The prophecies to which I would call attention now, came from the upper world, and came unheeded and unproclaimed! Great truths are always buried in silence, if possible, when they first arrive. It is probable that the grandest prophecies in their far-reaching scope will always come from such sources, and the grandest seers will be inspired. The grandest prophecy of the ultimate destiny and power of “Anthropology” came to me direct from an exalted source in the spirit world, and no human hand had aught to do with its production. But the human psychometric faculty has the same prophetic power in a more limited and more practical sphere. We have no reason to affirm that the wonderful personal prophecies of Cazotte on the brink of the French Revolution, stated in the “Manual of Psychometry,” were at all dependent on spiritual agency.
The prophecy of our great American calamity, which purports to have come from the spirit of Gen. Washington, appears in a book published by Josiah Brigham in 1859, of which few of my readers have any knowledge. The messages were written by the hand of the famous medium, Joseph D. Stiles, between 1854 and 1857, at the house of Josiah Brigham in Quincy, Mass., and were published at Boston in 1859, in a large volume of 459 pages, entitled “Messages from the Spirit of John Quincy Adams.” The medium was in an unconscious trance, and the handwriting was a fac-simile of that of John Quincy Adams. But other spirit communications are given, and that which purports to come from Washington was in a handwriting like his own, though not of so bold and intellectual a style. I quote the portion of his message which relates to the war of secession, as follows:
“The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, when they had attained the summit of imperial wickedness and licentiousness, as the Bible informs us, fell from their high estate by the visitation of natural penalties, and the righteous judgments of an overruling Providence. The fall of Rome and other large cities proves to us that no individual or nation can disobey the irrepealable enactments of the Infinite Father, and escape the fixed penalties attached to such transgression!
“And can boasting, sinful America indulge in the flattering, delusive hope, that the heavy judgments which fell upon those ancient cities will be averted from her, whose guilt is equal, if not even greater than theirs? Does she think that Cain-like, she can escape the vigilant, sleepless eye of that Divine Parent,
‘Whose voice is heard in the rolling thunders,
And whose might is seen in the forked lightnings,’
and that He will turn a deaf ear to the cry of ‘mortal agony,’ daily borne on the ‘four winds of Heaven’ to His throne of justice, from the almost broken hearts of His slavery-crushed children?
“Far from it; America can no more expect mercy in her prosperous wickedness, from the hand of Deity, that can the most degraded child of earth expect to enjoy equal happiness and bliss with the more refined and exalted intelligences of heaven. The Parent of all cares not for the unity or perpetuation of a family of States, where the prosperity or welfare of a single child of His is concerned.
“God, the eternal Father, has commissioned us, His ministers of truth and justice, to a great and important undertaking! He has invested us with power and authority to influence and guide the actions of mankind, and aid them in their struggles for right and truth. He has bade us arm ourselves with the weapons of love and justice, and hasten to the rescue of our struggling brother man. His call is imperative and binding, and we must and WILL obey!
“We are able to discern the period rapidly approximating when man will take up arms against his fellow-man, and go forth to contend with the enemies of Republican liberty, and to assert at the point of the bayonet those rights of which so large a portion of their fellow-creatures are deprived. Again will the soil of America be saturated with the blood of freedom-loving children, and her noble monuments, those sublime attestations of patriotic will and determination, will tremble, from base to summit, with the heavy roar of artillery, and the thunder of cannon. The trials of that internal war will far exceed those of the war of the Revolution, while the cause contended for will equal, if not excel, in sublimity and power, that for which the children of ‘76 fought.