CREDULITY, SUPERSTITION, AND FANATICISM.
A MEDLEY.
"Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world."—1 John IV. 1.
CREDULITY SUPERSTITION AND FANATICISM.
Whoever reads history with a view of tracing the progress of the human mind,—which, by the way, is the great object that renders history useful,—whoever reads history with that regard, must be astonished and shocked at the slow progress of philosophy, and the universal prevalence of credulity, superstition, and fanaticism. If antiquity would give a claim to reverence, this destructive band have a date prior to Christianity; their united power shed baneful influence on the earliest ages.
In the pagan temples there was a kind of incantation for conjuring down deities, to whom were assigned niches according to their different degrees of rank. The histories of Greece and Rome (for the sake of human nature, I wish that the parallel did not reach modern times) display an innumerable host of all ages, sexes, descriptions, and characters, enlisted under the banner of the priesthood, together with a select corps de reserve of augurs and soothsayers, who, by inspecting the entrails of beasts, foretold future events, and from the flight of birds the defeat of armies. Succeeding ages beheld their heathen temples solemnly consecrated; and being thus metamorphosed into Christian churches, the sculptures representing Jupiter, Minerva, Venus, and Diana, by virtue of a new baptism, became saints.[114]
Here also were a legion of arrogant priests, who insolently dictated the terms of salvation, fixed a standard for universal belief, and introduced their own inventions as divine precepts; who forced monarchs to pay tribute by ecclesiastical privilege, assumed the dominion of empires by divine right, and claimed three-fourths of the known world as heirs-at-law to St. Peter. To secure their acquisitions, they entrenched themselves behind ramparts raised on the credulity and folly of mankind. He who attempted to scale these hallowed mounds was deemed guilty of sacrilege; he who questioned the catholic infallibility was an atheist; and whosoever doubted the divine mission of a priest—an infidel.[115]
Finding the multitude were so well inclined to believe that whatever they could not comprehend was supernatural, they construed each phenomenon of nature into a portentous menace from Heaven. An eclipse became the omen of a revolution; an inundation the prognostic of a defeat; and an hurricane foretold the fall of every power that made any opposition to papal authority. By arts like these, the people were brought into a mental vassalage; and the powerful Baron having previously enslaved their persons, they readily gave the care of their souls to the confessor. To him they applied as the proper interpreter of every difficult case; and fraught with a full portion of credulity, each individual considered every cloud that passed over the sun, and every raven that expanded its ebon wing, as bearing some particular direction to himself. Hence arose the doctrine of demonology; and apparitions, witches, dreams, and divinations, formed a creed of superstition. On this was built that notable system, properly enough called "The Philosophy of the Distaff." This mythology of weak minds has been carried through every age and country by oral tradition and unfounded record.
Our earliest histories abound in augury and prediction; the most fabulous tales had credence, not only with the unlearned and ignorant, but with the educated and sagacious. The grave Duke de Sully seriously narrates those which had relation to Henry the Fourth.
It is recorded by Victorius Sirri, that Louis the Thirteenth was from his infancy surnamed Just,—"because he was born under the sign of the Balance!"
Even sorcery was made a leading branch of religion; and one of a priest's duties was to exorcise ghosts by talking Latin, which was considered as a never-failing antidote for a troublesome spirit, and invariably concluded by the ghost being laid in the Red Sea.
Some of these glaring errors have been obliterated, but absurdities of equal magnitude have supplied their place; and modern credulities are nearly as destructive to the interests of society as ancient superstitions.
Though this nation, as well as others, was at an early period enveloped by ignorance, superstition, and their consequent accompaniments, we had some right to expect the clouds would have been dispelled by the Reformation; but credulity kept its ground, and at a still later period—when we had a most learned and sedate monarch, and a most sententious and grave Parliament—an Act was passed for the punishment of witchcraft! By this sagacious union of royal and national wisdom, if a woman lived to a greater age than her neighbour, she was tried, proved guilty of commercing with a familiar in the shape of a tabby cat, and eased of all her sufferings by the ordeal of fire or water.
It is not many years since a fanatic in one of our colonies took a fancy to accuse a neighbour of witchcraft: the crime was clearly proved, and the poor culprit suffered according to law. In credulity and superstition there is something epidemical. The contagion spread; and this being found a summary process for removing a competitor in trade, or revenging an insult, informations for sorcery became frequent. Their sessions-house was crowded with witches, as is that at the Old Bailey with pickpockets. It however brought fees, and so far was well: but these sapient legislators at length discovered that the province was likely to be depopulated; and what affected them still more, their own fraternity were liable to the consequences. A man, who had been cheated by his lawyer, made an affidavit that said lawyer was a wizard. This was too much: the court had a special meeting, and unanimously determined that they would not receive any more informations against wizards. The bye-law had the effect of a charm, and sorcery was no more!
Lord Bacon somewhere remarks that superstition is worse than atheism. It takes from religion every attraction, every comfort; and the place of humble hope and patient resignation is supplied by melancholy, despair, and madness!
To the best minds, credulity is the source of much misery. Our first Charles, who, with all his errors as a king, had the manners and mind of a gentleman, was so much under its influence, that he never enjoyed a day's happiness after consulting the Sortes Virgilianæ.[116]
In our age—an age in many respects enlightened by the beams of philosophy—the effects resulting from credulity, superstition, and fanaticism are dreadful; but while the evils are contemplated with horror, the system is too ridiculous for sober reasoning. It induces the infatuated votary to believe that being in the pale of a particular church will ensure his salvation. The ignorant are confounded with metaphysical subtleties which the wisest cannot comprehend; and by combining different texts of holy writ, we are insulted with conclusions contrary to common sense.[117]
To check this inundation of absurdity, which deemed carnal reason profane, and was not to be combated by argument, Mr. Hogarth engraved this print; it contains what must ever operate as a complete refutation of those who, because they were his opponents in politics, have impudently asserted that he lost his talents in the decline of life: for though the delineation was made in his sixty-fourth year, in satire, wit, and imagination, it is superior to any of his preceding works.
The text "I speak as a fool" is a type of the preacher, whose strength of lungs is a convenient substitute for strength of argument. He is literally a Boanerges; his tones rend the region, and the thunder of his eloquence has cracked the sounding-board. His right hand poises a witch astride upon a broom-stick, and in his left he suspends an emissary of Satan: this embryotic demon wields a gridiron as a terror to the ungodly, and at the witch's breast is an incubus in the shape of a cat.[118] Considering action as the first requisite of an orator, our ecclesiastical juggler throws his whole frame into convulsions: he shakes as the lofty cedar in a storm. Like Milton's devil,
"With head, hands, wings, or feet, he works his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies."
By these violent agitations his gown flies open, and discovers that this Proteus of the pulpit is arrayed in a Harlequin's jacket; and his wig falling off, displays the shaven crown of a Jesuit. But the loss of a periwig is not attended to, his denunciations are redoubled, his fulminations hurled indiscriminately around; he scatters about firebrands; and darts, pointed with destruction, and barbed with death, pierce the hearts of his terrified hearers. Wrought up to the highest pitch of seraphic fervour, fevered by the heat of his own ecstasies,—the whole man is inspired,—and mounted upon the clouds of mystery, he soars through the dark regions of superstition, settles in the third heaven, and breathes empyreal air.
The train is fired,—the contagion spreads, the cup of delusion is filled to the brim, and each of his infatuated auditors intoxicated with the fumes of enthusiastic madness.
"Broken each link of reason's chain,
Witchcraft and magic hold their reign;
Terror and comfortless despair,
And fond credulity is there.
Circling all nature's vast profound,
Imagination takes her round,
Starting at spectres,—painting fairies,
Fancy, with all her wild vagaries,
Dances on enchanted ground.
Now with wings sublime she flies
Where planets roll in azure skies;
Now o'er clouds where tempests low'r,
To where the rushing waters pour:
Thence through the vasty void descends,
Where Chaos warring atoms blends,
To darksome caves of deepest hell,
Where sullen ghosts and torturing demons dwell."
With a postboy's cap upon his head, to denote that he is a special messenger from above, a little cherubimic Mercury flies through the clouds, and bears in his mouth an express directed to Saint Money Trapp.
Immediately beneath the pulpit are two lambs of the flock in an ecstasy. The young man with a round head of hair is probably a lay preacher; for though he has not a sable coat, he has a black collar. Piously entreating a young maiden, who meets his advances with an holy zeal, he puts the waxen model of a female saint down her bosom.
In the same pew are two fellows very differently affected: one of them, with a despairing countenance, sheds iron tears; the other, like the wet sea-boy on the mast, sleeps through the terrors of the storm, though a malignant imp of darkness, envying his serenity, endeavours to awake him by a whisper,[119] that he also may share such curses as would serve for a supplement to St. Ernulphus.[120]
Between two duck-winged cherubs, who are studying the laughing and crying gamut, is the harpy clerk. This crook-mouthed echo of absurdity, and associate in villany, has the true physiognomy of a Tartuffe: every feature is charged with hypocrisy.
The congregation,[121] many of whom have been imported from Liffey's verdant banks, bear their parts in this enchanting serenade; and the bull roar of the preacher, combined with a chorus of sighs, groans, and shrieks, must produce a symphony that might vie with the Irish howl or Indian war-whoop.
Among the crowd we discover a youthful convert under the guidance of his spiritual confessor,[122] who, pointing to Brimstone Ocean, unfolds a tale which terrifies his disciple to a degree that
"Must harrow up his soul; freeze his young blood;
Make his two eyes like stars start from their spheres;
His knotty and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."
The sanguinary Jew, while he leans upon an altar, on which lies a knife inscribed "bloody," sacrifices to his revenge an unfortunate insect which he caught carelessly wandering on the environs of his head.
Beneath is Mrs. Tofts, of Godalming, well known in the annals of credulity; in the violence of her paroxysm, she breaks a dram glass with her teeth.[123]
Next to Mrs. Tofts is a possessed shoeblack, coolly clearing his stomach of a quantity of hob-nails and iron staples.[124] In his hand he holds a quart bottle, in which the model of a spirit is closely cribbed—confin'd; but the imprisoned sprite forcing the cork, mounts into the regions of air with a lighted taper in its hand.[125] The book on which our sable professor of necromancy has deposited his basket, is King James's Demonology;[126] this, with Whitfield's Journal, which lies among the implements of his art, covertly intimate the sources where he had sought and found inspiration.
The ridicule is wound up by a Turk, whom we see through a window smoking his tube of Trinidado; lifting up his eyes with astonishment at the scene, he breathes a grateful ejaculation, and thanks his Maker that he was early initiated in the divine truths of the Koran, is out of the pale of this church, and has his name engraven on the tablets of Mahomet.
As all the decorations which are displayed in this temple of credulity, superstition, and fanaticism are suitable to the congregation, the carved figures on the pulpit are worthy of the preacher. We are in the first compartment presented with the apparition which warned Sir George Villiers of the Duke of Buckingham's danger from the knife of Felton;[127] in the second, with Julius Cæsar's ghost reproaching Brutus; and in the third, with the ghost of Mrs. Veale, which appeared to Mrs. Bargrave,[128]—because a very large impression of Drelincourt upon Death lay in the bookseller's warehouse, and would not move without a marvellous relation of an apparition.
Beneath is a figure of the Tedworth drummer, who so wickedly disturbed the family of Mr. Mompesson;[129] and in the frame below, a representation of Fanny, the phantom of Cock Lane, with her hammer in her right hand. These two notable memorials of credulity are placed as a kind of headpiece to a mental thermometer, which ascertains the different degrees of heat in the blood of an enthusiast. When the liquid ascends, it rises from lukewarm to love-heat,—ecstasy! convulsion fits,—madness,—and terminates in raving, which is properly obscured by clouds, and above the ken of human comprehension. In its falling state, the progress of religious depression is most accurately marked. From low spirits it sinks to sorrow, agony, settled grief, despair, madness,—suicide! The whole rests on Wesley's Sermons, and Glanville On Witches.[130]
On the preacher's left hand, suspended to a ring inserted in a human nostril, hangs the scale of vociferation. A natural tone is at the bottom, but the speaker's tone is described by the distended mouth above the scale, crying Blood! blood! blood! and inscribed "Bull roar."
To the hook of the chandelier hangs a small sphere, on which is engraven, "Desarts of new Purgatory." On the globe, out of which spring the branches for candles, is written, "A globe of hell, as newly drawn by R——ne" (Romaine). It is so formed as to give the caricature of a human face, and baptized "Horrid Zone." Round one of the eyes is inscribed "The Bottomless Pit;" round the other, "Molten-lead Lake." On one cheek is "Brimstone Ocean;" on the other, "Parts Unknown;" and round the mouth, "Eternal Damnation Gulf." Horribly profane as are these mottoes, they are mere copies of Tabernacle phraseology. In the same class comes the hymn, which is placed before the clerk:
"Only love to us be given;
Lord, we ask no other heaven."[131]
The poor's box is a mouse-trap, which very fairly intimates that whatever money is deposited will be secured for the faithful collectors. It may be further meant to insinuate, that whosoever is caught in this necromantic snare will be in the state of Sterne's starling, and cannot get out, for it is planted with pointed steel, and tears in pieces those who attempt an escape.
