After the doctrine of Polybius, that religion is nothing more than a tissue of lies and traditions, began to prevail at Rome, the phenomena which usually attend the decadence of a people became plainly apparent. Those who are familiar with the epidemic capers of the fanatics of that age, who jerked their heads and distorted their limbs while pretending to utter the will of the gods, will be reminded of that moral and religious degradation which has produced the same effects in all countries and times—effects distinctly visible among all Christian peoples into whose life the ancient heathenism still enters, or where false civilization once more tends to barbarism. The story of Alexander of Obonoteichos shows the extremes to which superstition may lead men. This audacious impostor buried in the temple of Apollo, at Chalcedon, but so that they could be easily found, a set of bronze tablets, promising that Esculapius and his father Apollo would shortly come to Obonoteichos. He also secreted an egg containing a small snake, and mounted the next day the altar in the market-place to proclaim as one inspired that Esculapius was about to appear. He produced the egg, broke its shell, and the people rejoiced over the god who had assumed the form of a serpent. The news of this miracle attracted immense crowds. A few days later, Alexander announced that the serpent-god had already reached maturity, and he exhibited himself to the public in a partially darkened room, dressed as a prophet, with a large tame serpent—secretly imported from Macedonia—so twisted around his waist that its head was out of sight, and its place supplied by a human head of paper, whence protruded a black tongue. This new serpent-god, Glykon, the youngest Epiphany of Esculapius, received the honors of temple and oracle service. Alexander became a highly respected prophet; Rutelia, a noble Roman, married his daughter, and the prefect Severian asked him for an oracle on taking the field against the king of the Parthians.
If we wish to see how the same impostures are reënacted in our own times, we need only read the accounts of certain evening amusements at the Tuileries. There sat one night the Emperor Napoleon III., the Empress Eugenie, the Duke de Montebello, and Home, the medium. On a table before them were paper, pens, and ink. Then appeared a spirit-hand, which picked up a pen, dipped it into the ink, and wrote the name of Napoleon I. in Napoleon's handwriting. The emperor prayed to be permitted to kiss the spirit-hand, which advanced to his lips, and then to those of Eugenie. This séance, and one of a similar kind at the Palais Royal, where the Red Prince, known for his hatred of the church, devoutly watched the ball which Home caused to move over a table, remind us involuntarily of the Jesus-contemning apostate Emperor Julian, as he followed Maximus, the Neo-Platonist, into a subterranean vault for the purpose of seeing Hecate, and looking credulously on when the former secretly set fire to a figure of Hecate, painted in combustible materials on the wall, and at the same time let fly a falcon with burning tow tied to his feet. Fuller information on this subject the curious may glean from the stories published in the French journals, of hands growing out of table-tops and sofa-cushions, which furnish the Paris élite with the only luxury of terror it seems still capable of enjoying; or they may consult the numerous patrons of the fashionable clairvoyants and physiognomists, the Mesdames Villeneuve, of the Rue St. Denis, as well as the successors of Lenormand, the famous coffee-grounds seer, toward whom Napoleon I. felt himself irresistibly attracted, (though he sent the luckless Cassandra occasionally to prison,) and whom the Empress Josephine held in high esteem.
The eighteenth century furnishes some striking illustrations of our theory. An epidemic tendency to unbelief, like that which characterizes this century, is without precedent since the dawn of Christianity. Its fruits recall the worst abuses of the Manichæans and the Albigenses. We do not here allude to the thousands of innocent superstitions, which Grimm says are a sort of religion for minor domestic purposes, and may be met with in all ages, but to those more glaring ones which show how inseparable are an arrogant unbelief and the grossest superstition. Hobbes, who labored already in the seventeenth century to undermine the Christian religion, was so afraid of ghosts that he would not pass the night without candles. D'Alembert, the chief of the Encyclopædists, used to leave the table when thirteen sat down to it. The Marquis D'Argens was frightened out of his wits at the upsetting of a salt-cellar. Frederick II. had faith in astrology. At the court of his successor, General Bishopswerder imposed on the king by magic tricks, and his accomplice, Wöllner, who raised spirits by the agency of optic mirrors, became minister. The custodian of the National Library at Paris related to Count Portalis that some time previous to the great revolution books on fortune-telling and the black arts were in general demand. Oerstedt speaks of a man who paraded his atheism with great insolence, but whom nothing could have tempted to pass through a graveyard after dark. Napoleon I. dispatched, in 1812, a special messenger to Beyreuth, with instructions not to be lodged in the apartments which the "white woman" of the Hohenzollerns was reputed to haunt. In the same way we see by the side of this league of unbelieving philosophers spring up such superstitious sects as the Butlerians, whose head, Margaret Butler, with Justus Winter for God the Father, and George Oppenzoller for God the Son, represented herself to be the Holy Ghost.
The alleged miraculous cures on the grave of Paris, the Jansenist deacon, in the first, and the exorcisms of the devil by Gassner, in the second half of the eighteenth century, form another instructive chapter in the history of superstition. While the Archbishop of Vontimiglii, the Bishop of Sens, and other distinguished prelates, denounced the cures performed with the earth from the grave of Paris as a cheat, Montegon, the atheist, wrote three volumes to prove their authenticity. While the Archbishop of Prague and the papal chair, by a decree of the Congregation of Rites issued in October, 1777, condemned the miraculous pretensions of Gassner, Walter, Leitner, and other deistic physicians, upheld them. While the mountebank Cagliostro, who pretended to have learnt in Egypt the secret of generating magical powers from reflecting surfaces, was called to account at Rome, the Free-Masons of Holland made him visitator, and fêted him in their lodges. The unbelief of the eighteenth century reached at last its culminating point during the French revolution in the abolishment of the Supreme Being, though the rites of Mlle. Aubry or Mme. Momoro were as silly as the worship of the cotton plucked from Voltaire's robe de chambre. The names in the philosophical calendar remind us strongly of the Hindoo worship of the spade and pick, and who knows but some super-enlightened atheist may be prepared to subscribe to the Brahminic dogma about the ox, an animal which has already played a prominent rôle at a red-republican festival? Burke's prediction has been fulfilled, "If we discard Christianity, a coarse, ruinous, degrading superstition will replace it."
This war against faith and every thing spiritual has continued into the nineteenth century, until once more gross materialism is found on every side. Already, during the fourth decade, the darkest superstition threatened to overwhelm the so-called intelligent world with the manifestations of magnetism. The campaign against the supernatural opened with the trial of the devil. As the Strasbourg Catholic satirically observed, the very day and hour had been fixed when it was required that he should establish his own existence by tangible proof. Disregarding the summons, the scamp was promptly declared in contumaciam outlawed and cashiered along with the entire host of unclean spirits. The same summary mode of treatment was pursued with the opposite side, and the same judgment was passed on the angels, cherubim, and seraphim. All were pronounced to be equally tasteless, scentless, inaudible, and imponderable, and declared to be mere creatures of the imagination. Their Lord and Master was next put on trial; at first very considerately with closed doors and in a secret inquisitorial manner. The results of the trial were put on record, and for a while imparted only to the initiated, who gradually divulged the news to the masses. At last the spirituality of our own soul was arraigned, and its activity explained as the result of a mere change of matter. The Beelzebub of ancient superstition was thus exorcised and expelled; but he soon returned to the house which the besom of criticism had cleaned, and brought back with him seven other evil spirits, so that nothing was gained by the proceeding. The age, having cut loose from the invisible, naturally plunged into a most abject dependence on the visible. As the negro races kneel before their fetiches, trees and serpents, so this century kneels before sleeping somnambulists, dancing and writing tables, and mixtures and nostrums from the apothecary shop.
Should civilization much longer continue on the present road, the most deplorable consequences must follow. As in all former times, so in this age unbelief has led where it always will lead—to superstition. Man, created for immortality, needs the wonderful, a future, and hope. When such a sceptical enlightenment as distinguishes modern philosophy has sapped the foundations of religion, its absence leaves in his thoughts and feelings an immeasurable void which invites the most dangerous phantoms of the brain. The moment man boldly declares, "I no longer believe in any thing," he is preparing to believe in all things. It is high time that so-called philosophy should again draw near to that religion which it has misunderstood, and which alone is capable of giving to the emotions of the heart a generous impulse and a safe direction.
REFORMATORIES FOR BOYS.—METTRAY.
It needs but a slight glance at the condition of things around us to discover, as a consequence of the criminal and most deplorable neglect of the moral education of a large proportion of our children, that if they be not already on the broad road to ruin, they give, at least, little hope of becoming useful members of society. This remark is intended chiefly, but not exclusively, for boys, whose constantly increasing lawlessness, connected with the steady growth of crime among us, cannot fail to awaken the most serious apprehensions in the mind of every attentive observer of passing events, while nothing adequate to the emergency is offered to check this growing evil; yet on the children of the present generation are based our hopes for the future of our country. Every one knows with what facility these young, fresh minds may be guided toward what is truly good; for, though the tendency of our human nature to the descending scale in morals as well as in physics is sufficiently evident, the one may be counteracted with almost as much certainty as the other, if judicious measures be early taken to give them a right direction. The writer has had much experience in the domestic training of boys, and yields the heartiest adhesion to the precept, "Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it." This training, however, is not by means of pampering animal appetites or self-will, but by inculcation of strict though gentle laws of obedience and self-denial. These habits once acquired, a solid basis is laid for good principles and conduct, and these can, I venture to say, always be fairly established within the first ten years of life, which have been justly pronounced the most important period of human existence, for they contain the germ from which the future character is formed. A profound thinker remarks, that "in the education of the family is concentrated the strength of the nation;" an observation which may well be applied to these United States, where the moral character of every individual, through our system of universal suffrage, assumes a certain weight, and thus, to a greater or less extent, influences the best interests of the whole country. We may here be permitted, in view of the immense importance of this education of early childhood, to suggest a hint of a strange inconsistency which is scarcely ever noticed in the systems of education adopted to prepare the fathers and mothers of our posterity for their respective callings. Everywhere, even where moral influences are neglected, means are provided for the preparation of boys for their career in life; yet, notwithstanding the multitudinous volumes of philanthropy expended upon "woman's sphere," "her rights," etc., etc., we have scarcely heard of a single well-directed effort, beyond the chances of the domestic circle, to educate young women in the supreme, the inexpressibly momentous knowledge of the vocation that must surely be the lot of nearly every one of them. They are destined to be mothers—to train up tender minds for time and for eternity! To them is confided the most precious of our earthly treasures; for what is untold gold but dust in comparison with the well-being of our children? Why are they not imbued with the most profound respect for the dignity of motherhood, as well as instructed conscientiously in its practical duties and responsibilities?