"By night
The village-matron round the blazing hearth,
Suspends the infant-audience with her tales,
Breathing astonishment—of witching rhymes,
Of evil spirits: of the death-bed call
Of him who robb'd the widow, and devoured
The orphan's portion: of unquiet souls
Risen from the grave to ease the heavy guilt
Of deeds in life concealed; of shapes that walk
At dead of night, and clank their chains and wave
The torch of hell around the murderer's bed.
At every solemn pause the crowd recoil,
Gazing each other speechless, and congeal'd
With shiv'ring sighs; till eager for the event,
Around the beldam all erect they hang,
Each trembling heart with grateful terror quell'd."
Ideas of mysterious and supernatural powers, vague, undefined, and frightful, are thus instilled into the child, and influence it unchecked and uncontrolled by the Scriptural doctrines of the invisible which are taught to it. At first the two trains of thought derived from these antithetical sources go on separately and distinctly; the more frightful and wonderful events of legendary lore and fable having a much greater influence, and forming a deeper impression on the mind of the child, whose reasoning powers are still in abeyance to the emotions, than the Scriptural doctrines of the supernatural. As it advances in years these trains of thought insensibly blend; the more rampant absurdities of the supernatural framework of legendary and ghost-lore are discarded; but the less obvious and more insidious portions remain to a greater or less extent, and they are so graven in the mind, that they become part and parcel of it, and in whatever manner they may be subsequently modified in form, it is probable that they are never eradicated, but form a medium which gives a false and deceptive gloss to all our ideas upon those matters which are not immediately within the ken of reason, or which are more clearly attributable to other agency than the forces of the material word—such matters, for example, as are contained in Holy Writ.
Hence our ideas of the supernatural are derived from two sources—from legendary lore and from Scripture; and this results, that although in after-life the more glaring errors and absurdities of the former are removed, those only being retained which are thought to be compatible with Holy Writ, yet the idea of the supernatural thus obtained, foreign from revelation, is retained in a vague and undefined form, and its origin and sources being lost sight of, it is regarded as an innate consciousness of the existence of supernatural beings, and prompts to the ready reception and belief of mysterious and not readily explicable phenomena being the result of supernatural agency.
That proclivity to the belief in supernatural interpositions, that vague notion of spiritual beings, that so-called innate consciousness of the existence of the supernatural, which most persons possess more or less of, and which is totally inconsistent with the clear and perfect doctrine of the invisible taught in the Gospel, is, we believe, derived solely from the infant mind and earlier periods of youth being poisoned by the supernatural events and phenomena detailed in fabulous, legendary, and ghost-lore.[43]
This substratum of superstition is the prime cause of the retention of those figments of degenerated and christianized mythology which are yet found among us, and for the persistence of the most generally received of these figments—ghosts. It is also a highly important element in the formation of that state of the mind which is from time to time manifested in singular and wide-spreading delusions respecting the communication of the spirit-world with man, and of which we have examples before us at the present time in the prevalent follies of "spirit-rapping" and "table-talking."
The belief in ghosts does not now possess those glaring features which were attached to it at the commencement of the present century, hence it is less obtrusive; but it is very far from being extinguished, as some would teach, and its "etiology" is of interest, because it leads to the elucidation of the principal causes and sources of the fallacies to which the senses of man are subject, and by which he has been led in the remotest periods of antiquity, as well as at the present time, to frame those mighty trammels of superstition from which the mind in vain strives to disentangle itself completely.
The doctrine that the spirits of the dead return to visit the scenes which were dear to them during the body's existence, is in itself awfully solemn and sublime. Man, prone to believe in supernatural interpositions (from causes already explained), and trusting altogether to the evidence of his senses, for many ages received this doctrine unquestioned; and aided by a fertile imagination, he clothed it with attributes which, although absurd in the main, yet as appealing to some of the deepest and warmest affections and passions of our nature, cannot even now be contemplated without exciting sensations of awe, if not fear.
The thought that the spirits of those who, during life, were bound to us by the closest ties of affection, are ever near, scrutinizing our actions and thoughts, and prompting us ever and anon to that course which would most tend to our profit here and our joy hereafter[44]—shielding us, like guardian angels, from the wiles of those wandering spirits who, like the "Wicked One" that came softly up to Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and "whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind,"[45] seek to tempt us to destruction,—such a thought thrills through the soul of every one, and fills it with strange and undefined emotions of blended joy and fear.
Few can free themselves altogether from the emotion of terror which is almost necessarily connected with scenes polluted by murder, or by other outbreaks of man's foulest passions. This feeling acting on the minds of the superstitious and ignorant, has led them to people with spectres all those places which have obtained notoriety from being the scene of some terrible ebullition of human frailty and wickedness.