The spirit-rapper; an autobiography

I had no sooner established myself in my new home, than I called in Arch street to see Priscilla. Instead of her I found James. He received me civilly, even kindly, conversed with me of what we had seen abroad, but Priscilla did not appear. No matter, I would call again. Did so; saw Priscilla only in presence of her husband. She was looking well, was affectionate in her tone and manner, but offered me not her hand, and seemed to take care that I should not so much as touch her dress. Well, said I to myself, be it so. The weakness shall last no longer. I will be myself again, and resume the project I had contemplated. I went home, not cured, but resolved, and immediately commenced my evocation, and communicated my orders to all the circles I had established throughout Europe. I have already hinted what this new project was. It was clear to me, from my historical reading and my personal observations amid the exciting scenes of the more recent European revolutions, that the grand support of social order, and what I have somewhere called the system of restraint and repression, is Christianity, and that the political and social reformers can never fully carry out their reforms till they have totally rooted out from modern society all belief in the Gospel, and all peculiar reverence for its Author. This is more than hinted by Mazzini and Kossuth, although the latter is a vice-president of the American Bible Society, boldly avowed by M. Proudhon, and stoutly contended for by the German Turnverein and Freimänner. If you concede the Christian idea of God, says Proudhon, you must at once and forever abandon your idea of liberty. It was equally clear to me, that the attempt, by means of political organizations, and revolutions directed against the papacy, or any church organization, Catholic or Protestant, to root out Christianity from the hearts of the people, must at last prove a failure. After all, there is a natural religiosity in man, and though he will often restrain and mortify it, and act only in view of purely secular ends,—practically live as if there were no God, and no hereafter,—he will almost always return to the order of religious ideas, and adopt or institute some kind of religious worship to which he will subordinate his political ideas, and his secular ends. An Epicurus may deny Providence, a Lucretius may sing, in no mean poetry, that it is impossible, “_revocare defunctos_,” and even Cicero may laugh at augurs and aruspices, and doubt the immortality of the soul, yet the sentiment of an invisible Force, of a mysterious Power that overshadows us, is universal, and the sceptical philosopher feels an indefinable shudder of awe, perhaps of fear, whenever he finds himself alone in the dark. Everywhere the shades of Acheron wander or flit around and before him. Even in the midst of our pleasures the thought of the invisible and the supernal intrude unbidden to mar our festivities, and to dash our joy with an indefinable sadness, shame, and remorse. Even a Voltaire trembles and blasphemes in dying, at the thought of being denied Christian burial, and a Volney, who resolves God into blind Nature, and Christianity into astrology or astronomy, prays lustily to the God he disowns, in a storm on Lake Erie. Do what we will, we cannot divest ourselves of the belief or apprehension of invisible powers, who hold our destiny in their hands; and a people absolutely without any religion, or at least superstition, is never to be found. Never had unbelievers a fairer chance for rooting out Christianity by political and social revolutions, than in the eighteenth century. The laugh was everywhere against religion and the clergy, a decided materialistic and infidel philosophy pervaded literature, possessed the schools, ruled in the courts, and domineered over thought and intellect. There was lukewarmness in the religious, there were scandals among the clergy, there were abuses in the state, and therefore an imperious call for reform. The reformers directed all their movements against religion, and their means were democratic and social revolution. They were strong, they were overwhelming in their power. At their bidding, down went throne and altar, and in ten years the religion they had abolished was reëstablished, the churches they had closed were reopened at the order of the soldier they had made their chief, and for democracy in the state they had an incipient Cæsarism, which, two years later, became a fully developed and perfect Cæsarism. The same result had followed our own movement. In January, 1850, religion was far more vigorous in Europe, than in January, 1840, and democracy at a far greater discount. It was idle, then, to hope either to destroy political and social authority in the name of absolute unbelief and irreligion, or to root out Christianity by political and social movements. Christianity could be eradicated only by means of a rival religion, and a religion which could appeal to a supernatural origin, and sustain itself by prodigies, or what the vulgar would regard as miracles. I had suspected this from the beginning, and resolved now, that instead of working with the purely secular passions of men, I would make my appeal to their religiosity. Mahomet, in the seventh century, had done this admirably for his time and the East, but had incautiously fixed his superstition in the Koran, and made it unalterable, and therefore incapable of adapting itself to the new face which things might assume in the vicissitude of events, the development of society, and the progress of the race. Swedenborg had done better, and so had Joe Smith, but neither had sufficiently provided for the progressiveness of the race, or with sufficient explicitness consecrated the principle of innovation and change, and both had retained too many conceptions taken from the old religion. Yet Swedenborg was to be taken as our starting point, and we were only to avoid his mistakes, the principal of which was a too strict and rigid church organization. When I returned from Europe, I found the directions I had given, before going abroad, had been pretty faithfully followed; and mesmeric revelations, through Andrew Jackson Davis, and spiritual communications, through the Foxes, were beginning to attract public attention. The spirits were becoming exceedingly anxious to communicate, and made, as it was supposed, many important revelations. In a few months, spiritual knockings were becoming quite common, and mediums were found in all parts of the country. At first, intercourse with the spirits was obtained only in the somnambulic state, or through the slow and toilsome medium of raps, but at the same time intimations and assurances were given that before a great while a more easy and direct method of communication would be vouchsafed; but, as yet, the public and individuals were not prepared for that more direct method. The spirits were willing, but the mediums were not sufficiently advanced, nor sufficiently spiritualized; and the public was too gross, too materialistic, and too sceptical. As soon as minds should become more refined, spiritual, and believing, open vision would be permitted them, and easy and regular communication would be established, and whoever wished would have as free and familiar intercourse with the spirit-world as with the world of the flesh. At first the great object was to establish the reality of the spiritual communications. This was to be done by the communication of secrets, either known only to the interrogator, or incapable of being known to the medium in any ordinary human or natural way. Sometimes the spirits played the part of fortune-tellers; sometimes they assumed to be prophets, and ventured to predict future events, but always events which either depended on them, or lay in the natural order, and which a knowledge of natural causes and effects could easily enable them to foresee. As the spiritual intercourse extended, and believers multiplied, the somnambulic and rapping mediums ceased to be the only mediums. The artificial somnambulic mediums, or mesmerized mediums, disappeared almost wholly, and to the rapping mediums were added writing mediums and speaking mediums, and in some instances the spirits became actually visible to the seers, and telegraphed their messages by visible symbols, and occasionally in words. Spiritual telegraphing, in some one or all these ways, became, in a few months, common in all parts of the country; and, at the expiration of two years, there were three hundred spiritual circles or clubs in the single city of Philadelphia, and more than half a million of believers in the United States. The epidemic had broken out in the North of England and Wales, had spread all over Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and Northern and Central Germany, penetrated France in all directions, and made its appearance even at Rome. In France and Italy, where the population is either profoundly Christian or profoundly infidel, the spiritual manifestation had to adopt more discreet and less startling forms than in our own and some other countries, and to give place at first to doubt whether it was not mere trickery, or explicable on recognized scientific principles; and confined itself, to a great extent, to the phenomena of table-turning, which excited curiosity without alarming conscience. In France, in the most polished, fashionable, and, I may almost say, most Catholic society, table-turning became an amusement. The next point to be attended to, was the doctrines, the philosophy or religion, that the spirits were to teach. It would not do to attack the Gospel too openly, and it was necessary to undermine, rather than to bombard it. In some respects even, it was advisable to seem to confirm, as it were by one rising from the dead, some portions of Christian belief,—such as the immortality of the soul, and the reality of an invisible spirit-world. The latter was doubted by the free-thinkers; but it was essential to my project that the free-thinkers, in this respect, should be converted, for their conversion and acknowledgment of belief in God and a spirit-world would do much to commend our spiritualism to a large body of silly and ill-informed Christian believers, who, seeing such apparently good effects resulting from it, would conclude that there could be nothing bad in it. By their fruits shall ye know them. In the American community, to a very great extent, the belief in the immortality of the soul is supposed to be identical with the belief in the resurrection of the dead, taught by Christianity; and our Unitarians, with their rationalistic erudition, very generally hold that the peculiar and distinctive doctrine taught by our Lord was the immortality of the soul. But the immortality of the soul was believed by the whole ancient world, Gentile as well as Jewish; and, though questioned by some ancient and modern sophists, there never has been found a people who, as a body, were ignorant of it, or that denied it. All the ancient, as all modern superstitions recognize it. All believe the soul is imperishable, though many suppose it will be absorbed in the Great Fountain of Life, as a drop in the ocean—a misinterpretation of the Christian doctrine of union with God in the Light of Glory, as the ultimate end or final beatitude of the just. The doubt was as to the body, or the _umbra_, the material envelope and companion and external medium of the soul in this life. The gross outward body they believed returned to dust, and mingled with its kindred elements; but this _umbra_, shade, the manes of the dead, which all antiquity carefully distinguished from the soul, was also, for the most part, believed to be imperishable; but its reunion with the soul, I do not find the heathen