THE SUPERSTITION OF UNBELIEF.
When an age has abandoned God, sensuality delivers it over, like Faust, to the devil, and he becomes its deity. Unbelief is everywhere followed by superstition. Where the gods are not, the demons reign, says a modern German poet. "We are ready to believe every thing when we believe nothing," remarks Chateaubriand. "We have augurs when we have no longer prophets; witchcraft when we have no longer religious ceremonies. When the temples of God are closed, the caves of the sorcerers are opened."
It is certainly a monstrous pairing when, with boasted enlightenment, fortune-telling, card-divining, and the other superstitions of darkness go hand in hand. But it is nevertheless an old and well-known fact-one constantly demonstrated by human experience—that unbelief is invariably associated with the grossest superstition. A rapid glance at the history of peoples in all other essentials most widely differing from each other will readily prove this.
Beginning with the Hindoos, the oldest people on the earth, we find that A. W. Schlegel has already effectually refuted the theories of modern writers on religion by demonstrating to us a steady retrogression from the spiritual to the sensual, from belief to unbelief and superstition. Dubois, who had spent thirty years among the Brahmins, and studied their philosophy, traces the degrading superstition into which the Hindoos have lapsed to their having lost faith in the religion of their ancestors. Once their schools taught the maxim, Before earth, water, air, wind, fire, Brahma, Vishnu, Chieva, sun, and stars, there was the only and eternal God, who had sprung out of himself. These pure ideas of religion have long been abandoned for an atheistic materialism. A superstitious demonology, spirit-raising, sorcery, and magic have grown out of this unbelief, and the same people now adore Kapel, the serpent, and Gamda, the bird. They observe annually a feast in honor of Darhba, an ordinary weed, and offer up sacrifices to spade and pick. To kill a cow is by them considered a crime more heinous than matricide, and their philosophers esteem it a great piece of good luck, a sure passport to paradise, if they can catch hold of a cow by the tail instead of the head, when dying. "Modern materialism," observes Dr. Hæffner, comparing the unbelief of the Hindoos with our own, "has closely approached the abyss of Buddhism." Manifestations like Mormonism, or the spiritualism of New York, Paris, and Berlin, already suggest to us the religious and moral practices of the Hindoos, and we bid fair soon to reach their lowest and vilest forms—the Lamaism of Thibet and Ceylon. As in the opening of the present century, admiration of genius led men to adore the poetical genius of Schiller and Goethe, so, changing their idols, they will eventually worship those who have deified matter. The Buddhas of modern atheism can only be the materialistic notabilities of the day; and for this reason a humorous writer recommends Carl Vogt for Delai-Lama, he being not only a high scientific but a great political authority.
Passing from the east to the west, we find, and especially in Roman history, that the increase of superstition has steadily kept pace with the diminution of faith. The religious decadence of ancient Rome dates from the close of the Punic wars and the domestic commotions of the republic, at which period we first notice that strange hankering after what is obscure and mysterious in paganism, and which attained its zenith under the Cæsars. This remark applies, however, more to the cities than the country; for, from the days of Augustus down to those of the Antonines, the latter had not yet been so generally corrupted as the former. Sulla, the dictator—to cite a few examples—put the utmost confidence in a small image of Apollo, brought from Delphi, which he carried about on his person, and which he embraced publicly before his troops with a prayer for victory. Augustus, who allowed himself to be worshipped as a god in the provinces, regarded it as an evil omen to be handed the left shoe instead of the right when he rose in the morning. He neither set out on a journey after the Nundines nor undertook any thing of importance during the Nones. When one of his fleets had been lost at sea, he punished Neptune by excluding his image from being carried in procession at the Circensian games.
After the doctrine of Polybius, that religion is nothing more than a tissue of lies and traditions, began to prevail at Rome, the phenomena which usually attend the decadence of a people became plainly apparent. Those who are familiar with the epidemic capers of the fanatics of that age, who jerked their heads and distorted their limbs while pretending to utter the will of the gods, will be reminded of that moral and religious degradation which has produced the same effects in all countries and times—effects distinctly visible among all Christian peoples into whose life the ancient heathenism still enters, or where false civilization once more tends to barbarism. The story of Alexander of Obonoteichos shows the extremes to which superstition may lead men. This audacious impostor buried in the temple of Apollo, at Chalcedon, but so that they could be easily found, a set of bronze tablets, promising that Esculapius and his father Apollo would shortly come to Obonoteichos. He also secreted an egg containing a small snake, and mounted the next day the altar in the market-place to proclaim as one inspired that Esculapius was about to appear. He produced the egg, broke its shell, and the people rejoiced over the god who had assumed the form of a serpent. The news of this miracle attracted immense crowds. A few days later, Alexander announced that the serpent-god had already reached maturity, and he exhibited himself to the public in a partially darkened room, dressed as a prophet, with a large tame serpent—secretly imported from Macedonia—so twisted around his waist that its head was out of sight, and its place supplied by a human head of paper, whence protruded a black tongue. This new serpent-god, Glykon, the youngest Epiphany of Esculapius, received the honors of temple and oracle service. Alexander became a highly respected prophet; Rutelia, a noble Roman, married his daughter, and the prefect Severian asked him for an oracle on taking the field against the king of the Parthians.
If we wish to see how the same impostures are reënacted in our own times, we need only read the accounts of certain evening amusements at the Tuileries. There sat one night the Emperor Napoleon III., the Empress Eugenie, the Duke de Montebello, and Home, the medium. On a table before them were paper, pens, and ink. Then appeared a spirit-hand, which picked up a pen, dipped it into the ink, and wrote the name of Napoleon I. in Napoleon's handwriting. The emperor prayed to be permitted to kiss the spirit-hand, which advanced to his lips, and then to those of Eugenie. This séance, and one of a similar kind at the Palais Royal, where the Red Prince, known for his hatred of the church, devoutly watched the ball which Home caused to move over a table, remind us involuntarily of the Jesus-contemning apostate Emperor Julian, as he followed Maximus, the Neo-Platonist, into a subterranean vault for the purpose of seeing Hecate, and looking credulously on when the former secretly set fire to a figure of Hecate, painted in combustible materials on the wall, and at the same time let fly a falcon with burning tow tied to his feet. Fuller information on this subject the curious may glean from the stories published in the French journals, of hands growing out of table-tops and sofa-cushions, which furnish the Paris élite with the only luxury of terror it seems still capable of enjoying; or they may consult the numerous patrons of the fashionable clairvoyants and physiognomists, the Mesdames Villeneuve, of the Rue St. Denis, as well as the successors of Lenormand, the famous coffee-grounds seer, toward whom Napoleon I. felt himself irresistibly attracted, (though he sent the luckless Cassandra occasionally to prison,) and whom the Empress Josephine held in high esteem.
The eighteenth century furnishes some striking illustrations of our theory. An epidemic tendency to unbelief, like that which characterizes this century, is without precedent since the dawn of Christianity. Its fruits recall the worst abuses of the Manichæans and the Albigenses. We do not here allude to the thousands of innocent superstitions, which Grimm says are a sort of religion for minor domestic purposes, and may be met with in all ages, but to those more glaring ones which show how inseparable are an arrogant unbelief and the grossest superstition. Hobbes, who labored already in the seventeenth century to undermine the Christian religion, was so afraid of ghosts that he would not pass the night without candles. D'Alembert, the chief of the Encyclopædists, used to leave the table when thirteen sat down to it. The Marquis D'Argens was frightened out of his wits at the upsetting of a salt-cellar. Frederick II. had faith in astrology. At the court of his successor, General Bishopswerder imposed on the king by magic tricks, and his accomplice, Wöllner, who raised spirits by the agency of optic mirrors, became minister. The custodian of the National Library at Paris related to Count Portalis that some time previous to the great revolution books on fortune-telling and the black arts were in general demand. Oerstedt speaks of a man who paraded his atheism with great insolence, but whom nothing could have tempted to pass through a graveyard after dark. Napoleon I. dispatched, in 1812, a special messenger to Beyreuth, with instructions not to be lodged in the apartments which the "white woman" of the Hohenzollerns was reputed to haunt. In the same way we see by the side of this league of unbelieving philosophers spring up such superstitious sects as the Butlerians, whose head, Margaret Butler, with Justus Winter for God the Father, and George Oppenzoller for God the Son, represented herself to be the Holy Ghost.
The alleged miraculous cures on the grave of Paris, the Jansenist deacon, in the first, and the exorcisms of the devil by Gassner, in the second half of the eighteenth century, form another instructive chapter in the history of superstition. While the Archbishop of Vontimiglii, the Bishop of Sens, and other distinguished prelates, denounced the cures performed with the earth from the grave of Paris as a cheat, Montegon, the atheist, wrote three volumes to prove their authenticity. While the Archbishop of Prague and the papal chair, by a decree of the Congregation of Rites issued in October, 1777, condemned the miraculous pretensions of Gassner, Walter, Leitner, and other deistic physicians, upheld them. While the mountebank Cagliostro, who pretended to have learnt in Egypt the secret of generating magical powers from reflecting surfaces, was called to account at Rome, the Free-Masons of Holland made him visitator, and fêted him in their lodges. The unbelief of the eighteenth century reached at last its culminating point during the French revolution in the abolishment of the Supreme Being, though the rites of Mlle. Aubry or Mme. Momoro were as silly as the worship of the cotton plucked from Voltaire's robe de chambre. The names in the philosophical calendar remind us strongly of the Hindoo worship of the spade and pick, and who knows but some super-enlightened atheist may be prepared to subscribe to the Brahminic dogma about the ox, an animal which has already played a prominent rôle at a red-republican festival? Burke's prediction has been fulfilled, "If we discard Christianity, a coarse, ruinous, degrading superstition will replace it."
This war against faith and every thing spiritual has continued into the nineteenth century, until once more gross materialism is found on every side. Already, during the fourth decade, the darkest superstition threatened to overwhelm the so-called intelligent world with the manifestations of magnetism. The campaign against the supernatural opened with the trial of the devil. As the Strasbourg Catholic satirically observed, the very day and hour had been fixed when it was required that he should establish his own existence by tangible proof. Disregarding the summons, the scamp was promptly declared in contumaciam outlawed and cashiered along with the entire host of unclean spirits. The same summary mode of treatment was pursued with the opposite side, and the same judgment was passed on the angels, cherubim, and seraphim. All were pronounced to be equally tasteless, scentless, inaudible, and imponderable, and declared to be mere creatures of the imagination. Their Lord and Master was next put on trial; at first very considerately with closed doors and in a secret inquisitorial manner. The results of the trial were put on record, and for a while imparted only to the initiated, who gradually divulged the news to the masses. At last the spirituality of our own soul was arraigned, and its activity explained as the result of a mere change of matter. The Beelzebub of ancient superstition was thus exorcised and expelled; but he soon returned to the house which the besom of criticism had cleaned, and brought back with him seven other evil spirits, so that nothing was gained by the proceeding. The age, having cut loose from the invisible, naturally plunged into a most abject dependence on the visible. As the negro races kneel before their fetiches, trees and serpents, so this century kneels before sleeping somnambulists, dancing and writing tables, and mixtures and nostrums from the apothecary shop.
Should civilization much longer continue on the present road, the most deplorable consequences must follow. As in all former times, so in this age unbelief has led where it always will lead—to superstition. Man, created for immortality, needs the wonderful, a future, and hope. When such a sceptical enlightenment as distinguishes modern philosophy has sapped the foundations of religion, its absence leaves in his thoughts and feelings an immeasurable void which invites the most dangerous phantoms of the brain. The moment man boldly declares, "I no longer believe in any thing," he is preparing to believe in all things. It is high time that so-called philosophy should again draw near to that religion which it has misunderstood, and which alone is capable of giving to the emotions of the heart a generous impulse and a safe direction.