that we
can commune with the spirits of the departed; that such communion is
through the instrumentality of persons yet living; that the fact of
mediumship is the result of physical organization; that the kind of
communion is affected by moral causes, and that the power, like our other
faculties, is possessed in different degrees, and is capable of
improvement by cultivation," and from this doctrine the believers gather
comfortable assurances. The Judge adds, "These things being established,
by means which show a settled purpose and an intelligent design, they
demonstrate man's immortality, and that in the simplest way, by appeals
alike to his reason, to his affections, and to his senses. They thus
show that they whom we once knew as living on earth do yet live, after
having passed the gates of death, and leave in our minds the irresistible
conclusion, that if they thus live we shall. This task Spiritualism has
already performed on its thousands and its tens of thousands--more,
indeed, in the last ten years than by all the pulpits in the land--and
still the work goes bravely on. God speed it; for it is doing what man's
unaided reason has for ages tried in vain to do, and what, in this age of
infidelity, seemed impossible to accomplish. Thus, too, is confirmed to
us the Christian religion, which so many have questioned or denied. Not,
indeed, that which sectarianism gives us, nor that which descends to us
from the dark ages, corrupted by selfishness or distorted by ignorance,
but that which was proclaimed through the spiritualism of Jesus of
Nazareth in the simple injunction--'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,
with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This
is the first and great commandment; and the second is like unto it--Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets.'"
In the case of Mr. Harris, it seems to us, he lays his stress upon these
peculiar doctrines, and rather aims at a universal Christianity; in all
sects he sees goodness, and he would combine them all into his own. He
and his disciples have found what all the rest are seeking after. His
Christianity is the faith which all good spirits own, which all angels
reverence. Christ came to reveal this faith: the whole world is but an
expression of it; the whole universe but an illustration of it; and as we
become Christ-like, in the renunciation of self, and the acceptance of
the great law of service in the Lord and to the Lord, more and more we
attain to an internal perception of the verities of that faith. The Word
is opened before us, and the natural universe is perceived to be its
outward illustration. The new church takes its stand upon this
fundamental doctrine of regeneration, and it is to the putting forth of
this in art, science, literature, poetry, preaching, in all the uses of
an ordered life, that the energy of the true churchman is continually, in
the Divine Providence, directed. And to those thus regenerated it is
given to become mediums. Mr. Harris, in his sermon preached at the
Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution, May 29, 1859, says: "Any
man, good or bad, can become a medium for spirits. I have seen the
vilest and the most degraded made the organs through which spirits
utterly lost, yet with something of the beams of the fallen archangel's
faded brightness lingering in the intellect--I say I have seen such, as
well as others, earnest, sincere, and worthy, become the organs of
communication between the visible and invisible spirits. But no man can
become a medium, an organ or oracle for the Spirit, for the Word made
flesh, giving to every man according to his will, until he hath passed
through the door of penitence--until he hath gone up through the gateway
of a sincere conversion, or turning from his evil--until he hath
consecrated himself to the great law of right--until he hath voluntarily
taken up all the burdens which God in his providence, whether social, or
domestic, or moral, has imposed upon him--until, at any cost or any
hazard, he hath sought to do, in his daily life, those things which God
in His word doth most authoritatively and continually command. All such
may, all such do, become, all such are, the _mediums_ of the Lord Christ,
omnipotent, omnipresent, and eternal, walking, as the Divine Man, in the
midst of the paradise of the angels. Breathing forth His breath, and so
vivifying the very air which the angels respire and live, He breathes
down that great _aura_ upon us continually. In prayer, and in the good
self-sacrificing life, we drink in that _aura_. The breath of God
inflows into the lungs; the thought of God streams into consciousness;
the energies of God are directed to the will; man, weak, becomes strong;
man, ignorant, becomes wise; man, narrow, becomes broad; man, sectarian,
becomes catholic and liberal; man, self-conceited, becomes reverent and
humble; man, transformed from the image of the tiger, the ape, the
serpent, takes upon himself, in Christ, the angels' image. And as we
drink in more and more of this Divine Spirit, our path in life--the path
of humble uses (not the path of self-seeking ambition; not the path of
prying curiosity), groweth brighter and brighter unto the perfect day."