“DOCTOR JOHN CAMPBELL, the minister of the Tabernacle Chapel, Finsbury,
and editor of the _British Banner_, etc., with that massive vigour which
distinguishes his style,” did, we are informed by Mr. Howitt, “deliver a
verdict in the _Banner_, for November, 1852,” of great importance and
favour to the Table-rapping cause. We are not informed whether the
Public, sitting in judgment on the question, reserved any point in this
great verdict for subsequent consideration; but the verdict would seem to
have been regarded by a perverse generation as not quite final, inasmuch
as Mr. Howitt finds it necessary to re-open the case, a round ten years
afterwards, in nine hundred and sixty-two stiff octavo pages, published
by Messrs. Longman and Company.
Mr. Howitt is in such a bristling temper on the Supernatural subject,
that we will not take the great liberty of arguing any point with him.
But—with the view of assisting him to make converts—we will inform our
readers, on his conclusive authority, what they are required to believe;
premising what may rather astonish them in connexion with their views of
a certain historical trifle, called The Reformation, that their present
state of unbelief is all the fault of Protestantism, and that “it is high
time, therefore, to protest against Protestantism”.
They will please to believe, by way of an easy beginning, all the stories
of good and evil demons, ghosts, prophecies, communication with spirits,
and practice of magic, that ever obtained, or are said to have ever
obtained, in the North, in the South, in the East, in the West, from the
earliest and darkest ages, as to which we have any hazy intelligence,
real or supposititious, down to the yet unfinished displacement of the
red men in North America. They will please to believe that nothing in
this wise was changed by the fulfilment of our Saviour’s mission upon
earth; and further, that what Saint Paul did, can be done again, and has
been done again. As this is not much to begin with, they will throw in
at this point rejection of Faraday and Brewster, and “poor Paley”, and
implicit acceptance of those shining lights, the Reverend Charles
Beecher, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (“one of the most vigorous
and eloquent preachers of America”), and the Reverend Adin Ballou.
Having thus cleared the way for a healthy exercise of faith, our
advancing readers will next proceed especially to believe in the old
story of the Drummer of Tedworth, in the inspiration of George Fox, in
“the spiritualism, prophecies, and provision” of Huntington the
coal-porter (him who prayed for the leather breeches which miraculously
fitted him), and even in the Cock Lane Ghost. They will please wind up,
before fetching their breath, with believing that there is a close
analogy between rejection of any such plain and proved facts as those
contained in the whole foregoing catalogue, and the opposition
encountered by the inventors of railways, lighting by gas, microscopes
and telescopes, and vaccination. This stinging consideration they will
always carry rankling in their remorseful hearts as they advance.
As touching the Cock Lane Ghost, our conscience-stricken readers will
please particularly to reproach themselves for having ever supposed that
important spiritual manifestation to have been a gross imposture which
was thoroughly detected. They will please to believe that Dr. Johnson
believed in it, and that, in Mr. Howitt’s words, he “appears to have had
excellent reasons for his belief”. With a view to this end, the faithful
will be so good as to obliterate from their Boswells the following
passage: “Many of my readers, I am convinced, are to this hour under an
impression that Johnson was thus foolishly deceived. It will therefore
surprise them a good deal when they are informed upon undoubted authority
that Johnson was one of those by whom the imposture was detected. The
story had become so popular, that he thought it should be investigated,
and in this research he was assisted by the Rev. Dr. Douglas, now Bishop
of Salisbury, the great detector of impostures”—and therefore
tremendously obnoxious to Mr. Howitt—“who informs me that after the
gentlemen who went and examined into the evidence were satisfied of its
falsity, Johnson wrote in their presence an account of it, which was
published in the newspapers and _Gentleman’s Magazine_, and undeceived
the world”. But as there will still remain another highly inconvenient
passage in the Boswells of the true believers, they must likewise be at
the trouble of cancelling the following also, referring to a later time:
“He (Johnson) expressed great indignation at the imposture of the Cock
Lane Ghost, and related with much satisfaction how he had assisted in
detecting the cheat, and had published an account of it in the
newspapers”.
They will next believe (if they be, in the words of Captain Bobadil, “so
generously minded”) in the transatlantic trance-speakers “who professed
to speak from direct inspiration”, Mrs. Cora Hatch, Mrs. Henderson, and
Miss Emma Hardinge; and they will believe in those eminent ladies having
“spoken on Sundays to five hundred thousand hearers”—small audiences, by
the way, compared with the intelligent concourse recently assembled in
the city of New York, to do honour to the Nuptials of General the
Honourable T. Barnum Thumb. At about this stage of their spiritual
education they may take the opportunity of believing in “letters from a
distinguished gentleman of New York, in which the frequent appearance of
the gentleman’s deceased wife and of Dr. Franklin, to him and other
well-known friends, are unquestionably unequalled in the annals of the
marvellous”. Why these modest appearances should seem at all out of the
common way to Mr. Howitt (who would be in a state of flaming indignation
if we thought them so), we could not imagine, until we found on reading
further, “it is solemnly stated that the witnesses have not only seen but
touched these spirits, and handled the clothes and hair of Franklin”.
Without presuming to go Mr. Howitt’s length of considering this by any
means a marvellous experience, we yet venture to confess that it has
awakened in our mind many interesting speculations touching the present
whereabout in space, of the spirits of Mr. Howitt’s own departed boots
and hats.
The next articles of belief are Belief in the moderate figures of “thirty
thousand media in the United States in 1853”; and in two million five
hundred thousand spiritualists in the same country of composed minds, in
1855, “professing to have arrived at their convictions of spiritual
communication from personal experience”; and in “an average rate of
increase of three hundred thousand per annum”, still in the same country
of calm philosophers. Belief in spiritual knockings, in all manner of
American places, and, among others, in the house of “a Doctor Phelps at
Stratford, Connecticut, a man of the highest character for intelligence”,
says Mr. Howitt, and to whom we willingly concede the possession of far
higher intelligence than was displayed by his spiritual knocker, in
“frequently cutting to pieces the clothes of one of his boys”, and in
breaking “seventy-one panes of glass”—unless, indeed, the knocker, when
in the body, was connected with the tailoring and glazing interests.
Belief in immaterial performers playing (in the dark though: they are
obstinate about its being in the dark) on material instruments of wood,
catgut, brass, tin, and parchment. Your belief is further requested in
“the Kentucky Jerks”. The spiritual achievements thus euphoniously
denominated “appear”, says Mr. Howitt, “to have been of a very disorderly
kind”. It appears that a certain Mr. Doke, a Presbyterian clergyman,
“was first seized by the jerks”, and the jerks laid hold of Mr. Doke in
that unclerical way and with that scant respect for his cloth, that they
“twitched him about in a most extraordinary manner, often when in the
pulpit, and caused him to shout aloud, and run out of the pulpit into the
woods, screaming like a madman. When the fit was over, he returned
calmly to his pulpit and finished the service.” The congregation having
waited, we presume, and edified themselves with the distant bellowings of
Doke in the woods, until he came back again, a little warm and hoarse,
but otherwise in fine condition. “People were often seized at hotels,
and at table would, on lifting a glass to drink, jerk the liquor to the
ceiling; ladies would at the breakfast-table suddenly be compelled to
throw aloft their coffee, and frequently break the cup and saucer.” A
certain venturesome clergyman vowed that he would preach down the Jerks,
“but he was seized in the midst of his attempt, and made so ridiculous
that he withdrew himself from further notice”—an example much to be
commended. That same favoured land of America has been particularly
favoured in the development of “innumerable mediums”, and Mr. Howitt
orders you to believe in Daniel Dunglas Home, Andrew Davis Jackson, and
Thomas L. Harris, as “the three most remarkable, or most familiar, on
this side of the Atlantic”. Concerning Mr. Home, the articles of belief
(besides removal of furniture) are, That through him raps have been given
and communications made from deceased friends. That “his hand has been
seized by spirit influence, and rapid communications written out, of a
surprising character to those to whom they were addressed”. That at his
bidding, “spirit hands have appeared which have been seen, felt, and
recognised frequently, by persons present, as those of deceased friends”.
That he has been frequently lifted up and carried, floating “as it were”
through a room, near the ceiling. That in America, “all these phenomena
have displayed themselves in greater force than here”—which we have not
the slightest doubt of. That he is “the planter of spiritualism all over
Europe”. That “by circumstances that no man could have devised, he
became the guest of the Emperor of the French, of the King of Holland, of
the Czar of Russia, and of many lesser princes”. That he returned from
“this unpremeditated missionary tour”, “endowed with competence”; but not
before, “at the Tuileries, on one occasion when the emperor, empress, a
distinguished lady, and himself only were sitting at table, a hand
appeared, took up a pen, and wrote, in a strong and well-known character,
the word Napoleon. The hand was then successively presented to the
several personages of the party to kiss.” The stout believer, having
disposed of Mr. Home, and rested a little, will then proceed to believe
in Andrew Davis Jackson, or Andrew Jackson Davis (Mr. Howitt, having no
Medium at hand to settle this difference and reveal the right name of the
seer, calls him by both names), who merely “beheld all the essential
natures of things, saw the interior of men and animals, as perfectly as
their exterior; and described them in language so correct, that the most
able technologists could not surpass him. He pointed out the proper
remedies for all the complaints, and the shops where they were to be
obtained”;—in the latter respect appearing to hail from an advertising
circle, as we conceive. It was also in this gentleman’s limited
department to “see the metals in the earth”, and to have “the most
distant regions and their various productions present before him”.
Having despatched this tough case, the believer will pass on to Thomas L.
Harris, and will swallow _him_ easily, together with “whole epics” of his
composition; a certain work “of scarcely less than Miltonic grandeur”,
called The Lyric of the Golden Age—a lyric pretty nigh as long as one of
Mr. Howitt’s volumes—dictated by Mr. (not Mrs.) Harris to the publisher
in ninety-four hours; and several extempore sermons, possessing the
remarkably lucid property of being “full, unforced, out-gushing,
unstinted, and absorbing”. The candidate for examination in pure belief,
will then pass on to the spirit-photography department; this, again, will
be found in so-favoured America, under the superintendence of Medium
Mumler, a photographer of Boston: who was “astonished” (though, on Mr.
Howitt’s showing, he surely ought not to have been) “on taking a
photograph of himself, to find also by his side the figure of a young
girl, which he immediately recognised as that of a deceased relative.
The circumstance made a great excitement. Numbers of persons rushed to
his rooms, and many have found deceased friends photographed with
themselves.” (Perhaps Mr. Mumler, too, may become “endowed with
competence” in time. Who knows?) Finally, the true believers in the
gospel according to Howitt, have, besides, but to pin their faith on
“ladies who see spirits habitually”, on ladies who _know_ they have a
tendency to soar in the air on sufficient provocation, and on a few other
gnats to be taken after their camels, and they shall be pronounced by Mr.
Howitt not of the stereotyped class of minds, and not partakers of “the
astonishing ignorance of the press”, and shall receive a first-class
certificate of merit.
But before they pass through this portal into the Temple of Serene
Wisdom, we, halting blind and helpless on the steps, beg to suggest to
them what they must at once and for ever disbelieve. They must
disbelieve that in the dark times, when very few were versed in what are
now the mere recreations of Science, and when those few formed a
priesthood-class apart, any marvels were wrought by the aid of concave
mirrors and a knowledge of the properties of certain odours and gases,
although the self-same marvels could be reproduced before their eyes at
the Polytechnic Institution, Regent Street, London, any day in the year.
They must by no means believe that Conjuring and Ventriloquism are old
trades. They must disbelieve all Philosophical Transactions containing
the records of painful and careful inquiry into now familiar disorders of
the senses of seeing and hearing, and into the wonders of somnambulism,
epilepsy, hysteria, miasmatic influence, vegetable poisons derived by
whole communities from corrupted air, diseased imitation, and moral
infection. They must disbelieve all such awkward leading cases as the
case of the Woodstock Commissioners and their man, and the case of the
Identity of the Stockwell Ghost, with the maid-servant. They must
disbelieve the vanishing of champion haunted houses (except, indeed, out
of Mr. Howitt’s book), represented to have been closed and ruined for
years, before one day’s inquiry by four gentlemen associated with this
journal, and one hour’s reference to the Local Rate-books. They must
disbelieve all possibility of a human creature on the last verge of the
dark bridge from Life to Death, being mysteriously able, in occasional
cases, so to influence the mind of one very near and dear, as vividly to
impress that mind with some disturbed sense of the solemn change
impending. They must disbelieve the possibility of the lawful existence
of a class of intellects which, humbly conscious of the illimitable power
of GOD and of their own weakness and ignorance, never deny that He can
cause the souls of the dead to revisit the earth, or that He may have
caused the souls of the dead to revisit the earth, or that He can cause
any awful or wondrous thing to be; but to deny the likelihood of
apparitions or spirits coming here upon the stupidest of bootless
errands, and producing credentials tantamount to a solicitation of our
vote and interest and next proxy, to get them into the Asylum for Idiots.
They must disbelieve the right of Christian people who do _not_ protest
against Protestantism, but who hold it to be a barrier against the
darkest superstitions that can enslave the soul, to guard with jealousy
all approaches tending down to Cock Lane Ghosts and suchlike infamous
swindles, widely degrading when widely believed in; and they must
disbelieve that such people have the right to know, and that it is their
duty to know, wonder-workers by their fruits, and to test miracle-mongers
by the tests of probability, analogy, and common sense. They must
disbelieve all rational explanations of thoroughly proved experiences
(only) which appear supernatural, derived from the average experience and
study of the visible world. They must disbelieve the speciality of the
Master and the Disciples, and that it is a monstrosity to test the
wonders of show-folk by the same touchstone. Lastly, they must
disbelieve that one of the best accredited chapters in the history of
mankind is the chapter that records the astonishing deceits continually
practised, with no object or purpose but the distorted pleasure of
deceiving.
We have summed up a few—not nearly all—of the articles of belief and
disbelief to which Mr. Howitt most arrogantly demands an implicit
adherence. To uphold these, he uses a book as a Clown in a Pantomime
does, and knocks everybody on the head with it who comes in his way.
Moreover, he is an angrier personage than the Clown, and does not
experimentally try the effect of his red-hot poker on your shins, but
straightway runs you through the body and soul with it. He is always
raging to tell you that if you are not Howitt, you are Atheist and
Anti-Christ. He is the sans-culotte of the Spiritual Revolution, and
will not hear of your accepting this point and rejecting that;—down your
throat with them all, one and indivisible, at the point of the pike; No
Liberty, Totality, Fraternity, or Death!
Without presuming to question that “it is high time to protest against
Protestantism” on such very substantial grounds as Mr. Howitt sets forth,
we do presume to think that it is high time to protest against Mr.
Howitt’s spiritualism, as being a little in excess of the peculiar merit
of Thomas L. Harris’s sermons, and somewhat _too_ “full, out-gushing,
unstinted, and absorbing”.