The spirit-rapper; an autobiography
its restraints would be to deny that reality, and to explain the
phenomena commonly held as evidence of such intervention, on
physiological and other natural principles. This has been the aim of
science, especially medical science, during the last two hundred years.
This aim was adopted by the so-called wits and philosophers of the last
century, and during this it has begun to be adopted by jurisprudence,
and even to be acquiesced in by a large portion of professed Christian
ministers. Literary men, like Sir Walter Scott; founders of new sects,
like the late Hosea Ballou, of Boston; neologist theologians everywhere;
and that “fourth estate,”—journalism, have all combined to reason,
explain, or laugh away, every thing pertaining to demonology, and to
make the world believe that there is no devil, that evil spirits are
only the creatures of a disordered brain, that apparitions or ghosts are
only hallucinations, possession a peculiar kind of madness or insanity,
and magic mere charlatanry or sleight-of-hand. All this, for an
anti-Christian purpose, was admirable, since even the conservative
portion of the clergy seemed to acquiesce in it.
Nevertheless, this could suffice only to a certain extent. It might
serve to emancipate the intelligent classes, but could not emancipate
the people. The latter half of the eighteenth century—a century of
anti-Christian light, philosophy, physical science, and materialism—was
more distinguished for the mysterious phenomena, usually called
demoniacal, than any other period since the Christianizing of the Roman
Empire, with the single exception of the sixteenth century. Weishaupt,
Mesmer, Saint-Martin, and Cagliostro, did far more to produce the
revolutions and convulsions of European society at the close of that
century, than was done by Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert, Diderot,
Mirabeau, and their associates. These men had no doubt a bad influence,
but it was limited and feeble. It was not they who stirred up all
classes, produced that revolutionary madness, that wild ungovernable
fury of the people which we everywhere witnessed, and nowhere more than
in Paris, the politest and most humane city in the world. The masses
were possessed, they were whirled aloft, were driven hither and thither,
and onward in the terrible work of demolition, by a mysterious power
they did not comprehend, and by a force they were unable, having once
yielded to it, to resist.
You feel this in reading the history of those terrible events. It seems
to you that Satan was unbound, and hell let loose. The historians of
that old French Revolution, such as Mignet, Thiers, Lamartine, Carlyle,
all feel that there was something _fatal_ in it, and have been led, at
least all except the last, to defend it on the ground of fatalism. The
Royalist and Catholic historians, who oppose it, seem never to seize its
spirit. They declaim, denounce, find fault here, find fault there, now
with this action and now with that, but they never explain any thing,
solve any problem which comes up, and they leave the whole a mystery, or
an enigma.
The same phenomena, only on a reduced scale, were observable in the
revolutions of 1848. Everywhere there seemed to be an invisible power at
work. Good, honest Father Bresciani, would explain all this by the
Secret Societies. It is in vain. They did much, those secret societies;
but how explain the existence of those societies themselves, their
horrible principles, and the fidelity of their members in submitting to
what they must know is a thousand times more oppressive than the
institutions they are opposing? Tell me not that all these
revolutionists were incarnate devils; that they cooly, and deliberately,
from ordinary human motives and influences, planned and carried out
their revolutionary enterprise. There were in their ranks men of the
highest intelligence, the purest virtue, and the humanest feelings; men,
all of whose antecedents, whose tendencies, whose studies, professions,
interests, and, I may say, convictions, placed them in the ranks of the
conservatives, were carried away by an invisible force, and shouted out,
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and hurled the brand of the incendiary at
temple, palace, and castle, which sheltered them, as if it was not they
who did it, but a spirit that possessed them. Men caught the infection,
they knew not how, they knew not when, they knew not where. The
revolutionary spirit seemed to float in the air, as it undoubtedly did.
Without Weishaupt, Mesmer, Saint-Martin, Cagliostro, you can never
explain the revolution of 1789, and without me and my accomplices you
can just as little explain those of 1848. There was at work in the
former a power that the wits ridiculed, that science denied, philosophy
disproved, and the clergy hardly dared assert. There was there the
mighty power, whatever it be, which it is said once dared dispute the
empire of heaven with the Omnipotent, and which all ages have called
Satan, whether it is to be called evil with the Christian, or good with
the philanthropist, a person with the believer, or a primitive and
elemental force with the mesmerist. France, Europe was mesmerized. So
was it again in 1848, though with less terrible external convulsions.
It is impossible to bring the great body of the people of any age to
agree with our Voltarian philosophers—to be genuine Sadducees. In the
first place, the writings of the philosophers and academicians do not
reach the mass; and, in the second place, there are constantly occurring
phenomena which, in their apprehension, give the lie to Sadduceism. At
the very time when the philosophers of pagan Rome were losing all faith
in their national religion, doubting almost the existence of the
Divinity and the immortality of the soul, and laughing at augurs and
soothsayers, the people were more superstitious than ever. It was then
that magicians from Asia and Africa flocked to the Eternal City, and
that Isiac, Bacchic, and other Eastern superstitions, with all their
impurities and wild fanaticism, in comparison with which the national
religion was pure, reasonable, and moral, were introduced, and spread as
an epidemic; and the laws of the earlier emperors show how hard and how
ineffectually authority labored to suppress them.
The enemies of Christianity may accept the mysterious phenomena,
commonly regarded as diabolical, and explain them and the miracles of
the Bible and the alleged miracles of the Church on natural principles,
and if they cannot explain them on any known natural principles, they
may make them the basis of an induction of a new natural principle; or,
in other words, invent a natural principle to explain them, as Baron
Reichenbach has done—a principle, element, substance, or force, which he
calls _od_. They may do this, or they may recognize their real spiritual
and superhuman origin, but ascribe them to good, not to evil spirits, or
what is the same thing, maintain that what the world has hitherto
worshipped as good is evil, and what it has been taught to avoid as evil
is good. That is, that Satan is God, and God is Satan.
Swedenborg, in founding his New Jerusalem, or New Church, and Joe Smith,
in founding the Church of the Latter Day Saints, as Mahomet in the
seventh century, virtually adopted the latter course. Swedenborg became,
in the later years of his life, a somnambulist, and could throw himself
into the state which some mesmerists call sleep-waking, in which he was
a clairvoyant, and had the power of second sight. He fancied himself a
prophet, and capable of teaching angels as well as men. But he held the
power he found himself able to exercise, to be good as well as
supernatural.
The same was the case with Joe Smith, an idle, shiftless lad, utterly
incapable of conceiving, far less of executing the project of founding a
new church. He was ignorant, illiterate, and weak, and of bad
reputation. I knew his family, and even him also, in my boyhood, before
he became a prophet. He was one of those persons in whose hand the
divining-rod will operate, and he and others of his family spent much
time in searching with the rod for watercourses, minerals, and hidden
treasures. Every mesmerizer would at once have recognized him as an
impressible subject. He also could throw himself, by artificial means,
that of a peculiar kind of stone, which he called his Urim and Thummim,
into the sleep-waking state, in which only would he or could he
prophesy. In that state he seemed another man. Ordinarily his look was
dull, and heavy, almost stupid; his eye had an inexpressive glare, and
he was rough, and rather profane. But the moment he consulted his Urim
and Thummim, and the spirit was upon him, his face brightened up, his
eye shone and sparkled as living fire, and he seemed instinct with a
life and energy not his own. He was in those times, as one of his
apostles assured me, “awful to behold.”
Much nonsense has been vented by the press about the origin of his
Bible, or the Book of Mormon. The most ridiculous as well as the most
current version of the affair is, that the book was originally written
as a novel, by one Spalding, a Presbyterian minister in Pennsylvania,
and that Joe got hold of the manuscript and published it as a new Bible.
This version is refuted by a simple perusal of the book itself, which is
too much and too little to have had such an origin. In his normal state,
Joe Smith could never have written the more striking passages of the
Book of Mormon; and any man capable of doing it, could never have
written any thing so weak, silly, utterly unmeaning as the rest. No man
ever dreamed of writing it as a novel, and whoever had produced it in
his normal state, would have made it either better in its feebler parts,
or worse in its stronger passages.
The origin of the book was explained to me by one of Joe’s own elders,
on the authority of the person who, as Joe’s amanuensis, wrote it. From
beginning to end, it was dictated by Joe himself, not translated from
plates, as was generally alleged, but apparently from a peculiar stone,
which he subsequently called his Urim and Thummim, and used in his
divination. He placed the stone in his hat, which stood upon a table,
and then taking a seat, he concealed his face in his hat above it, and
commenced dictating in a sleep-waking state, under the influence of the
mysterious power that used or assisted him. I lived near the place where
the book was produced. I had subsequently ample means of investigating
the whole case, and I availed myself of them to the fullest extent. For
a considerable time the Mormon prophets and elders were in the habit of
visiting my house. They hoped to make me a convert, and they spoke to me
with the utmost frankness and unreserve.
Numerous miracles, or what seemed to be miracles—such miracles as evil
spirits have power to perform—and certain marvellous cures were alleged
to be wrought by the prayers and laying on of the hands of the Mormon
elders. Some of these were wrought on persons closely related and well
known to me personally; and I have heard others confirmed by persons of
known intelligence and veracity, whose testimony was as conclusive for
me as would have been my own personal observation. That there was a
superhuman power employed in founding the Mormon church, cannot easily
be doubted by any scientific and philosophic mind that has investigated
the subject; and just as little can a sober man doubt that the power
employed was not Divine, and that Mormonism is literally the Synagogue
of Satan.
It matters little to the enemies of Christianity, whether the public
deny altogether the marvellous phenomena heretofore regarded as
diabolical, whether they accept and explain them by means of a primitive