The narrative here takes us to a portion of the shadowy perturbation which any who have turned these pages as a fictitious rendering of the grotesque in experience will do well to omit. Only a mortifying, though perchance salutary, sense of human infirmity comes from beholding one set over the people as intercessor and counsellor struggling in the meshes of that snare which the Enemy had spread for the undisciplined and wandering multitude. No, not even struggling now. That Clifton had fought through solitary days against the wretched enervation which invited him, I had reason to know. But he had dared to tamper with the normal functions of mind and body, to try fantastic tricks with that mysterious agent through which the healthy will commands the organism. And when the mental disorder, mocked at and preached against in happier years, at length ran through Foxden, the morbid condition of his system was powerless to resist the contagion.
And let us not overlook the fact that in these manifestations there was to be found a palpable reality, a positive marvel, well calculated to lay hold of a skeptic like Clifton. His early associations with the Transcendentalists had undermined his faith in all popular presentations of Christianity. But his peculiarly emotional nature could never dwell in that haziness of opinion upon august subjects in which sounder men among the brethren made out to live cheerfully and to work vigorously. While Clifton madly sought a position of intelligence and satisfaction beyond the reach of humanity, the necessary abstraction enlarged and stimulated his reasoning powers. But the penalty was to be paid. For with terrible recoil from its tension his mind contracted to far less than normal limits. Then came a listless vacuity, a tawdry dreaminess. And this poor minister, who flattered himself that he had outgrown every graceful and touching form with which human affection or human infirmity had clothed the Christian idea, stumbled amid the rubbish of an effete heathenism, with its Sibylline contortions and tripod-responses, which the best minds of Pagan civilization found no difficulty in pronouncing a delusion and a lie.
I knew Dr. Burge for one of those most useful instructors who will patiently examine with the intellect what the instinct teaches them to condemn. He seldom helped the doctrine he assailed by denying it such facts as were true and such attractions as were real. He had cheerfully accepted whatever reproach came to him from frequenting circles in the attempt to see the mystery from the believers' point of view. I was not surprised at finding him upon one of the back benches in the Town Hall.
"Nothing noteworthy," he said, as I joined him. "Only women have spoken,—the excited nervous system careering without restraint,—no spirits yet."
"They pretend inspiration, I suppose."
"Oh, yes; and it is not surprising that semi-educated people, ignorant of analogous phenomena, should take the omne ignotum pro magnifico."
"Yet you are said to be a believer in the possession which the mediums claim?"
"Certainly," replied Dr. Burge, "and to just this extent:—I do not doubt the possibility of intercourse between man and the lower grades of immaterial life, and I am willing to adopt this hypothesis to explain any occurrence where the facts demand it. That, in rare cases, such may be the most simple and natural supposition, I readily admit. The ordinary performances, however, may be accounted for without calling in god or demon to untie the knot."
I remarked that Mr. Clifton was not to be seen upon the platform.
"He is kept out of the way until the last,—in the Selectmen's Room, as I am told, and alone."