The truth is, Elinor has thought much over Mr. Schuyler’s little flirtation with her cousin, and he has not
come out from that inspection of his conduct with any great credit, in her way of looking at it. She thinks that although he may pass unscathed by such indulgence, it is not honorable in him to tempt one younger and weaker than himself into such practices. She thinks if Lizzie could find no one like him to entice her into this folly, she must perforce amuse herself in some other way. It seems to her that his motives were bad. And she suspects that if she would have lent herself to this sort of thing, he would have been just as ready to conduct an affair of the kind with herself. Her native good sense shows her this, and she is thankful for the different example and teaching which has hedged her in from ever giving a chance for such a thing. The amount of all this is, that the little inclination to like Mr. Fred Schuyler which she had once is now gone, she has no trust in him, and without, trust there can be no abiding love.
Therefore, when, some days after that gentleman overcomes his dislike of her religion so far as to absolutely offer his heart, hand, and fortune to her, this disdainful Catholic astonishes him with these words:
“I think, Mr. Schuyler, that these protestations are more due to my cousin Lizzie than to me. If you speak truth to me, you have spoken false to her. If it is truth to her, what am I to believe? Mr. Schuyler, ‘I must trust all in all,’ or not at all.”
OWEN ON SPIRITISM.[159]
Mr. Owen, though he has since been a member of Congress, and an American minister at Naples, was formerly well known in this city as associated with Frances Wright in editing the Free Enquirer, as the author of an infamous work on moral physiology, and as an avowed atheist. He now claims to be a believer in the existence of God, and in the truth of the Christian religion; but his God has no freedom of action, being hedged in and bound hand and foot by the laws of nature, and his Christianity is a Christianity without Christ, and indistinguishable from unmitigated heathenism. How much he has gained by his conversion, through the intervention of the spirits, from atheism to demonism and gross superstition, it is not easy to say, though it is better to believe in the devil, if one does not mistake him for God, than it is to believe in nothing.
Mr. Owen makes, as do hundreds of others, a mistake in using the word spiritualism for spiritism, and spiritual for spirital or spiritalistic. Spiritualism is appropriated to designate a system of philosophy opposed to sensism or materialism, and spiritual stands opposed to sensual or carnal, and is too holy a term to be applied to spirit-rapping, table-tipping, and other antics of the spirits. Mr. Owen is unhappy in naming his books. He
holds that the universe is governed by inflexible, immutable, and imperishable physical laws; that all events or manifestations take place by the agency of these laws; that the future is only the continuation and development of the present; and that death is only the throwing off of one’s overcoat, and the life after death is the identical life, without any interruption, that we now live. We see not well how he can assert another world, or a debatable land between this world and the next. If all things and all events are produced by the agency of natural laws, and those laws are universal and unchangeable, we are unable to conceive any world above or beyond nature, or any world in any sense distinguishable from the present natural world. His books are therefore decidedly misnamed, and so named as to imply the existence of another world and a world after this, which cannot on his principles be true.