Last of all we may speak of necromancy, which has something in it that
so strongly takes hold of the imagination, that, though it is one only
of the various modes which have been enumerated for the exorcise of
magical power, we have selected it to give a title to the present
volume.
There is something sacred to common apprehension in the repose of the
dead. They seem placed beyond our power to disturb. "There is no work,
nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave."
After life's fitful fever they sleep well:
Nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch them further.
Their remains moulder in the earth. Neither form nor feature is long
continued to them. We shrink from their touch, and their sight. To
violate the sepulchre therefore for the purpose of unholy spells and
operations, as we read of in the annals of witchcraft, cannot fail to
be exceedingly shocking. To call up the spirits of the departed, after
they have fulfilled the task of life, and are consigned to their final
sleep, is sacrilegious. Well may they exclaim, like the ghost of
Samuel in the sacred story, "Why hast thou disquieted me?"
There is a further circumstance in the case, which causes us
additionally to revolt from the very idea of necromancy, strictly so
called. Man is a mortal, or an immortal being. His frame either wholly
"returns to the earth as it was, or his spirit," the thinking
principle within him, "to God who gave it." The latter is the
prevailing sentiment of mankind in modern times. Man is placed upon
earth in a state of probation, to be dealt with hereafter according to
the deeds done in the flesh. "Some shall go away into everlasting
punishment; and others into life eternal." In this case there is
something blasphemous in the idea of intermedding with the state of
the dead. We must leave them in the hands of God. Even on the idea of
an interval, the "sleep of the soul" from death to the general
resurrection, which is the creed of no contemptible sect of
Christians, it is surely a terrific notion that we should disturb the
pause, which upon that hypothesis, the laws of nature have assigned to
the departed soul, and come to awake, or to "torment him before the
time."