The spirit-rapper; an autobiography
“Sir, you will excuse me. I am no logician, and eschew dialectics. Truth
is one, it is the Whole, the All, the universal Being. It is a reality
in, under, and over all, manifesting itself under an infinite variety of
aspects. Every one beholds it under some one of its aspects, no one
beholds it under all. Each mind in that it is real, is itself, is a
manifestation of it, but no one is it in its integrity and universality,
any more than the bubble on its surface is the whole ocean. Under each
particular bubble lies, however, the whole ocean, and if it will speak
not from its diversity, its bubbleosity, in which sense it is only an
apparition, an appearance, a show, an unreality, but from what is real
in it, from its real substantial self, it may truly call itself the
whole ocean. So, under each individual mind lies all truth, all reality,
all being; and hence, in so far as they are real, all minds are one and
the same. Men are weak, are puny, differ from one another because they
seek to live in their diversity, and to find their truth, their reality,
in their individuality. Let them eschew their individuality, which is to
their reality, their real self, only what the bubbleosity of the bubble
is to the ocean, and fall back on their identity, on the universal truth
which underlies them. If they will be men, real men, not make-believes,
strong men, thinking men, let them be themselves, sink back into their
underlying reality, on the One Man, and suffer the universal Over-Soul
to flow into them, and speak through them without let or impediment.”
“We must,” said another Transcendentalist, sometimes called the American
Orpheus, “return to the simplicity of childhood. ‘Except ye be converted
and become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom
of heaven.’ The man who thinks, Rousseau has well said, is already a
depraved animal. All learning is a forgetting; science and wisdom are
gathered from babes and sucklings. We are not prepared as yet to talk of
world-reform. We must _be_ before we can _do_; be men before we can do
men’s work. All _being_ is in _doing_; rather all _doing_ is in _being_.
Ideas are the essences, the realities of things. Seek ideas. They will
take to themselves hands, build them a temple, and instaurate their
worship. Seek not ideas from books; they are lies. Seek them not of the
learned and grey-haired; they have lost them. Be docile and childlike;
seat yourself by the cradle, at the feet of awful childhood, and look
into babies’ eyes.”
“What we want to cure the evils of society,” broke in Mr. Kerrison,—a
tinker, I believe,—a small man in a snuff-colored frock coat, with sharp
grey eyes, lank cheeks, a short nose, a pointed chin, and squeaking
voice, “is a Children’s Protection Society; a society that shall protect
children from the indelicacy, the cruelty, and inhumanity of their
brutal parents. There is nothing more shocking to our finer
sensibilities, or more outrageous to true philanthropy, than to see a
full-grown woman, tall and stout, with a red face, fiery eyes, and a
harsh voice,—or a full-grown man, yet taller and stouter, stern and
awful in his look, terrible in his anger tones,—seize a poor helpless
little boy or girl,—yes, or girl,—not more than three or four years old
it may be, and taking him or her across the knee, strike on the very
seat of her or him, blow after blow, till the poor little thing screams
with pain and agony. It is indelicate, cruel, barbarous. How would the
father or mother like to be treated in the same way? It blunts the
delicate sensibility of the child, sours his temper, hardens his heart,
develops and strengthens all his harsh and angry feelings, and prepares
him to be, when he grows up, as bad as was his father or his mother.”
“Our friend,” added Mr. Silliman, an amiable young minister, a
Unitarian, I believe, or, as he said, a Preacher of the religion of
Humanity, “has, I think, gone to the root of the matter. The evils of
individuals and of society have their origin in the harsh, cruel,
unfeeling, and indelicate manner in which parents bring up their
children. Children should never be restrained, should never be crossed;
they should always be caressed by the soft, delicate hand of love, be
surrounded by sweet and smiling faces, by lovely and attractive images,
live in communion with fresh and fragrant nature, and find life all one
fairy day.”
“Young America,” interposed Mr. Merton, “will thank you both, I have no
doubt. The abolition of corporal chastisement will meet the decided
approval of our little folks, and perhaps of our patriots. It is
questionable whether this flogging of children is not an infringement
upon equal rights. I do not see what the father in my town, universal
democrat as he was, had to reply to the question put to him the other
day by Young America. A little rascal, some ten or twelve years old, had
done some mischief, for which his father flogged him. Young America bore
it with heroic fortitude, as if the honor of his country and of the race
was at stake in his person, and when it was over, with the calm and
dignified air of a man and a freeman, folded his arms across his breast,
looked up to his father, and asked,—‘Father, is not this a free
country?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘By what right, then, do you flog me?’”
“Parents,” said a cross-grained old maid, “are wholly incapable of
bringing up their children. They have no judgment, no steadiness; at one
moment whipping them without rhyme or reason, and the next soothing them
with candy, and smothering them with caresses. They impart to them their
own tempers, passions, weaknesses, and prejudices. There should be
established infant schools at the public expense, where all the
children, as soon as twelve months old, should be placed, and brought up
by proper persons trained and prepared in normal schools for that
purpose.”
“You will have to go farther back than that, my good woman,” said Mr.
Long, an English gentleman just arrived in the country and announced as
the Prophet of the Newness. “Children are born with an inclination to
evil, and are hardly born before they manifest vicious tempers and a
fondness for doing precisely what they ought not to do. If suffered to
have their own way, they would never live to grow up. They must, as they
are now born, be restrained and even whipped, for their own good. Here
the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. We must begin
with the parents. We live in a depraved state, and children inherit
vitiated moral and physical constitutions from their fathers and
mothers. We must look to this fact, and sternly prohibit all persons of
obviously vitiated moral or physical constitutions from begetting or
bearing children. After that we must turn our attention to improving the
breed, as our English farmers have done in the case of their horses,
oxen, cows, sheep, swine, dogs, and hens.”
“That may be rather difficult to manage in a free country,” said Dr.
Muzzleton, a professor of Surgery in a Western medical college, “and can
hardly be tried, except by the master with his negroes on our Southern
plantations. The hopes of philanthropists must rest on something more
practical, and less difficult to be accomplished. The philanthropist’s
dependence is on dietetic reform. The vitiated moral and physical
constitution of parents, and which they impart to their children, comes
unquestionably from the use of animal food. It is necessary, therefore,
to abolish the use of animal food, and have people feed only on a
vegetable diet. Nature shows this in the very construction of the human
teeth, which are very different from those of the lion, the tiger, and
other carniverous animals. Carnivorous animals have no grinders, and
their teeth are fitted only for tearing. Man has incisors and molars,
which shows that he was intended to cut and grind his food.”
“But which serve him very well, since he does not usually eat flesh raw,
but cooks it,” remarked Mr. Merton. “But the antediluvians eat no flesh.
They lived on a vegetable diet, were vegetarians, and yet they became so
corrupt that the Almighty sent a flood and destroyed them all, with the
exception of eight persons.”
“Where do you learn that?” asked Dr. Muzzleton.
“From the Bible and tradition,” replied Mr. Merton.
All stared, and many broke out into a loud laugh, at the joke of citing
the Bible and tradition as authority in an assembly of philanthropists
and reformers. Dr. Muzzleton looked round with great blandness, and said
to Mr. Merton, “You see, my young friend, the majority is against you. I
respect the Bible in matters pertaining to another world, but I am
speaking now as a man of science, not as a theologian. I leave theology
to the clergy,” bowing on his right to Mr. Cotton, and on his left to
Mr. Winslow.
“I respect the Bible in theology no more than I do in science,” said
Miss Rose Winter, a strong-minded woman, and a decided reformer, of
Jewish descent. “The first thing for all reformers to do is to destroy
the authority of the Bible and emancipate the Christian world from its
morality. It is the great supporter of all abuses, and it and the church
are almost our only obstacles to overcome. It sanctions the use of wine
and animal food, slavery and the restitution of the fugitive slave, war
and capital punishment. It asserts the divine right of government, and
forbids resistance to power. It is the fountain of superstition, and the
grand bulwark of priestcraft. It calls woman the weaker vessel, forbids
her to speak in meeting, and commands her to be in subjection to her
husband. We are fools and madmen to talk of our reforms as long as we
regard the Bible as any thing more than a last year’s almanac.”
“In that I think you are right, my dear lady,” said Mr. Cotton, dryly.
“I esteem the Bible a good book,” said Mr. Winslow. “It contains more
genuine and sublime poetry than any other book I am acquainted with, not
even excepting Homer. But I do not accept its plenary inspiration, and I
feel bound to believe only the truths I find in it.”
“And these,” remarked Mr. Merton, “I suppose are only what happens to
accord with your own opinions for the time being.”
“The Bible,” interposed Priscilla, “is a genuine book, and faithfully
records the real experience of prophets and seers of old times, and is
of no value to us save as interpreted by the facts of each one’s own
inner life. Much of it is local, temporary, colored by the nation and
age that produced it, and is no longer of any significance for us; but
what there is in it universal, that is the genuine utterance of
universal nature, and true for all persons, times, and places, should be
accepted, as we accept every genuine word, by whomsoever uttered.”
Mr. Merton shrugged his shoulders and said nothing; Mr. Cotton looked
black, was scandalized, and muttered, “Rank infidelity.” “And what
else,” said a very gentlemanly young man, who had been talking nonsense
for an hour to a bevy of young ladies in a corner of the room, and
apparently indifferent to the great matters under discussion, “and what
else did his reverence expect in a company of reformers? Yet we are not
really infidels. We have only thrown off the mask, and ceased to be
hypocrites. Whatever man’s profession, ever since it was said, ‘It is
not good for man to be alone,’ and Eve was brought blushing to his
bower, woman has been the real shrine at which he has worshipped. This
is our ancestral religion, and true to the religion of my fathers, I
make woman my Divinity, and lay my offering at Leila’s feet.”
“Do not believe him,” said a saucy young thing, with a sparkling eye and
pouting lips. “He worships only himself. Here I have been this half hour
trying to convince him that there is something mystic in woman, and that