The spirit-rapper; an autobiography
philosophers, of the most learned and polite nations of Gentile
antiquity. Men are deceived, deluded, but never by pure falsehood. It is
the truth mingled with the falsehood that deceives or misleads them.”
“But the whole,” said Jack, “was a system of jugglery, cheatery, and
knavery, of the heathen priests.”
“I do not defend,” replied Mr. Merton, “the ancient pagan superstitions,
nor the strict honesty, any more than the immaculate purity, of the
ancient priesthoods; but I have learned not to explain great effects by
petty causes, like the shallow-pated philosophers of the last century,
and the historians of the school of Voltaire, Hume, and Robertson, who
had no more comprehension of the real causes and concatenation of events
than a respectable goose. All heathenism was founded on delusion, but
not a delusion originating with, and kept up by, the trickery and
jugglery of priests, who were often greater dupes than any others. No
art, craft, jugglery, or fraud, could be carried on for three thousand
years in the bosom of cultivated nations without detection. There were
men in ancient heathendom as able and as willing to detect human
imposture, as are our modern philosophers, who tell us so gravely in
their elaborate works how the priests contrived to work their miracles,
and to keep the people in subjection. The only sound philosophy proceeds
on the assumption of the general good faith of mankind, or that they
dupe and are duped, save in individual cases, without malice prepense.
“In these oracles there was a superhuman intelligence, and an
intelligence which was neither that of those who consulted nor that of
those who gave the response, and it tells you itself why the oracles
after the birth of our Saviour and the spread of Christianity, became
mute.
Me puer Hebræus, divos Deus ipse gubernans,
Cedere sede jubet, tristemque redire sub Orcum;
Aris ergo dehinc tacitus abscedito nostris.
The Hebrew youth, himself God and master of the gods, had reduced them
to silence. Whence this third intelligence? It cannot come from the odic
agent, for that is unintelligent.”
“I do not agree with Mr. Sowerby,” said Mr. Winslow. “I believe all
existence is intelligent, and all forces intelligent forces. God is
infinite intelligence. He is the principle and similitude of all things,
and therefore every thing must, like him, be intelligent.”
“That was my view,” said I, “or else I should have had no hesitation in
explaining a large portion of the mysterious phenomena by the old notion
of demonic invasion.”
“Yet this view,” replied Mr. Merton, “is decidedly untenable. God, in
the sense of creator, is the principle of all things, and in the sense
that the ideas or types after which he creates them are in his eternal
reason, he is their similitude; but it is not necessary to suppose that
every creature imitates him in all his attributes, which would suppose
that a cabbage has intellect and will, and a granite block is endowed
with charity. The infinite intelligence of God supposes that all are
created, ordered, and governed by, and according to, intelligence, but
not that every creature is intelligent, or an intelligence. We might as
well say that every creature is infinite, for God is infinity, as well
as intelligence.
“In the phenomena of demonopathy the patient is distinctly conscious of
an intelligence not his own. The Mother Superior in the convent of
Loudun was distinctly conscious that the words spoken by her organs did
not proceed from her intelligence, and that they were uttered, not by
her will, but against it. There is a thousand times more evidence of
this third intelligence, and that it is personal, than Baron Reichenbach
has adduced in proof of his odic agent. The nuns of Loudun knew what
they did, and they struggled with all their might against the power that
afflicted them. They knew as well that their words and actions proceeded
from a foreign personality, and not from themselves, as you know that my
words and actions do not proceed from you. They held in the greatest
horror the blasphemous words their organs were made to utter, and the
indecent postures they were made to assume, and sought deliverance by
prayer and pious practices. That does not proceed from one’s own will,
which he holds in horror, and struggles against.”
“The will and intelligence was that of Grandier, who mesmerized them.
He, by the mesmeric agent, had placed himself in relation with them, and
he moved them as a mesmerizer does his somnambulist,” said Mr. Sowerby.
“That Grandier persecuted them, and was in some sense near them, is what
they uniformly asserted, and what I am not disposed to deny, but that it
was he who possessed them, and used their organs, is not to be supposed;
because one human being cannot thus possess another, and because the
intelligence and will displayed surpassed his own. Grandier, if he
afflicted them, did it only by means of a foreign power, foreign both to
his personality and theirs, as even Mr. Sowerby contends; but this
foreign power must have had, as is evident from the recorded phenomena,
intelligence and will of its own.”
After a long discussion on this point, which I had hardly for a moment
questioned, for I had proved it by my experiments with Priscilla, and
with tables and inanimate objects, time and again, though I saw not all
that it involved, all except the Doctor and Jack agreed that it must be
so. The Doctor would not make an admission that required him to modify
what he had written and published on insanity, and Jack would not hear a
word on the subject. His experience was explicable on the assumption of
hallucination, and he would not believe anybody had had a more
marvellous experience than his own.
“But,” said Mr. Merton, “this wonder-working power, if it have
intelligence and will, must be a spirit, good or bad, and, also a
superhuman spirit, since the phenomena are superhuman.”
“So,” said Dr. Corning, “here we are in the middle of the nineteenth
century, in this age of science, after so much has been said and written
against the folly, ignorance, barbarism, and superstition of past ages,
back in the old superstitious belief in demons, good and bad angels,
ghosts and hobgoblins, fairies and ghouls, witches and witchcraft,
sorcery and magic. Well, gentlemen, I have done. I am inclined to
believe there must be a devil, for if there were no devil we could
hardly have such poor success in bringing the world to reason, and
curing it of superstition.”
“There may be more truth in what you say than you suspect,” said Mr.
Merton. “The devil is the father of ignorance, credulity, and
superstition, no less than of false science, infidelity, and
irreligion.”
CHAPTER XX.
SHEER DEVILTRY.
A few days after this last conversation, I was visited by Judge Preston,
whom I had slightly known in former years,—a man of very respectable
gifts and attainments, and of high standing in the community. He had
been a politician, lawyer, legislator, and was now a Justice of the
Supreme Court of his native State. He was moral, upright, candid, and
sincere, but like too many of his class, as well as of mine, had grown
up and lived without any fixed or determinate views of religion. To say
he had rejected Christianity, would be hardly just; but he had only
vague notions of what is Christianity, and if he did not absolutely
disbelieve a future state, he had no firm belief in the immortality of
the soul. He rather wished than hoped to live again. He had not long
before lost his wife, whom he tenderly loved, and her death had plunged
him into an inconsolable grief. He wept, and refused to be comforted. A
friend drew him one evening into a circle of Spiritualists or
Spiritists, and after much persuasion, induced him to seek through a
medium an interview with his deceased wife. What he saw and heard
convinced him, and he soon found that he was himself a medium—a writing
medium, I believe.
Judge Preston, in connection with a physician of some eminence, and his
friend Van Schaick, formerly a member of the United States Senate, a
prominent politician a few years since, and in religion a Swedenborgian,
had just published a work, of large dimensions as well as pretensions,
on Spiritualism and Spirit-manifestations, very well written, and not
without interest to those who would investigate the subject of demonic
invasion.
He said that he had called to see me in obedience to an order given him
by Benjamin Franklin, who assured him that I could, if I chose, give him
some information on the subject of the spirit-manifestations, for I had
had more to do with them than any man living.
I replied that I was very glad to see him; but, as to the conversation
on spirit-manifestations, I must decline taking part in it myself. I was
very weak, and I did not think I could give him any information of
importance. He could probably learn much more from the shades of
Franklin, William Penn, or George Washington, than from me. George Fox
and Oliver Cromwell could tell him many things; Swedenborg and Joe Smith
more yet. I advised him to call up the Mormon prophet, who could
probably give him more light on the subject than any one who had gone to
the spirit-world since Mahomet. I should, however, be most happy to hear
him and my highly esteemed friend Mr. Merton, who was present, converse
on the subject.
“Mr. Merton,” said the Judge, “I perceive is not a believer, and I am
not fond of conversing with sceptics.”
“Judge Preston,” said Mr. Merton, “can hardly call me a sceptic, and I
think, were we to compare notes, he would find me believing too much
rather than too little.”
“It may be so,” said the Judge, “but I feel as if I was in the presence
of an unbeliever, and an enemy of the spirits.”
“We must not place too much reliance on our feelings; and the habit of
carefully noting them, and taking them as our guides, is not to be
encouraged,” answered Mr. Merton. “Our feelings become warped, obscure
our perceptions, and mislead our judgment. I certainly do not deny the
facts, or the phenomena which you call spirit-manifestations, although I
may not, and probably do not, admit your explanation of them, nor the
doctrines concerning God, the universe, and man and his destiny, which I
find in your book.”
“But do you believe that spirits from the other world do really
communicate with the living?”
“That there is in many of the phenomena, I say not in all, which you
call spirit-manifestations, a real spiritual invasion, I do not doubt;
but whether the spirits are the souls of the departed, or really demons
or devils personating them, is a question to which you do not seem to
me, from your book, to have paid sufficient attention. You are
necromancers, diviners with the spirits of the dead. Necromancers are
almost as old as history. We find them alluded to in Genesis. Moses
forbids necromancy, or the evocation of the dead, and commands that
necromancers shall be put to death. In all ancient and modern pagan
nations, necromancy is found to be a very common species of divination.
The African magicians found at Cairo practise it even at the present
time, as we find testified to by an English nobleman and a French
academician, though by a seeing medium, not, as is the case with you, by
rapping, talking, and writing mediums. The famous Count de Cagliostro,
or rather Giuseppo Balsamo, at the close of the last century, professed
to enable persons of distinction to converse with the spirits of eminent
individuals, long since dead; and evocation of the dead has long been
practised at Paris by students of the University. You are real diviners,
attempting, by means of evoking the dead, to divine secrets, whether of