The spirit-rapper; an autobiography
hand of the devil is here, and that its chiefs must have been inspired
by the Holy Ghost, or driven onward by infuriated demons.
So, it seems to me, we must reason with regard to Cromwell and the stern
old Puritans, fierce and terrible as the old Berserkirs from the North.
There was something superhuman in the English rebellion and revolution
of the seventeenth century; and if Cromwell and his party were not
specially moved by the Holy Spirit, as they believed, they must have
been animated and driven on by the old Norse demon. So also of the old
French Revolution, and of all those terrible convulsions which have
ruined nations and shaken the world. Men are indeed in them, with their
wisdom and their folly, their beliefs and their doubts, their virtues
and their vices, but there is more in them than these. There is in them
the fierce conflict of invisible powers, ever renewing and carrying on
that fierce and unrelenting war which Lucifer and his rebel host dared
wage against the Most High, and which must continue till time be no
more. All history, if we did but understand it, is little else but the
history of the conflict between these invisible powers; and till we
learn this fact, in vain shall we pride ourselves on our philosophies of
History.
Carlyle has well exposed the shallow philosophy and absurd theories of
our popular historians. Would he had himself gone deeper, and recognized
the demonic and also the providential element in history, and not have
attempted to explain its philosophy on human nature alone. Your Odins,
Thors, Socrateses, Mahomets, Cromwells, Bonapartes, are not simply
exponents of true, living, energetic manhood, and owe not their success,
or their place in history to their clear perception and their
instinctive adherence to the laws of true and genuine nature, as Carlyle
would have us believe. The nature he bids us worship is the devil, the
dark, subterranean Demon, that seizes us, blinds our eyes, and carries
us onward, whither we know not, and by a power which we are not. It is
the demon of the storm, the whirlwind, and the tempest, the volcano and
the earthquake, and the Carlylean heroes are energumenes, Berserkirs,
who spread devastation around them, who quaff the blood of their
enemies, from human skulls, in the orgies of Valhalla, and leave as
their monuments the ruins of nations. Carlyle has himself been touched
with a German devil, and received a slight manipulation from the old
Norse demon. But he has done well to say, “No sham can live;” he might
have added, No sham is or can be productive. It is not by petty passions
and petty tricks that nations are shaken to their centre, and fearful
revolutions, which change the face of the world, are effected. Only what
is real is, and only what is, can do. Under all the heavings and
tossings of nature, there is a reality of some sort; and only by means
of that reality can you explain the historical phenomena that arrest
your attention.
I have just been reading, in order to relieve my weariness, Sir Walter
Scott’s _Woodstock_, not surely one of his best, but one of his most
serious novels, in which he has endeavored to be something of the
philosopher, as well as the unrivalled romancer. Poor man! wizard of the
north, as he has been called, his magician’s wand fails him here. How
was he, with the shallow philosophy of the eighteenth century, to
explain such a phenomenon as Cromwell and his Major Generals, those
furious Berserkirs, true descendants of the old Vikings of the North? To
say that Oliver and the Independents were mere long-faced, psalm-singing
hypocrites, moved only by the ordinary motives and passions of human
beings, is a libel on history. Long-faced, sanctimonious, and
long-winded, famous for their dark cloaks and steeple-crowned hats,
their psalm-singing, their Biblical phraseology, their speaking through
the nose, and turning up the white of the eye, they certainly were; but
whoso supposes they were so by virtue of subtle, calculating hypocrisy,
knows them not. Whatever else Cromwell and the Puritans were, they were
no hypocrites; their manners, their dress, and address, however
objectionable we may choose to regard them, were not affected to cloak
conscious vice or iniquity, or to deceive either their friends or their
enemies. Never were men more serious, more deeply in earnest; and it was
in obedience to what they held to be the voice of God that they
preached, fasted, sung psalms, prayed, and—kept their powder dry. It was
not by their snivel, their nasal twang, their Biblical phraseology, nor
by an affectation of piety and dependence on the Lord, nor by any form
of hypocrisy or cant, that they made mincemeat of the drinking, swearing
rakehell, but brave and loyal cavaliers at Marston Moor, Edgehill, and
Worcester. A chorus of spirits, black or white, joined in their
psalm-singing, and invisible powers sped their balls to the hearts of
their enemies, and gave force to the well-aimed strokes of their swords.
Certainly the hand of Providence in the affairs of nations is not to be
denied, and certain it is that God visits nations in mercy and in
judgment. A sound theology, an enlightened piety sees the providence of
God in the growth of the infant colony, in the prosperity of states, and
the revolutions and fall of empires. But he works by ministries; and the
most terrible exhibitions of his wrath, the most fearful of his
judgments are those in which he lets loose the demons, and permits a
people to fall under their power. These demons work their own will, but
are at the same time the executors of his vengeance—of his justice. The
good, even in the greatest national calamities, are never injured, for
nothing but sin ever injures; but the wicked are punished. They had
chosen the devil for their master, and it is fitting that he whom they
had falsely worshipped as God, who is no God, should be made the
instrument of their punishment. The national sins of England were great;
her kings had betrayed their trust—had led the people into error, and
forgotten what they owed to the King of kings and Lord of lords. The
Lord had a controversy with them, and he permitted the old Puritans to
triumph over them; and whether they did so by simple human strength, or
by the willing assistance of evil spirits, inflaming them with a
preternatural courage, and driving them on by a preternatural fury, the
principle is one and the same. So also of France, in her terrible
revolution of 1789, and of Europe in 1848.
I read with sorrow the puny attempts of the author of _Woodstock_ to
explain away, as mere jugglery or trickery, the strange phenomena which
disturbed the sequestrators of the Royal Lodge. He would, on the
strength of an anonymous pamphlet, explain them as a trick played off
upon the parliamentary commissioners by Dr. Rochecliff, Albert,
Tompkins, Joceline, and Phebe. It may have been so; but the machinery he
supposes is clearly inadequate to explain all the mysterious phenomena
he acknowledges. The trick could hardly have failed, if trick there was,
to be detected either by Colonel Everard or the Commissioners. But even,
if his explanation of that particular case is to be accepted, or if a
thousand instances are to be referred to trickery, it says nothing as to
the general fact of demonic vexations and invasions. As Christians, we
know that we are constantly beset by evil spirits, and the mysterious
occurrences at the Royal Lodge of Woodstock, even if real, are only a
step beyond ordinary Satanic temptations, as possession is only a
further extension of obsession.
If much harm is done by superstition, perhaps even more is done by the
denial of all demonic influence and invasion, and the attempt to explain
all the so-called Satanic phenomena on natural principles. It generates
a sceptical turn of mind, and the rationalism resorted to will in the
end be turned against the supernatural facts of religion, and the same
process which is adopted to explain away the Satanic prodigies, will be
made use of to explain away the miracles of the Old and New Testaments.
In fact it has been so done, and we have seen grave commentators
laboring, as they believed, to explain these very miracles on natural
principles; thus reducing Christianity from its high character of a
supernatural religion to a system of mere naturalism, at best a simple
human philosophy, perhaps inferior to many other systems. Jefferson,
writing to Priestley, speaks, as he supposes, very well of our Lord, but
disputes his merits as a philosopher, and says, in substance, “Jesus was
a spiritualist, I am a materialist.” How many men in our days regard
themselves as very commendable Christians because they recognize the
beauty and worth of certain moral precepts of the Gospel, precepts which
are only the universal dictates of reason, and recognized by the common
sense of all nations—heathen as well as Christian! Thomas Paine was more
honest, for though he could say Jesus taught very pure morals, which
have never been excelled, he refused to call himself a Christian. I have
met many a professed minister of the Gospel who would find Tom Paine’s
creed, meagre as it was, too big for him: “I believe in one God and no
more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe that
religious duties consist in justice and mercy, and endeavoring to make
our fellow-creatures happy.” The Gospel, as it is preached by some
“godly” ministers in New England, is too meagre to have satisfied a
Rousseau, or even a Voltaire.
In the case of the Spiritists of our own times, much harm is done by
telling them the spirit-manifestations are all humbuggery, imagination,
fraud, or trickery. These people know that it is not so. They know that
they are not knaves, that they practise no trickery, and have no wish to
deceive or be deceived. They are not conscious of any dishonest
intentions, and they have no reason to think that they are less
intelligent or less sharp-sighted than they who abuse them as impostors,
or ridicule them as dupes. The worst way in the world to convert a man
from his errors is to begin by abusing him, and denying what he knows to
be true. Except in the teachings of God, or what is the same thing, the
teachings of men appointed, instructed, and supernaturally assisted by
him to teach, we never find unmixed truth, for to err is human; and on
the other hand, we never find pure, unmixed falsehood. Unmixed falsehood
is universal negation, and no negation is possible but by an
affirmation. Error is the misapplication of the true. These Spiritists
are deceived, are deluded, I grant, for they are the sport of a lying
and deceiving spirit; but they are not deceived or deluded as to the
phenomena to which they testify, nor, as a general thing, do they wish
to deceive others. Among them there may be knaves and fools, there may
be quacks and impostors, but I have no reason to suppose that the mass
of them are not as intelligent and as honest as the common run of men,
as the world goes. Their error is in their explication of the phenomena,
not in asserting the reality of the phenomena; and to begin by telling
them that no such phenomena have ever occurred, that the
spirit-manifestations are all humbug, is, to say the least, a very
unwise proceeding. If you are a minister of religion, by doing so you
are only playing into the hands of the devil, for you outrage the
natural sense of justice and truth which these people still retain, and
dispose them in turn to look upon religion itself, as held by the
Christian Church, as a humbug.
I have known many apparently sincere and pious persons driven to
apostasy by the scepticism with regard to the phenomena they have
themselves seen. The very worst way in the world to deliver ourselves or