BY R. BALMANNO.
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Belief in the supernatural has obtained credit in the world from the earliest records with which we are acquainted. The Grecian and Roman histories are full of it; even the Sacred Volume contains instances of spectral or preternatural appearances, which can neither be denied nor explained. In all civilized nations, at all times, up to the present period, we have testimony of unequivocal authority, giving minute details of extraordinary facts, on the evidence of individuals of unimpeachable integrity, which confound experience, elude investigation, and baffle research. The wisest of our divines, and the most accomplished of our philosophers are all forced to admit that there are things, with which human comprehension and reason cannot successfully grapple.
We must allow the truth of the remark of that immortal poet, whose commanding intellect and reach of thought, soared far above that of any “man of woman born;”—“there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” The boastful wisdom of vain-glorious men, like Voltaire, and such deistical writers, must bow before the Almighty fiat, “Thus far shalt thou go, and NO farther.” That fiat can never be violated by man.
As I am about to give the result of some rather extraordinary circumstances which have either occurred to myself, or to personal friends with whose names the world is well acquainted, it may not be altogether out of place to introduce them, by a short notice of those very singular annoyances to which the family of the Reverend Samuel Wesley, of Epsworth Parsonage, in the county of Leicester, in England, were subjected for a considerable length of time.
And it is remarkable that these extraordinary circumstances were not confined to the experience of one, nor two, nor three individuals, but to a whole family, consisting of nine persons, besides a neighboring clergyman; and it is still more extraordinary that they were not made apparent to one sense alone, but to several, inasmuch as they heard, they felt, and they saw. Confederacy or collusion appears to have been out of the question, and, indeed, to have been strictly guarded against, at the suggestion of Mr. Wesley’s two sons, then absent, whose suspicions were deeply excited.
Both these gentlemen were men of strong sense and highly cultivated mind. Samuel, the elder of the two, was at the time an usher in Westminster High School, and John, so celebrated afterward as the founder of Methodism, was a student of Christ Church, the most aristocratic of all the colleges in Oxford.
These gentlemen, in writing to their parents concerning the appearances, suggested the possibility of collusion, or the work of young men wishing to get access to the house, to enable them to make love to their sisters, who were, however, young ladies of unsullied purity and virtue.
Dismal groans were heard, and strange knockings, three or four at a time. Loud rumblings above and below stairs. Clatterings amongst bottles; footsteps of a man going up and down stairs at all times of the night; dancings in an empty room, whose door was locked; and gobblings like a turkey-cock. Mr. and Mrs. Wesley endeavored at first to persuade the children and servants it was rats within, and mischievous persons without, or that some of their daughters sat up late, and made the noises as a hint to their lovers; but these ideas soon underwent a change. Mrs. Wesley supposed she saw a black badger run from under the bed; and the man, Robert Brown, saw a white rabbit, with its ears erect, and its scut standing straight up, run from behind the oven. A shadow might explain the first, and the last might be owing to the propensity of ignorant persons to exaggerate.
But no such animals had ever been kept on the premises, nor were any such in the neighborhood. Yet, granting them to have been shadows, or an affection of the retina, these in no degree invalidate the other parts of the story, which rest on the concurrent testimony of many intelligent persons.