A History of American Christianity

by Leonard Woolsey Bacon

To this period also must be referred the rise of that system of necromancy which, originating in America, has had great vogue in other countries, and here in its native land has taken such form as really to constitute a new cult. Making no mention of sporadic instances of what in earlier generations would have been called (and properly enough) by the name of witchcraft, we find the beginning of so-called "spiritualism" in the "Rochester rappings," produced, to the wonder of many witnesses, by "the Fox girls" in 1849. How the rappings and other sensible phenomena were produced was a curious question, but not important; the main question was, Did they convey communications from the spirits of the dead, as the young women alleged, and as many persons believed (so they thought) from demonstrative evidence? The mere suggestion of the possibility of this of course awakened an inquisitive and eager interest everywhere. It became the subject of universal discussion and experiment in society. There was demand for other "mediums" to satisfy curiosity or aid investigation; and the demand at once produced a copious supply. The business of medium became a regular profession, opening a career especially to enterprising women. They began to draw together believers and doubters into "circles" and "séances," and to organize permanent associations. At the end of ten years the "Spiritual Register" for 1859, boasting great things, estimated the actual spiritualists in America at 1,500,000, besides 4,000,000 more partly converted. The latest census gives the total membership of their associations as 45,030. But this moderate figure should not be taken as the measure of the influence of their leading tenet. There are not a few honest Christians who are convinced that communications do sometimes take place between the dead and the living; there are a great multitude who are disposed, in a vague way, to think there must be something in it. But there are few even of the earnest devotees of the spiritualist cult who will deny that the whole business is infested with fraud, whether of dishonest mediums or of lying spirits. Of late years the general public has come into possession of material for independent judgment on this point. An earnest spiritualist, a man of wealth, named Seybert, dying, left to the University of Pennsylvania a legacy of sixty thousand dollars, on condition that the university should appoint a commission to investigate the claims of spiritualism. A commission was appointed which left nothing to be desired in point of ability, integrity, and impartiality. Under the presidency of the renowned Professor Joseph Leidy, and with the aid and advice of leading believers in spiritualism, they made a long, patient, faithful investigation, the processes and results of which are published in a most amusing little volume.[338:1] The gist of their report may be briefly summed up. Every case of alleged communication from the world of departed spirits that was investigated by the commission (and they were guided in their selection of cases by the advice of eminent and respectable believers in spiritualism) was discovered and demonstrated to be a case of gross, willful attempted fraud. The evidence is strong that the organized system of spiritualism in America, with its associations and lyceums and annual camp-meetings, and its itinerancy of mediums and trance speakers, is a system of mere imposture. In the honest simplicity of many of its followers, and in the wicked mendacity of its leaders, it seems to be on a par with the other American contribution to the religions of the world, Mormonism.

FOOTNOTES:

[316:1] For condensed statistics of American immigration, see "Encyclopædia Britannica," 9th ed., s. vv. "Emigration" and "United States." For the facts concerning the Roman Empire one naturally has recourse to Gibbon. From the indications there given we do not get the impression that in the three centuries of the struggle of the empire against the barbarians there was ever such a thirty years' flood of invasion as the immigration into the United States from 1840 to 1869. The entrance into the Roman Empire was indeed largely in the form of armed invasion; but the most destructive influence of the barbarians was when they were admitted as friends and naturalized as citizens. See "Encyclopædia Britannica," vol. xx., pp. 779, 780.

[318:1] Jacobs, "The Lutherans," p. 446.

[321:1] Bishop O'Gorman, "The Roman Catholics," p. 375. The atrocity of such a plot seems incredible. We should have classed it at once with the Maria Monk story, and other fabulous horrors of Dr. Brownlee's Protestant Society, but that we find it in the sober and dispassionate pages of Bishop O'Gorman's History, which is derived from original sources of information. If anything could have justified the animosity of the "native Americans" (who, by the way, were widely suspected to be, in large proportion, native Ulstermen) it would have been the finding of evidence of such facts as this which Bishop O'Gorman has disclosed.

[321:2] The subject is reviewed in detail, from opposite points of view, by Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 489-500, and by Dr. Daniel Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," pp. 618-621. One of the most recent estimates is that presented to the Catholic Congress at Chicago, in 1893, in a remarkable speech by Mr. M. T. Elder, of New Orleans. Speaking of "the losses sustained by the church in this country, placed by a conservative estimate at twenty millions of people, he laid the responsibility for this upon neglect of immigration and colonization, i.e., neglect of the rural population. From this results a long train of losses." He added: "When I see how largely Catholicity is represented among our hoodlum element, I feel in no spread-eagle mood. When I note how few Catholics are engaged in honestly tilling the honest soil, and how many Catholics are engaged in the liquor traffic, I cannot talk buncombe to anybody. When I reflect that out of the 70,000,000 of this nation we number only 9,000,000, and that out of that 9,000,000 so large a proportion is made up of poor factory hands, poor mill and shop and mine and railroad employees, poor government clerks, I still fail to find material for buncombe or spread-eagle or taffy-giving. And who can look at our past history and feel proud of our present status?" He advocated as a remedy for this present state of things a movement toward colonization, with especial attention to extension of educational advantages for rural Catholics, and instruction of urban Catholics in the advantages of rural life. "For so long as the rural South, the pastoral West, the agricultural East, the farming Middle States, remain solidly Protestant, as they now are, so long will this nation, this government, this whole people, remain solidly Protestant" ("The World's Parliament of Religions," pp. 1414, 1415).

It is a fact not easy to be accounted for that the statistics of no Christian communion in America are so defective, uncertain, and generally unsatisfactory as those of the most solidly organized and completely systematized of them all, the Roman Catholic Church.

[325:1] "Parliament of Religions," p. 1417. An obvious verbal misprint is corrected in the quotation.

[327:1] Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 439, 440. James Parton, in the "Atlantic Monthly," April and May, 1868. So lately as the year 1869 a long list of volumes of this scandalous rubbish continued to be offered to the public, under the indorsement of eminent names, by the "American and Foreign Christian Union," until the society was driven by public exposure into withdrawing them from sale. See "The Literature of the Coming Controversy," in "Putnam's Magazine" for January, 1869.

[331:1] Speech of Mr. M. T. Elder, of New Orleans, in the Catholic Congress at Chicago, 1893, quoted above, p. 322, note.