SPIRITUALISM.
CHAPTER III.
The spiritualists who protest against the attribution of spiritualistic phenomena to the devil may be divided into two classes: 1st, Those who believe there is no such being as the devil; 2d, Those who, believing him to exist, think it unreasonable to attribute such phenomena as those under consideration to such a being.
To these first I can but admit that there is no demonstrating the devil; but, on the other hand, I would remind them that, in denying his existence, they are opposing themselves, 1st, to the religious instinct of the great mass of mankind, who are persuaded that life is a warfare, that there is an enemy. 2d, To the unwavering, explicit tradition of the Christian church. It is impossible to read the Gospels and the other records of the early church without having the idea of a battle, and an enemy against whom it is waged, brought prominently before you. Our Lord came to break the power of Satan, and to take away "the armor in which he trusted"; and the church was instituted for his detailed discomfiture. Every soul that is saved is regarded as a spoil snatched from the hand of the enemy; every one who is cast out of the church is delivered over to Satan.
Some of the earliest words of the church's ritual are words of defiance and adjuration of the enemy upon whom it was her mission to trample. Her exorcisms, for instance, in the baptism service testify to a consciousness of the devil's presence which is simply startling in its realism. He is never forgotten from the moment when, gently breathing on the child's face, she charges the unclean spirit to give place to the Holy Ghost, to the moment when he is cast out headlong, followed by the renunciations of his rescued victim.
The extreme antiquity of these exorcisms is sufficiently vindicated by the poetic paraphrase of Prudentius in the IVth century:
Intonat antistes Domini: fuge callide serpens
Mancipium Christi, fur corruptissime vexas
Desine, Christus adest humani corporis ultor
Non licet ut spolium rapias cui Christus inhœsit
Pulsus abi ventose liquor Christus jubet, exi.[192]
Moreover, though the devil is expelled in baptism, the church never lets her children lose sight of him. She is ever warning them in the words of S. Augustine: "Take care, afflicted mortals, take care that the evil one defile not ever this house of the body; that, introduced by the senses, he debauch not the soul's sanctity, nor cloud the intellectual light. This evil thing winds through all the inlets of the senses, moulds itself in forms, blends with colors, weds with sounds, lurks in anger and guileful speech, clothes itself in scents, transfuses itself in savors, and by a flood of troublous movement obscures the mind with evil desires, and fills with vapor the channels of the understanding, through which the soul's ray might shed the light of reason."[193] Voltaire was quite in the right when he set down a priest who would fain compromise with infidelity by throwing up the devil, in this wise: "Belief in the devil is an essential point of Christianity: no Satan, no Saviour."
Those who, admitting the devil to exist, deny that spiritualistic phenomena are diabolical, urge various pleas which I purpose to examine in detail. They insist upon, 1st, the innocent and friendly character of the phenomena. 2d, The difficulty of believing that the devil would be allowed to take so great a liberty with respectable persons without some sort of understanding on their parts. 3d, The fact that spiritualism is a great and most efficient exponent of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God in a materialistic generation.
Now, as regards the first plea, I simply deny the fact of the innocence. I submit that pantheism and the non-existence of eternal punishment are immoral doctrines, the spread of which is calculated to make the world worse; and that these are pre-eminently the doctrines of spiritualism, taught always indirectly, and standing out more and more clearly in proportion as the pious twaddle in which they are incorporated for the sake of weak brethren is laid aside, and the spiritualistic element can give itself free way.
Demoralizing, also, is the distaste which spiritualism creates for all religion, inasmuch as religion lives by faith. An example of this is given in Experiences with D. D. Home, p. 60. The party of spiritualists had been conversing, as they imagined, with the spirit of the child of one of them, lately dead, the body, in its coffin, being in the room in which they were sitting. After the burial, we are told, "On our way home, every one remarked that the burial-service, which is, in general, so impressive, had that day, while in church, sounded strangely flat and unprofitable. Mrs. Cox asked how it was that the clergyman had not used the words, 'dust to dust, ashes to ashes, earth to earth.' We assured her that he had; but she declared she had not heard them, although standing as near to him as any of us."
In other respects spiritualism is by no means innocent. It is impossible to set aside the strong testimony, not merely of medical men, who might be supposed prejudiced, but of so many who have either practised spiritualism themselves, or had spiritualist friends, as to the gradual exhaustion of the vital powers which it produces when persevered in to any extent. And, again, it is by far the most efficacious destructive of the barriers of propriety, particularly between the sexes. No one can read much even of the most respectable séances without feeling that the worthy persons who take part in them, whilst securing, may be, the perfect propriety of the particular séance in which they are engaged, are lending the cloak of their respectability to an institution especially marked out for the dissemination of corruption. My contention is that the devil has in spiritualism the prospect of an excellent harvest of evil, of which he has received a very sufficient earnest.
With regard to the gentle behavior, which is supposed to be inconsistent with the character of one who is spoken of as "a roaring lion," I would observe that this gentleness on the part of the spirits is by no means invariable; see the violent scene (Experiences, p. 154) in which Home is tormented and screams; or, again, where the company is struck by the "disagreeable and fearful glowing" of his eyes (Rep., p. 208). However, it must be confessed that the general character of the manifestations is gentleness itself; but of this sort of gentleness there are plenty of examples in accounts of mediæval magic, when spirits have persevered for a considerable time in gentle, not to say pious, behavior, and, indeed, only came out as devils when worried by the church. The following is taken from the Gloria Posthuma S. Ignatii.[194]
A little girl of nine, the daughter of an artilleryman at Malta, was made quite a pet of by spirits, who were always bringing her little presents of jewelry and fruit, at one time giving her fresh figs in January. She was frightened just at first; but they talked so charmingly of their being creatures of the good God as well as she, and seemed to know so much about the inside of churches, that the child could not but think well of them. They did her a wonderful number of kind services of various sorts. For a long time the child's parents, who never saw the spirits, but only the effects they produced, acquiesced, and seemed to think it rather a good joke. There was only one thing that troubled them, and which ultimately made them call in the priest, and this was that the spirits, who showed themselves amiably enough disposed towards the family in general, had an exceptional spite against one little boy. They never saw him come into the room without showing disgust and saying all sorts of unpleasant things about him to their little protégée. There was nothing peculiar about the boy, except that he served Mass every morning. When the priest was sent for, and the house exorcised, the amiable spirits, as is invariably the case under these circumstances, lost their temper, and went off in ugly shapes, vomiting fire; in fact, to borrow the spiritualist expression, showing themselves very unformed spirits indeed.
With this account we may compare Mr. Fusedale's extraordinary letter (Rep., p. 255), in which he says that the spirits habitually play with his children and amuse them by showing them pretty scenes in a polished globe. He tells us that he has himself seen one of these scenes—a ship hemmed in by ice in an Arctic sea—and that he has often witnessed his little boy shoved across the room in a chair, his legs being too short to reach the ground, and "no human agency near." The two accounts are not unlike, except that in the second story the materials for playing out the last scene are wanting.
As regards the second plea, no doubt there is something odd, at first sight, in so many respectable persons having got into such intimate relations with the devil without knowing anything about it; and though there are not wanting individual instances in the history of diablerie, I must confess that I have met with nothing of the sort on so large a scale. But then, we must remember that there never has been a time when respectables as a body were so irreligious, and it is religion that is the great obstacle to such unconscious intercourse with Satan. No Christian who knows anything of the way in which the ancient world was exorcised need be surprised at the devil's being able considerably to enlarge his sphere, as the church has been compelled to narrow hers.
At first, indeed, it seemed as if this was not to be the case. The philosophy of the last century boasted, with some plausibility, that it had done what the church, with all her exorcisms, had never succeeded in doing—that it had swept away Satan altogether, along with his great adversary. Church and devil had gone down together; and for a time people persuaded themselves that the devil, anyhow, had gone. In the solemn obsequies of the whole caste of superstition, as the world fondly thought it, the devil was carried out first, dead, hopelessly dead, free-thinking priests, such as Voltaire rebuked, bearing up the pall. Though many a mocking requiescat has been chanted over his grave, like that of the church, it has proved to be a cenotaph; and now that he appears again, we can hardly wonder if he finds himself more at home than ever since Christianity came into the world.
Satan has ever been, as the schoolmen called him, God's ape (simius Dei), reproducing in the mysteries of the "Sabbath" the rites, and even the organization, of the church; but now, after the world's reiterated rejection of Christ, it would seem that the enemy has been permitted to carry the parody a step further. Not only wherever two or three are gathered together in his name is he in their midst, but, good shepherd-wise, he is allowed to seek the sheep that had been lost. Uninvited he seeks them in the unromantic circle of XIXth-century life, entrenched as this is amongst elements the least promising, one should think, for mysticism of any sort. In bright, cheerful, modern rooms, amongst the rustle of innocent commonplaces, he finds his opportunity and his profit, and gently and genially weans his victims from what fragments of dogmatic religion they may still retain to the liberty of his children. At least, there is nothing unnatural in this view.
The third plea is, in the spiritualist's mind, irresistible, and it has had, doubtless, considerable influence in preventing various religious persons from condemning spiritualism. The great evil of the day is materialism; now, then, it is asked, is it conceivable that the devil should appear as the advocate of the two great spiritual doctrines of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God; nay, should actually convert numbers to a belief in these doctrines? I answer, 1st, that when the devil first came forward as the champion of human liberty, he certainly did preach both the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. "Ye shall not die." "Ye shall be as gods." True, he was denying in one breath the death of the body and the death of the soul; but this is quite in the fashion of spiritualism, which invariably denounces any use of the word "death." 2d, That the doctrine of the immortality of the soul loses all disciplinary force when converted into that of endless, inevitable progression. The possibility of a miserable finality has been accepted by the noblest philosophers as a necessary phase in that melody of a future life which, to use the expression of Socrates (Phædo, cap. 63), it is "so necessary for each man to sing to himself." There are some, he had said (cap. 62), whom "a befitting fate casts into Tartarus, whence they never come out." And in the last book of the Republic, where human life is described as going on in an indefinite series of metempsychosis, we are shown, as the generations sweep round, a pit into which the very bad fall out of the circle, never to join it again. Nor is the doctrine of the existence of God when converted into pantheism of more avail. A deity who is the mere terminus ad quem of necessary evolution can neither be feared as judge nor worshipped as God.
Long experience has taught the evil one that man cannot do without religious sentiment; so he aims at getting its circulation into his own hands by coming forward boldly as the advocate of its cardinal points. He is determined to risk no more disappointing losses, by striving to feed men on the dry husks of materialism, which are insufficient to support life, and are sure, sooner or later, to provoke nausea and repulsion. As to those who have been really converted from scepticism by the spirits, nay, have been landed, as has sometimes been the case, in the bosom of the Catholic Church, I can only say, Blessed be God! who has ever exercised seignorial rights upon the devil's fishing.
So much for the spiritualist amendment. I shall now proceed to consider the positive arguments and evidence tending to show that spiritualism is diabolic.
1st. I notice its shrinking and disgust for all active Catholicism which extends to the use of fragments of Catholic truth in the hands of zealous sectarians. This antipathy, I contend, is invariable; but I must guard against being misunderstood. I admit that the spirits have indulged from time to time in a considerable amount of Catholic, or, I should rather say Ritualist, talk. Several instances may be found in Mr. Home's séances in which holy-water and crucifixes are spoken of with a certain amount of unction. I admit, too, that though sometimes the spirits are discomfited by the mere presence of a religious object—a medal, relic, etc.—this is by no means ordinarily the case. It is quite possible for religious objects to be so presented as in no way to embarrass the spirits, who have been sometimes permitted to carry them about with apparent tenderness, even as Satan was allowed to carry our Lord and set him on a pinnacle of the temple. A sword requires to be handled with a certain amount of vigor and intention if it is to avail as a weapon. If holy objects are brought out simply as so many Catholic testimonials and orders of merit for the spirits, I know nothing in the nature of things or in the promises of God to prevent the devil wearing them in his button-hole. On the other hand, a man uncertain of the spirits' character, but with an honest and lively intention of rejecting them so far as they are God's enemies, "fugite partes adversæ," if he adjures them in his name, will either reduce them to silence and impotence, or extort the confession that they are devils.
It would be easy to produce numbers of instances of the extraordinarily hostile sensitiveness of the spirits in regard to the use in their presence of Catholic prayers, medals, relics, etc. In fact, in order to avoid being a non-conductor, if not an obstructive, a certain undogmatic attitude of mind is required. We need not, indeed, reject Christ, but we must be prepared to look for another beside him, if not in his place. Mr. Home (Rep., p. 188) says that, for the medium's success, "the only thing necessary is that the people about should be harmonious." He explains that "the 'harmonious' feeling is simply that which you get on going into a room and finding all the people present such as you feel at home with at once.... Scepticism is not a hindrance; an unsympathetic person is." I have no doubt that this account is perfectly accurate so far as it goes. A Christian's hatred of what he suspects to be the devil, and Professor Tyndall's contemptuous disgust for what he considers a piece of cheating, are both no doubt natural impediments to spiritualistic manifestations; although, in the former case, it may well be that it is something more.
The following scene from Prudentius (Apoth., 460-502) illustrates what I have said as to Christian rite and formulary availing against sorcery, not as a charm, but as a weapon of faith. It must be remembered that Julian had been baptized, but his baptism had no effect in breaking the magic rites. We venture thus to render it:
"To give great Hecatè her glut of blood,
Whole troops of cows and lowing heifers stood
About her altar, every frontlet crowned
With shadowy cypress twisted round and round.
And now the priestly butcher drives his brand
Into the victims, and with bloody hand
Gropes keenly in the entrails chilling fast,
To count each fluttering life-pulse to the last.
When suddenly he cries, dead-white with fear,
'Alas! great prince, some greater god is here
Than may suffice these foaming bowls of milk,
The blood of victims, flowers, and twisted silk.
Yon summoned shades are scattering in dismay,
And scared Persephonè glides fast away,
With torch averted and with trailing scourge,
Thessalian charms are powerless to urge
The troubled gods to face the hostile thing.
In vain our spells and mystic muttering;
The flame has withered in yon censer's core,
The blinking embers shrink in ashes hoar.
The server with the plate can scarcely stand,
The rich balm dripping from his trembling hand.
The flamen feels his laurel chaplet go,
The victim leaps, and shuns the fatal blow.
Assuredly some Christian youth has dared
To enter here, and, as their wont, has scared
The assembled gods, and of their rites despoiled.
Avaunt! avaunt! thou that art washed and oiled!
That so anew fair Proserpine may rise.'
He shrieked, and swooning fell, as though his eyes
Had seen Christ angry and in act to slay.
In a like fear the prince now thrusts away
His royal crown, and gazes all about;
For the fond youth had dared his spells to flout
By bearing on his brow the Christian sign.
Lo! one, dragged forward from the brilliant line
Of royal pages, flaxen-haired and bright,
Resigns his arms, and owns that they are right:
That he is Christian, that his forehead bears
The wondrous sign that every witchcraft scares.
The startled monarch, leaping from his seat,
Upsets the pontiff in his swift retreat,
And flees the chapel, while the rest atone
Their impious deed, seeing their master gone,
And bowing low their heads in awe and shame,
In faltering accents call on Jesu's name."
The fathers have the completest confidence in the efficacy of Christian weapons in Christian hands, and even, when used honestly, in hands not yet Christian, to defeat sorcery.
Tertullian (Apol., c. 23) throws out this bold challenge: "Let any one, known to have a devil, come before your tribunal. That spirit, if bidden speak by a Christian, shall as truly confess himself a devil as he has elsewhere falsely declared himself a god. Or bring forward some one of those who are thought to be divine patients, who, sniffing up the altar's deity, conceive of the steam, violent retchers with panting utterance; the heavenly Virgin herself, the promiser of rain, Æsculapius too; ... if they do not all confess themselves devils, not daring to lie to a Christian, then and there shed that insolent Christian's blood."
Nor is it only the passionate Tertullian who can speak thus. S. Athanasius (De Incarn., num. 48) is hardly less energetic: "Let any one come who wishes to test what we have said; and let him, in the midst of the manifestations of demons, and the guiles of oracles, and the marvels of magic, use the sign of the cross, which these mock at, or merely name Christ, he shall soon see how quickly the demons are routed, the oracles silenced, the whole magic art and its charms utterly wiped out."
The instances of modern spiritualist manifestations being stopped by religious adjuration are very frequent.
Mr. Glover (Rep., p. 205) had been asking the spirits about the time of our Lord's coming; they had answered glibly enough, and had pointed out several texts in the Bible, when, apparently on a sudden impulse, "he made a cross in a circle, and asked, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, if the communications were of God, and the answer was 'No.' He then asked if they were of the devil, and the answer was 'Yes.'"
Mr. Chevalier (Rep., p. 218) says that, after having received several communications purporting to come from his recently-lost child, "One day the table turned at right angles, and went into a corner of the room. I asked, 'Are you my child?' but obtained no answer. I then said, 'Are you from God?' but the table was silent. I then said, 'In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I command you to answer; are you from God?' One loud rap—a negative—was then given. 'Do you believe,' said I, 'that Christ died to save us from sin?' The answer was, 'No.' 'Accursed spirit!' said I, 'leave the room.' The table then walked across the room, entered the adjoining one, and quickened its steps. It was a small, tripod table. It walked with a sidelong walk. It went to the door, shook the handle, and I opened it. The table then walked into the passage, and I repeated the adjuration, receiving the same answer. Fully convinced that I was dealing with an accursed spirit, I opened the street-door, and the table was immediately silent; no movement or rap was heard. I returned alone to the drawing-room, and asked if there were any spirits present. Immediately I heard steps, like those of a little child, outside the door. I opened it, and the small table went into the corner as before, just as my child did when reproved for a fault. These manifestations continued until I used the adjuration, and I always found that they changed or ceased when the name of God was used."
Miss Anna Blackwell (Rep., p. 220) gives her evidence immediately after Mr. Chevalier's. Whilst admitting the fact that the spirits often call themselves devils, she suggests a twofold explanation: 1st. That they are coarse, undeveloped spirits. 2d. That they are vexed at the rude treatment they have received. She is speaking of her sister's mediumship: "The spirit would use her hand to write what communication had to be made. The spirits wrote what was good and bad. One wanted to sign himself Satan and Beelzebub; but," continues Miss Blackwell, "my sister did not believe in the existence of any such a spirit, and she said, 'No; if you are permitted to come to me, it is not to tell such outrageous lies. If you persist in trying to impose upon me, you sha'n't write.' I have been present at many such little fights. She would resist the spirit, and, when she saw the capital S of Satan being written, would twist her hand. The spirit has then written, 'I hate you, because I cannot deceive you.' ... We never begin without prayer. We say to the spirits that wish to deceive us, 'Dear spirits, we are all imperfect; we will endeavor to benefit you by our lights, in so far as they are superior to yours.' Sometimes they would overturn and break the table; yet they were rendered better by our kindness. We would never dream of addressing one as an 'accursed spirit.' From one who was very violent, and by whom I have been myself struck, we have received progressive messages, saying, 'We are going up higher now; we have, through your help, broken the chains of earth, and we leave you.' When my sister found the S being written, or the capital B for Beelzebub, she would say with kindness, but firmness, 'Dear spirit, you must not deceive; it is not for such tricks, but for a good end, that you are permitted to come.'"
It is often said that the education question is the question of the day; but I was hardly prepared to find that it embraced the spirit-world. I know not which to pity most, those to whom the responsibility has been brought home of having to educate a vast number of imperfect spirits, who are, as Miss Blackwell admits, "all in a manner devils," or the wretched spirits who have thus to begin all over again as day-scholars at a dame's school.
According to Miss Blackwell's theory, the church is evidently responsible for the existence of the devil. So far as he can be said to exist at all, he is the church's creation; for, instead of doing her best to instruct and humanize the rude but well-meaning spirit Arab thrown upon her hands, she has goaded him to desperation by addressing him as "Maledicte damnate." Oh! if she had only called him "dear spirit," with Miss Blackwell, he might ere now have comported himself conformably, instead of masquerading under such uncomfortable names as Satan and Beelzebub and doing a world of mischief.
My second argument is the similarity between spiritualism and mediæval witchcraft. I have already noticed incidentally several points of resemblance, and would now draw attention to what is, perhaps, the most important point of all. Of course, such similarity has no argumentative force if Miss Blackwell's theory be admitted.
As I have before remarked, one of the most prominent characteristics of mediæval magic was its being a parody of the church. The principal ceremony of the "Sabbath" was a diabolical burlesque of the Mass, in which the devil preached, and the celebrant stood on his head, and the servers genuflected backwards. Now, amongst modern spiritualists I have discovered no such violation of decency; the parody is not so complete, and, on the whole, it is a decorous one; but it unmistakably exists, and is on the increase. It is by no means uncommon to assemble the spirit circle before an altar with crucifix and candles. In Experiences with D. D. Home we find that that gentleman has quite a craving in this direction. He baptizes with sand, he stretches himself in the form of a cross, imitates the phenomena of Pentecost, the rushing wind, the dove, the tongues of fire, and is perpetually anointing his friends with some mysterious substance, which apparently emanates from his hands.
Against what has been said on behalf of the devil hypothesis the spiritualist can urge nothing, except the by no means unwavering testimony of the spirits themselves, and the spiritualist's own recognition of the identity of his departed friends. As to the spirits' testimony, it is worth just nothing. Evil spirits have always personated the dead, as philosophers, fathers, schoolmen with one accord testify. As to the recognition of friends, I should wish to treat with all due consideration the natural craving of friends to obtain some intelligence of their departed friends; but, on the one hand, minute imitations of manner are certainly not beyond the devil's power; on the other, affection is anything but keen-sighted, and the rapture of a communication at all, when once the idea is admitted, is apt to throw all minor details into the shade. Was not Lady Tichbourne able to trace the features of her drowned boy in the Claimant's photograph?
Wherever the spirits have represented persons of known character and ability—men, for instance, who have left a gauge of their mental qualities in their writings, like Shakespeare or Bacon—the personation has been invariably a lamentable and most palpable failure. That the spirits of clever men do not at all talk up to the mark is notorious and generally admitted by candid spiritualists. Mr. Simkiss (Rep., p. 133) says, "Beyond solving the important question, 'If a man die, shall he live again?' by the very fact of spirits communicating and proving their identity, there is to me little that is consistent or reliable in what is revealed through different mediums." Mr. Varley (p. 168) endeavors to explain the feebleness of spirit-talk by want of education and development on the part of the mediums by which their communications are conditioned. I do not say that there is not something in this; but surely the communications of genius would, under the most adverse circumstances, take the form rather of broken sense than fluent twaddle.
The extreme irritation invariably manifested by the spirits towards anything like suspicion, particularly if it take the form of trying to subject them to a religious test, is surely grotesquely unnatural in the case of spirits who have shuffled off the coil of mortality, with whom life's fitful fever has passed. We have at least some right to expect that persons who in their lifetime had a reasonable amount of dignity and patience should have increased rather than diminished their stock of virtue with their enlarged experience, unless, indeed, they have so lost God as to have lost themselves.
It is difficult to conceive a justification for the spiritualist who, believing that he is dealing with spirits, refuses to entertain the idea that these may be devils, and makes no attempt to bring them to a test. His best excuse, perhaps, would be that the world has to such an extent lost its standard of faith and morals wherewith to test anything.
Spiritualists may object that some thing, at least, of what I have urged against them avails as much, or even more, against the devil hypothesis. Thus, if the spirit of Bacon is too nonsensical for Bacon, à fortiori he is too nonsensical for Lucifer, who must needs be the cleverer spirit of the two. Upon this I observe that the retort shows a complete ignorance of the devil's character and position. "The character of a myth," some one interposes. Well, I am not now discussing his existence. Even a myth must be in keeping. You have no right to give Cerberus four heads, or make him mew instead of bark, for all he is a myth. I suppose people have been seduced by Milton's grand conception of the "archangel fallen" and the splendid melancholy of his solemn rhetoric; but the devil of theology never says anything wise or fine. He is, indeed, understood to retain the natural powers with which he was created; but he is wholly averse from the God whom all wise and fine utterances do, in their measure, praise. Wherefore all such are in the highest degree repugnant to Satan. Neither are such costly and uncongenial deceits necessary to beguile man. Selfinterest and curiosity may be gratified at a cheaper rate.
The concessions of spiritualists themselves in reality reduce the difference between us very considerably. I have gained all that I care for, if it be conceded that these spirits may be the spirits of the damned, who are equivalently devils; and Miss Blackwell admits that these spirits are "in a manner devils," and Mr. Home (Experiences, p. 167) says of some of them: "I tell you you do not know the danger, they are so fearfully low—the very lowest and most material of all. You might almost call them 'accursed.' They will get a power over you that you cannot break through." The one great difference between us is that consistent spiritualists hold that there is no finality; that these irrepressible devils—for they are always obtruding themselves amongst the respectable spirit guests—may be reformed. But even so, would it not be well to consider whether the chances are not in favor of our being ruined before they are restored? Once and again it may be that a spirit speaks to them who is from God, even as God spake sometimes in the high places of Baal.[195] But God is not wont to reward imprudence, and, on their own showing, spiritualists stand convicted of the most extraordinary rashness in thus exposing themselves to the whirlwind of spirit influence without having a spiritual constitution, so to speak, or any canons or habits of spiritual life wherewith the influence can be tested.
Man, as Alvernus finely says, is a being created "upon the horizon of two worlds"—the world of sense and the world of spirit. But in the sensible world only is he at home, wherein his material nature is sufficiently developed for him to hold his own; whereas, in the spirit-world, with which he is also in contact, the God of both worlds must be his guide, or, horsed upon his excited imagination, he may easily be lost in the wilderness, and fall a prey to lawless spirits. Nothing can be more striking than the contrast between the sobriety of the Catholic Church in her dealings with the spirit-world and the rashness of spiritualists. The church has always recognized as a reality spirit communications of various kinds, good and bad; but she has always tested most rigidly the character of the spirits; and even when these have satisfied every test, she has only allowed their sanctity to be highly probable; she has never, so to speak, granted them her testamur. They are ever on their trial, inasmuch as she insists that the lessons they communicate shall be in strict subordination to the rule of faith and morals; in other words, to the ordinary duties of life. The church has ever shown herself keenly alive to the dangers of supernatural intercourse. She has been jealously on her guard against overwrought sentimentalism, vanity, or any strained or undue development of one part of the patient's moral nature at the expense of the rest.
Whilst she prizes amongst the choicest of her devotional treasures the private revelations of her saints, such as those of S. Bridget, S. Gertrude, S. Catharine of Sienna, and many more, yet if one consults the great masters of Christian spiritualism, if I may so speak—such as S. John of the Cross, for example—who have themselves experienced the favors of which they treat—the ecstasy, the vision, and the prophecy—one is more struck than by anything else by the stern common sense of their precautions against deception, and the sad sobriety of their confession that, after all, you can hardly ever be quite sure that you are not the victim of an illusion.
That a certain moral discipline is necessary in order not to be deceived, even when you are dealing with one who has a true spirit of prophecy, is implied in the words of Ezechiel, cap. xiv.: "For every man of the house of Israel, and every stranger among the proselytes in Israel, if he separate himself from me, and place his idols in his heart, and set the stumbling-block of his iniquity before his face and come to the prophet to inquire of me by him: I the Lord will answer him by myself.... And when the prophet shall err and speak a word, I the Lord have deceived that prophet.... According to the iniquity of him that inquireth, so shall the iniquity of the prophet be."
S. Augustine (De Gen. ad Lit., lib. xii. c. 13, 14) might be warning those spiritualists who place their security in the peacefulness and truthfulness of their communications: "The discernment of spirits is very difficult. When the evil spirit plays the peaceful (quasi tranquillus agit), and, having possessed himself of a man's spirit without harassing his body, says what he is able, enunciates true doctrine, and gives useful information, transfiguring himself into an angel of light, to the end that, when persons have trusted him in what is clearly good, he may afterwards win them to himself. I do not think he can be discerned except by means of that gift of which the apostle saith when speaking of the diverse gifts of God: 'To another discernment of spirits.' It is no great thing to discover him when he has gone so far as to do anything against good morals or the rule of faith, for then he is discovered by many; but by the aforesaid gift, in the very beginning, whilst to many he still appears good, his badness is found out forthwith."
Again (Confess., lib. x. c. 35), he speaks of the danger of seeking supernatural communications: "In the religious life itself, men tempt God when they demand signs and marvels, not for any one's healing, but simply for the sake of the experience. In this vast wood, full of snares and dangers, what have I not had to drive away from my heart! What suggestions and machinations does not the enemy bring to bear upon me, that I may ask for a sign! But I beseech thee that even as all consent thereto is far from me, so it may be ever further and further."
Amort, De Rev. Priv., p. 20, from Gravina, says: "It is often easier to establish the certainty of the deceitfulness of an apparition than of its truthfulness, because bad angels have their own characteristics, which good angels never imitate; on the other hand, the bad often imitate the appearance and manner of the good."
Amort, ibid., p. 104, from S. John of the Cross, says: "All apparitions, visions, revelations, consolations, sweetnesses, sensations, etc., which are received by the external senses, should ever and always be refused by the soul as much as in it lies.... In most cases they are diabolical.... When they are from God, they are sent in order that they may be despised, and that the soul, by means of the victory wherewith it overcomes these pleasures of the senses, divine though they be, may be led to the things of the understanding."
Ibid., p. 115: "When the words in any supposed revelation take the form of a process of reasoning after the application of the soul in contemplation, God, the natural reason, and the devil may all three concur in the same process."
No test of the holiness of a manifestation is considered quite satisfactory save that of a continued increase in virtue, especially in humility, in degrees corresponding to the increase of the favor; for the devil will not consent to be a master of virtue. When S. Teresa had scruples as to the source of her favors, it was thus her director consoled her.
So cautious is Catholic mysticism; whilst spiritualists are not afraid to keep a sort of spirit-ordinary, where
"White spirits and black, red spirits and gray,
Mingle, mingle, mingle; those that mingle may."
I repeat it, spiritualists who think they are communicating with spirits, and take no pains to test their character, as though the hypothesis of a devil were absurd, are inexcusably silly.
I must now consider some objections in the mouth of persons who, without pretending that they have found any satisfactory solution of the question in the theories of unconscious cerebration or psychic force, are nevertheless exceedingly impressed by the strong psychic element in the phenomena of spiritualism—the apparent necessity for the presence of one or more persons of a peculiar nervous organization, for a certain harmonious mixture, or rather melodious articulation, of the company, in order to produce the desired effect. "Surely," they say, "such law, i.e., such regular alternation of cause and effect, as can be discovered is psychic. So far as we can subject the phenomena to ordinary scientific tests, everything points to their being the product of the psychic force of a certain peculiarly constituted company." This is the tone of Mr. Cox's recent letter to the Times, and Mr. Edwin Arnold's letter in the Report is quite in the same key.
My answer is that I admit all that they say. Of course, so much of law as is detected is psychic. There is no other law at work within the sphere of our discovery. The question is whether there are not indications of an influence at work which is irreducible to psychic laws, whilst using, in a partially abnormal manner, psychic force.
Mr. Lewes will urge (letter, Rep., p. 264): "I might propose as an hypothesis that the chair leaped because a kobold tilted it up; ... but you would not believe in the presence of a kobold, because his presence would enable you to explain the phenomena." Most indubitably I should, if no less an hypothesis would explain the phenomena; particularly if I had otherwise reason to believe in the existence and operation of kobolds. I should hold the likelihood of the hypothesis of his action in the particular case as steadily increasing in proportion as the other hypotheses tended to break down.
"No guess," Mr. Lewes insists, "need be rejected, if it admits of verification; no guess that cannot be verified is worth a moment's attention." The last part of this trenchant dictum is worth a moment's attention. If it simply mean that it is not worth a scientific man's while to attempt a direct scientific examination of what clearly admits of no such treatment, I can only say that, however much the scientific man may sometimes need the lesson, it is neither more nor less than a truism. If it mean that no hypothesis is to be regarded by any one as "worth a moment's attention" which science can never hope directly to verify, it is conspicuously untrue. Even a terra incognita is not without scientific interest as marking a boundary; nay, it may be scientifically proved to contain a place known to exist and proved not to exist in any known lands.
Of course, the devil, or kobold, if Mr. Lewes prefers it, cannot be verified in the sense of caught and handed over to scientific men as a specimen of spiritualistic fauna. Neither do I suppose he can be really detected, except by the standard of Catholic truth, by Catholic tests, and Catholic weapons; and even then, in the eyes of unbelievers, he will be no further identified than as an adverse intelligence in a very bad temper. But surely this is enough, where men's minds have not been reduced to mere machines for registering rigid scientific results, to secure the devil hypothesis something more than "a moment's attention."
What law we detect in spiritualistic phenomena I conceive to be the working of the conditions in subordination to which the devil is able to communicate with man. This subordination is probably owing, in part, to the nature of things which compels certain things to accost certain other things in one way and not another, in part to the merciful reservation of God. It would seem as if the spirits were, on the whole, prevented from being more irreligious than the prevailing tone of the company, or at least of the most irreligious portion of it. It may very well be that the conditions limiting diabolical intercourse are more complex and imperious, where the spirit "quasi tranquillus agit, without harassing the body." In mediæval diablerie, the demon is often represented as hindered or assisted by instruments of a purely physical character; thus Coleridge makes Christabel lift the enchantress over the threshold. A crowd, by neutralizing individual resistance, may present fewer obstacles to the devil—nay, may supply a medium of its own; just as frightened cattle huddled-together in a thunder-storm are said, by the steam-column arising from their tightly compacted bodies, to furnish a conductor for the lightning.
I have indicated in several places of these essays what I conceive to be the objects the devil has in view in lending himself to spiritualism. His main object, I can hardly doubt, is to do with religious sentiment what we are told Mr. Fisk tried to do with the gold currency of America—"corner it," get its circulation into his own hands. In the numberless cases where religion is nothing more than sentiment, he is only too likely to succeed; second-sight is so much more satisfying to the imagination, and at the same time so far more modest in its demands upon the will, than faith. The spread of spiritualism in the last few years is notorious, and there is every prospect of its continuing. Whether it will ever enter upon a new phase of existence, and become a fact publicly acknowledged by scientific men, is a question. It has never been so recognized amongst civilized nations. Whatever miracles, divine or diabolical, were meant to effect, it was not to overbalance the general sway of purely human power, of which this world is the appointed stage. As a general rule, the brilliant series of miracles by which the Christian martyr has baffled death in the presence of admiring crowds has ended in quiet decapitation at a convenient mile-stone. Many a time, doubtless, has the Roman headsman flattered himself that his good straight-down blow effectually upset that fine story made up out of a drugged lion and a fagot of green wood, which had somehow imposed upon so many stupid people. Not, of course, that I am denying that there have been miracles which imperiously asserted themselves over all obstacles, like the series which ended in Pharao's drowning; but, as a general rule, God has spoken once and again, and then prosaic obstinacy has been given its way. On these occasions, God has no doubt submitted himself to a general law which he has made for all direct spiritual interference, and which he mercifully enforces with especial strictness in the case of the devil.
Any civilized nation engaged in active pursuits will always be likely to contain, one should think, a majority among its scientific men who will be unfitted to experience, and indisposed to believe in, and still more to acknowledge, the phenomena of spiritualism. But it is impossible to say; the spiritualistic system as developed by Allan Kardec (see Miss Blackwell's communication, Rep., p 284) seems to lend itself in a remarkable way to some of the most prominent scientific tendencies of the day. If ever Darwinists should stand in need of the consolations of religious enthusiasm, they might find a congenial home in spiritualism. In the vast system of metempsychosis to which Miss Blackwell introduces us, we have all the Darwinian stages and to spare. First in order comes the "primordial fluid," "containing all the elements of derived existence," "the first substantiation of creative thought." "There are three orders or modes of substantiality"—"psychic substance," and "corporeal substance," and "dynamic substance, or force," which last is stated to partake of the nature of the two other modes, and to be the intermediary between them.
(P. 300) "Every state of the psychic element determines corresponding vibrations of the dynamic element, which, effecting corresponding aggregations of the atoms of the material element, produce the substance or body which is the material expression of that state." The soul's magnetic envelope, "perisprit," is at once its first garment and the instrument by which it aggregates to itself the elements of its body.
This system embraces a twofold metempsychosis—that of formation and that of reformation. The first is the process by which the impersonal psychic element is gradually prepared for individualization or the attainment of conscious personality by being transfused progressively through the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds—the same process, but with a different final cause, it would seem, as that described by the poet:
"Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus,
Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet."
The psychic element is presented, not as feeding, but as feeding on successive worlds, like a silk-worm on mulberry-leaves, leaving geological strata behind it, for instance, as the refuse of its mineral sojourn.
Souls are first individualized in the fluidic or atmospheric world; and if they are docile to the instruction of that world, they never "incur the penalty of incarceration in bodies of planetary matter, and consequently never become men," but remain in this or that fluidic world until ripe for the highest or "sidereal order." On the other hand, the spirits who are indocile enter upon the second series of metempsychosis, "having brought upon themselves the penalty of exile in a planet corresponding, in the compactness or comparative fluidity of its material constituents, to the degree of their culpability."
(P. 309) "The moral and intellectual state of the soul decides the corresponding magnetic action of the perisprit, and thereby decides the nature of the body which is formed by that action."
(319) "While accomplishing the new series of incorporations in progressively nobler forms, in higher and higher planets, the spirit goes back, at each disaggregation of its material envelope, into the fluidic sphere of the planet in which its last material embodiment has been accomplished."
(322) "The fluidic world being the normal world of souls, we remain in intimate (though usually unconscious) connection with the fluidic sphere of the planet, while incarnated on its surface. We return to it during sleep, when, through the elasticity of the perisprit (which has been seen by clairvoyants elongated into a sort of luminous cord connecting the soul with the sleeping body), we are enabled to visit our friends in the other life."
(326) "The more extended vision of the fluidic sphere shows (its inhabitants) a wide range of human actions and intentions, and thus enables them to forecast with more or less correctness, and, when permitted to do so, to predict the same with more or less exactness, according to the flexibility of the medium."
S. Augustine has a fine passage in his De Divinatione Dæmonum, cap. iii., comparing the keenness and swiftness (acrimonia sensûs et celeritas motûs) which the devils possess in virtue of their fluidic state (aerium corpus) to the vulture's knowledge, who, "when the carcase is thrown out, flies up from an unseen distance; and to the osprey's, who, floating aloft, is said at that vast height to see the fish swimming beneath the waves, and fiercely smiting the water with outstretched legs and talons, to ravish it."
I can conceive the attractions of such a system, combining, as it does, the ingenuity and fulness of Platonism with something of the color and rhythm of modern science. If any concordat is to be made between religious enthusiasm unattached and science, I do not think the chances of spiritualism are to be despised. Just at present, however, although some scientific men have taken up spiritualism, there can be no doubt that, on the whole, spiritualism and science are at daggers drawn. There is no mistaking the utter loathing expressed in Professor Huxley's letter (Rep., p. 229), in which he declines to take any part in the committee's investigation, on the ground that, "supposing the phenomena to be true, they do not interest me." He has a perfect right to compare spiritualistic talk to "the chatter of old women and curates in a cathedral town"; but his anger has made him quite miss the logical point of the position. The privilege he declines as worthless is the opportunity, not of listening to such conversation, but of examining and testing the hitherto ignored faculty; and this no man can seriously reject as uninteresting.
There is no difficulty in understanding the bitterness with which modern science regards spiritualism. It had been for so long carrying everything before it; it had weighed so many things on earth and in the heavens; it had reduced so many apparently eccentric phenomena to law; its discoveries had been so brilliant, and its still more brilliant projections were so plausible, that it flattered itself that all idea of the supernatural was fairly relegated to the obscure past or to the obscurer future. The philosophy of the XIXth century was being fast reduced to a bare statement of the contents of sensation, and the philosophers of the day were looking for an easy victory over the most respectable of dogmatic traditions, when, lo! full in the calm scientific light, the singularly grotesque form of spiritualism lifts its head, and the warrior who had so loudly challenged the king to mortal combat finds himself set upon by the court fool. When earth, according to the poet's dream, should be "lapped in universal law," up starts a mass of phenomena not merely inexplicable by any known law, but, in popular estimation at least, incompatible with any hypothesis but that of supernatural agency. It has been the more intolerable that spiritualism had affected an imposing vocabulary of scientific terms, recommending itself to its audience by an appeal to partially known laws, such as magnetism and electricity, whilst really indulging in the most unblushing necromancy. Thus the scientific formulæ have been given somewhat the rôle of captives in the triumph of superstition. No wonder scientific men are angry. But whilst they "do well to be angry," I think they do by no means well to refuse to investigate the subject because on various accounts it is offensive to them.
Scientific men frequently complain that spiritualists will not submit their séances to the test of a public examination in broad daylight. Now, this is really not a fair statement of the case. Spiritualists say that they have found by experience that a certain class of phenomena require dark or twilight; but a vast number of independent physical manifestations do take place in broad daylight. On the other hand, when the scientific investigator insists upon interfering with the constituents of the séance, the arrangement of the circle, etc., the spiritualist answers, fairly enough, that, since under the most favorable conditions the success of the séance cannot be reckoned on, it would be absurd to allow the abandonment of what experience has shown to be a necessary condition of success. "With the phenomena of magic we can experimentalize but little; neither can we evoke the least of them at our good pleasure. We can but observe them where they present themselves, gather them into corresponding groups, and discover among them common features and common laws." (Perty, Mystisch. Erscheinungen—Vorrede, p. xi.) This being understood, spiritualists invite the representatives of science to make what observations they please in broad daylight, when, at least, they will be able to discount such disturbing conditions as they may not eliminate. It is an onus, certainly, for the investigator to have to form a part of what is going on; but this is no more than the detective undergoes when he plays the accomplice in order to discover the thief. Say that spiritualism is a folly, a disease, what you will, it is at least of the highest scientific interest and practical importance that we should understand its conditions and action as thoroughly as possible. If scientific men have no more serious scruple to keep them aloof than the dignity of their order—for, after all, this is what Mr. Huxley's excuses come to—the exigencies of the case require that it should be put aside. If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain.
Nothing is more calculated to bring out the inherent diversities of the human mind than the investigation of spiritualism; for it not only involves an examination of some of the most difficult problems relating to evidence, but, indirectly at least, an examination of the whole process by which each individual concerned rejects or assimilates his mental pabulum. Hence the extraordinary difficulty of conducting such an inquiry without incessant wrangling. The Committee of the Dialectical Society, to whose Report I have so often referred, is quite a case in point. Its Report is the record of a schism, of an irreconcilable clash of opinions. If the committee had waited until these had been reduced to harmony, the Report would never have been published. One of the principal members—Dr. Edmunds—was, I think, exceptionally tried. His own opinion was and is that spiritualism is a mixture of trickery and delusion; but his own dining-room table habitually took sides against him, and this in the most treacherous manner. It used to wait until he had left the room, and then, in the presence of the other investigators, run around with nobody touching it.
You might almost as well meddle with a man's digestion as with his belief. Prove that his convictions are groundless, and he feels as outraged as though you had affixed a register to his waistcoat which showed the world that his favorite dish had disagreed with him. Dr. Garth Wilkinson (Rep., p. 234) is by no means singular in his experience "that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or given in the affections or intuitions, and that discussion and inquiry do little more than feed the temperament." And what a variety of temperaments will inevitably be found in any committee of investigation—men who, like Mr. Lewes, consider the possibility of an hypothesis which cannot be rigidly tested unworthy of consideration, or like Mr. Grattan Geary (Rep., p. 95), who, on finding that many eminent men are spiritualists, is simply impressed by the number of eminent men who are enjoying an unmerited reputation for sanity. After all, men make more account, as a general rule, of one little bit of experience, the real force of which is incommunicable, and which, when put into words for another's benefit, is often to the last degree trivial, than of all the arguments in the world. A charming example of this is given by Dr. H. More in a letter to Glanville, published at the beginning of the latter's Sadducismus Triumphatus: "I remember an old gentleman in the country of my acquaintance, an excellent justice of the peace, and a piece of a mathematician; but what sort of a philosopher he was you may understand from a rhime of his own making, which he commended to me on my taking horse in his yard, which rhime is this:
An ens is nothing till sense find out,
Sense ends in nothing, so naught goes about;
which rhime of his was so rapturous to himself that, at the reciting of the second verse, the old man turned himself about upon his toe as nimbly as one may see a dry leaf whisk'd round in the corner of an orchard-walk by some little whirlwind. With this philosopher I have had many discourses concerning the immortality of the soul and its distinction. When I have run him quite down by reason, he would laugh and say, 'That is logick, H.,' calling me by my Christian name. To which I replied, 'This is reason, Fr. L. (for so I and some others used to call him), but it seems you are for the new light and direct inspiration,' which, I confess, he was as little for as for the other; but I said so only by way of drollery to him in those times. But truth is, nothing but palpable experience could move him; and being a bold man, and fearing nothing, he told me he had tried all the ceremonies of conjuration he could to raise the devil or a spirit, and had a most earnest desire to meet with one, but never could do it. But this he told me: when he did not so much as think of it, while his servant was pulling off his boots in the hall, some invisible hand gave him such a clap on the back that it made all ring again. So, thought he, now I am invited to the converse of my spirit; and therefore, so soon as his boots were off and his shoes on, out he went into the yard and next field to find out the spirit that had given him this familiar clap on the back, but found none neither in the yard nor field next to it. But though he did not feel the stroke, albeit he thought it afterwards (finding nothing come of it) a mere delusion, yet, not long before his death, it had more force with him than all the philosophical arguments I could use to him, though I could wind him and nonplus as I pleased; but yet all my arguments, how solid soever, made no impression upon him. Wherefore, after several reasonings of this nature, whereby I would prove the soul's distinction from the body, and its immortality, when nothing of such subtile considerations did any more execution on his mind than some lightning is said to do, though it melts the sword, upon the fuzzy consistency of the scabbard, well, said I, Fr. L., though none of these things move you, I have something still behind, and what you yourself acknowledged to me, that may do the business. Do you remember that clap on the back when your servant was pulling off your boots in the hall? Assure yourself, said I, Fr. L., that goblin will be the first that will bid you welcome into the other world. Upon that his countenance changed most sensibly, and he was more confounded with this rubbing up of his memory than with all the rational and philosophical arguments I could produce."
Whilst admitting that the Report of the Dialectical Society indicates a very considerable initial success, I cannot but feel the undiminished importance of W. M. Wilkinson's rather caustic warning (Rep., p. 231): "The first thing in such an investigation is to assume nothing, not even that a committee of the Dialectical Society can 'obtain a satisfactory elucidation of the phenomena.' No committee has ever done so yet. A committee of professors of Harvard University, amongst whom was Agassiz, after they had made an examination, did not think proper to publish their report, though they had published their intention to do so, and were frequently and publicly asked for it." The London Society has, at least improved upon the example.
I have maintained throughout that neither the hypothesis of trickery nor of delusion can be sustained for a moment as an adequate explanation of the phenomena of spiritualism, on grounds which may be thus summarized: 1. Many of these phenomena outdo all conjuring. 2. They take place where the possibility of trickery has been eliminated. 3. The exhibition of imaginative excitement is, on the whole, inconsiderable, and there is no appreciable proportion between the degrees of excitement and the phenomena. But, at the same time, I am far from maintaining that there is no trickery amongst the mediums, and no predisposition in the company tending more or less to disqualify them from detecting it. I am inclined to think that more or less trickery forms part of the stock in trade of most mediums, but that its share in the production of phenomena is comparatively slight.
Mr. Browning's marvellous conception of Sludge the Medium is based, I admit, upon a real, existing unscrupulosity on the one side, and on a real, existing gullibility on the other; but these are magnified into colossal and perfectly unreal proportions so far as Sludge is to be taken as a representative of his class. In many cases a single fraud may fairly be taken to vitiate the whole projection. If in a chemical demonstration, for instance, we were to discover the secret substitution, by the operator, of an ingredient not in the programme, we might fairly conclude that the whole thing was a pretence; that there was nothing in it. But this is not necessarily so in the case of spiritualism; the lie or trick does not always imply the total absence of other force, but may be an initial ceremony, preparing the company by quickening their expectations, and propitiating the evil influence by an acceptable sacrifice of human honor.
It must be confessed that there is something very suggestive of trickery, and of silly trickery, in the attempts made from time to time by the spirits to flatter into good-humor the anti-spiritualistic critic of the company; as when Professor Tyndall was dubbed "Poet of Science,"[196] and when Dr. Edmunds' portrait was given in such glowing colors that, except in the character of a sceptic, he would have been ashamed to reproduce it (Report). Again, that something like systematic trickery has sometimes been attempted would seem to be established by the very remarkable evidence of Mr. W. Faulkener Surgeon (Rep., p. 125): "He said that for years he had been in the habit of supplying magnets for the production of rapping sounds at spiritual séances.... Some of these magnets—as, for instance, the one he had brought with him—were made for concealment about the person; while others were constructed with a view to their attachment to various articles of furniture.... He had never himself fitted up a house with these magnets, and he only knew of one house, Mr. Addison's, that is so fitted up. He also stated that he had not supplied any of these magnets for two or three years."
As regards the company's predisposition to believe in spiritualism, I admit that a sufficient predisposing reaction against materialism has taken place, giving room for a man to constitute what "Sludge" calls
"Your peacock perch, pet post
To strut, and spread the tail, and squawk upon,
Just as you thought, much as you might expect,
There be more things in heaven and earth, Horatio."
Nay, I admit that the following fiercely graphic catalogue of the medium's patrons only sins by omission:
1. "Fools who are smitten by imaginary antecedent probabilities.
2. ... "their opposites
Who never did at bottom of their hearts
Believe for a moment—men emasculate,
Blank of belief, who played, as eunuchs use,
With superstition safely.
3. "The other picker-up of pearl
From dung-heaps, ay, your literary man,
Who draws on his kid gloves to play with Sludge
Daintily and discreetly; shakes a dust
Of the doctrine, flavors thence he well knows how
The narrative or the novel—half believes
All for the book's sake, and the public stare,
And the cash that's God's sole solid in this world.
4. "There's a more hateful kind of foolery—
The social sage's Solomon of saloons
And philosophic diner-out, the fribble
Who wants a doctrine for a chopping-block
To try the edge of his faculty upon;
Prove how much common sense he'll hack and hew
In the critical minute 'twixt the soup and fish:
These were my patrons...."
And far stronger than any such predispositions is the intense and widespread feeling, so pathetic even in its uncouthest manifestations, to which Dr. Edmunds refers (Rep., p. 57): "Prior to the experience gained in this inquiry, I never realized the vast hold which the supernatural has upon mankind. Minds which have broken away from the commonplace lines of faith, and thrown overboard their belief in revealed religion, have not cast out the longing after immortality." And I may add, that when all religious assurance of what the soul must needs desire is absent, the longing for some visible, palpable witness becomes proportionably intenser. And so just now, from the very lack of faith, there is an exceptionally vehement desire that some one should come with unmistakable credentials from beyond the grave, and make us see, and feel, and know what we cannot help longing for; and it is difficult to say to what extent the wish may not be father to the thought.
I admit that all this constitutes an adverse momentum of antecedent probability. But, after all, spiritualists, as a whole, are not persons who have given any indications that this yearning has so wholly overbalanced their critical faculty as to make them incompetent witnesses. Moreover, we have, as witnesses to spiritualistic phenomena, not merely the spiritualists proper, but persons who, as regards the predominance of this sentiment, are their extremest opposites—viz., the advocates of psychic force. It must be admitted that these persons are either without the yearning for evidence of a future life, or at least hold it in complete subordination to the critical faculty.
It may easily be contended that I have been overrating the progress and prospects of spiritualism, for that the public prints as a rule make fun of it. I may be reminded that Mr. Browning has exposed it, in the region of poetry, in his Sludge the Medium; Professor Tyndall in that of prose, in his delicious account of a séance, in which he discomfits the medium and plays spirits himself, to the great edification of the company, who rebuke him solemnly for his want of faith in his own make-believe; that the keen critics of the Saturday and the Pall Mall invariably treat spiritualism as unmitigated humbug.
In reply, I point to the Report; to the testimony of an antagonist like Mr. Geary, as to the number of eminent men who believe in spiritualism; to the notorious fact that scientific men, as a whole, in Germany and America have ceased to regard spiritualism as a mere delusion; to the recent correspondence in the Times, and particularly to the article of December 26, 1872, wherein the writer, after reviewing the Report, exclaims that "it is high time competent hands undertook the unravelling of this gordian knot. It must be fairly and patiently unravelled, and not cut through. The slash of the Alexandrian blade has been tried often enough, and has never sufficed. Scientific men forget that, in the matter of spiritualism, they must make themselves fools in order that they may become wise." The writer then proceeds to relate how he went off to examine for himself. He tells us that he and his friend enter a room, the furniture of which consisted of a table and a few cane-bottomed chairs, which he previously examines; that in an inner room, during a dark séance, in which the medium's hands and feet have been carefully secured, a chair is lifted up and thrown upon the table; that afterwards, in the outer room, "the furniture became quite lively, and this in broad daylight; a chair jumped three or four yards across the carpet, our hat fell to our feet, and numerous other phenomena occurred"; but the mediums are free, and he is nervous about them. In another séance, the same writer, whilst the medium's hands and feet are in custody, has various things thrust into his hand, and once "felt distinctly the touch of a large finger and thumb." Several times during the séance he takes the opportunity, freely accorded, of carefully searching under the table with a lamp. He confesses there was nothing during the whole evening, except the phenomena themselves, to suggest imposture. "We tried our best to detect it, but found no trace of it." And then he ends with "a slash of the Alexandrian blade," after all, and suggests that still trickery it must be.
Spiritualism indubitably affords, and in all probability will continue to afford, an abundant and legitimate field for the satirist of human folly, even when its substantial reality has been admitted; for it is a condescension to a great vulgar want, and its supplies are detailed, for the most part, through the unwashed fingers of very scurvy fellows indeed. Neither is there anything in the discipline necessary for the development of a medium, so far as I know, which makes his refinement as a class probable.
Educated men are naturally shy of admitting their connection with anything involving so much that is low and disagreeable, except as a sort of "casual ward" experience; just as men are usually shy of its being known that they eat strange meats, such as rats, out of siege-time. But once let an heroic rat-eater come forward, impelled by a sense of public duty, to tell the world what a noble viand it is neglecting, when, lo! it appears, from confessions on this side and on that, that numbers know all about it, and have been secretly indulging in the rat feast. So it is with spiritualism and its adherents; it is only now and again that the curtain is lifted up, and we are enabled to appreciate the hold which it is steadily making good on the public imagination.
As to the line taken by the Pall Mall and the Saturday, the question is whether the critics who write in these periodicals could, under any circumstances, adapt their method and style, I will not say to the support, but to the fair discussion, of an uncouth, ill-conditioned, sensational enthusiasm like spiritualism. As it was the Crusader's boast that he never touched the unbeliever save with the sword, so, it would seem, some of our critics plume themselves upon never touching enthusiasm but with a sneer. Our present school of critics is the result of a reaction from the enthusiastic Young England school of forty years ago, who were romanticists, patronizing religious enthusiasm as one of the many forms of romance. We can hardly expect that a school which is inclined to regard all religious sentiment as something essentially weak and finikin; which can talk of Joan of Arc as a "crazy servant-girl,"[197] should be civil to an exhibition of enthusiasm much weaker, and vulgar to boot. Neither do I see how it would be possible to write a trenchant critique of such a nondescript medley, except by treating it as a form of mania. It admits of no precise scientific treatment, for it falls under no one category. Spiritualism, to discuss, not to banter, would be as uncongenial a subject for the Pall Mall or the Saturday as a case of chronic bronchitis for a brilliant public operator.
When the "Jupiter" of the latter days is engaged in duly chronicling, for the edification of the public, the splendid spiritualistic phenomena with which Antichrist will dazzle the world, should the Pall Mall and Saturday still exist, we should not look for them even then amongst the enthusiastic crowd. Though employed in the government interest, they will surely be allowed to do their old work in their old way, and we shall find them engaged in the congenial task of mocking the last miracles by which Enoch and Elias are gathering in the remnant of the elect.
It may be insisted that the one effectual way of repressing spiritualism is to pooh-pooh it. Surely it is too late; you must give its many sober adherents some better reason against trusting their own senses than its making other people laugh.
Assuredly spiritualism can never be safely despised until its reality has been discounted and its author recognized.
FOOTNOTES:
[192] Apoth. l. 409.
[193] Lib. de Divers. Quæst., qu. 12.
[194] See Görres, Mystik, tom. iii. p. 346, French trans.
[195] St. Aug., De Unit. Eccles., c. 19.
[196] Tyndall, Scientific Scraps.
[197] This was in the Spectator, but surely not of it.