These may be fruitful sources of material wealth, and may be necessary to support and sustain a vast population, but they can not create intelligence, promote virtue, regulate the social system, or in any way define and adjust the higher duties and prerogatives of citizenship.
The wisest legislation protects equally the rights of all and confers exclusive privileges upon none, and the best government guarantees equal rights to all its citizens.
It is natural to expect that foreigners coming to these shores and settling in these States would accept the institutions with the protection of the government, and not seek to supplant the institutions of the State that offers them home and shelter; and yet it will not be denied that the foreigners in Missouri, taking advantage of the readiness of politicians to truckle to their passions and prejudices, have made strong demands upon the peculiar institutions of the State, and their demands have not been unheeded. It could not be expected that German rationalists, who could scarcely speak English well enough to carry on the most ordinary traffic, would understand, or care to understand, those institutions of the State which characterized the State as a Christian commonwealth.
Nor did legislators, politicians, editors or preachers consider the moral forces they were starting and fostering for evil, and the subtle agencies that would work with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, and whose coming was after the manner of Satan, with all power, and signs, and lying wonders, deceiving the very elect, and spending its force and fury upon the desecrated altars and martyred ministers of Christianity.
Other and different agencies were at work, and had been for years, which could not be reached or affected by State legislation, and which contributed no little to that state of the public mind which put the institutions and ministers of Christianity under disability—what was commonly denominated “Spiritualism.” It existed in a multitude of forms, had many names, and manifested itself in many strange phenomena. Professing to hold communication with the spirit world and receive intelligence from departed spirits, it appealed strongly to the curious, the credulous and the superstitious.
Those who believed in the supernatural, or whose hearts of grief kept them near the “region and shadow of death,” or whose caste of temperament made them super-sentimental, or who, by some constitutional or cultivated peculiarity, easily take up with every wild fancy and foolish vagary that produces a new and novel sensation; and many others, too, who had credit for intelligence, refinement and piety—and as for that, some of the most gifted minds of the State—were led away by it, and became its deceived disciples, in one form or another, without suspecting its deceitful moral tendencies.
Lecturers came into the cities and traversed the State, circles were formed, mediums constituted, spirits rapped and wrote, tables moved and turned, and men, women and children forgot their meals, and stood in superstitious awe within the enchanted circles. Thousands of people lost their relish for the Word of God and forsook his altars of worship. Men neglected their fields, women their homes and children their schools, and for whole days and nights hung with bated breath upon the supposed communications from departed spirits, made often through the most ignorant mediums. Not only in the cities full, but throughout the vast populations of the rural districts, all classes seemed more or less affected by and interested in it. In thousands of homes in Missouri the midnight lamp shone upon tables surrounded by groups and circles of people so intent upon the unintelligible incantations and messages of spiritualism, so-called, that sleep was banished from swollen eyes and pillows brought no rest to aching heads. By it many were disqualified alike for secular, domestic and religious duties.
A peculiarity of spiritualism was that night and darkness were necessary to evoke the spirits. They would rarely communicate to mortals in the day time, or perform any very remarkable feats, such as playing on musical instruments, untying mediums, singing in the air, etc., except in total darkness. Evil spirits, like evil men, “love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.”
This modern spiritualism—neither the history nor philosophy of which it is necessary here to discuss—organized itself into bands, circles and societies of men and women in the larger cities, had their places of secret nocturnal meetings, rented halls for public Sabbath exercises, had their rituals and creeds, their priests and prophets, their altars, incantations and genuflexions, which answered to some sort of public worship. The first female lecturers and public speakers were spiritualists, and in the spiritualists’ church, so-called, women are the high priests and the scriptural teachings in regard to the relation of men and women and their duties in the church are reversed.
Indeed, to call them a church at all is a misnomer, and a shameful reflection upon every idea, principle and function of a true church of Jesus Christ, for by believing in a revelation direct from departed spirits in the spirit world they reject God’s revelation.