The spirit-rapper; an autobiography
others from the power of Satan, is to deny his existence. Resist the
devil, and he will flee from you; laugh at him, if you will, and he will
hie himself back to hell, for he cannot endure contempt; but deny his
existence, persuade yourselves that there exists no devil, and he in
turn will laugh at you, and take quiet possession of you. Oppose the
Spiritists we certainly should, but not where they are strong and we are
weak. The true way is to concede the facts, concede all that they really
and honestly observe, concede even their mysterious and superhuman
character, and then explain to them their principle and origin, and show
them that they proceed not from good angels, even when apparently they
are pure and unobjectionable, but from the enemies of Christ, from Satan
and his angels carrying on, with devilish malice, their never-ending war
against Heaven.
Such at least are the conclusions which I have been forced in my own
mind to adopt, and such, it seems to me, all must adopt who study the
question in the light of Christian theology. I am at least honest in
these conclusions, and, though I may err now, as I have so often erred
before, yet I am not more likely to err than others. Err indeed I may,
but, if I must err at all, I would rather err on the side of
superstition, than on the side of scepticism and irreligion.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CONVERSION.
My story, like my life, draws to its close. The change which my
religious views have undergone has been more than once hinted. On
religion, as on most other subjects, I no longer think or feel as I did
in the day when I fancied I possessed more than human science, and
wielded a more than human power.
I grew up without any decided religious doctrines, though inclining to
what was called Liberal Christianity, that is, a Christianity kept up
with the times, and conformed to the ever-changing spirit of the age. I
was not an avowed unbeliever; I was not an open scoffer; I even thought
it well to pay a decent external respect to religion, to attend church
when convenient, and to patronize the Gospel, providing it was not
preached with too much earnestness and devotedness, and not promulgated
as a law which must govern all my thoughts, words, and deeds, but was
proposed simply as a speculation, as a theory, or as an opinion, which I
was at liberty to accept, modify, or reject, as seemed to me good.
Before my mesmeric experiments and acquaintance with Priscilla, I was a
sort of Rationalist, accepting Christianity in name, and explaining its
miracles and mysteries on purely natural principles. Afterwards, after
my philanthropic schemes had miscarried, my worship of humanity as God
had proved a failure, and my belief in progress had expired in the
crucible of experience, I fell into a sort of despair, and would fain
have persuaded myself that I believed in nothing. If I did not
absolutely deny God, my belief in him became so obscured by the mists of
my speculations and the corruptions of my heart, that I was in reality
no better than an atheist. The devil was a bugbear invented by the
priests, and men were mere motes in the sunbeam. I have already
described the state into which I fell—a state from which I would risk my
life to save my bitterest enemy.
Prior to the absolute crushing of all my hopes, which followed my having
finished all the work I had marked out for myself to do, and found it
nought, I regarded myself as a Free-Thinker, because I had either
allowed myself to think, or had made myself acquainted with the thoughts
of others, against religion. My freedom and independence of mind were in
denying, not in believing. I was not free to think in favor of religion,
nor sufficiently independent to believe Christianity, and labor in
earnest to serve God and save my own soul. To have done so would have
been sheer superstition, would have been sinking myself to the level of
the vulgar, and to have exposed myself to the gibes and sneers of my
scientific associates.
Nevertheless, my unbelief, my scepticism, and my radicalism, were a sort
of violence done to my own better feelings and graver judgment. They
never came natural to me, and I am sure I was never cut out for a
philanthropist or a world-reformer. There was always something in the
views and practices of my associates that disgusted me, and often was I
obliged to hold my nose when they were discussed, as it is said Satan
does when he encounters a confirmed sensualist. I had no natural relish
for “the Newness,” and when at worst retained a secret reverence for the
past, and dwelt with pleasure on the time-hallowed, over which for ages
had flowed the stream of human affection, human joy, and human sorrow. I
stood in awe before the shadow of the hoary Eld, and wished always to
find myself bound by indissoluble ties to what had gone before me, as
well as to what might come after me. Half in spite, and half under the
charm of Priscilla, I embraced philanthropy, but not inwardly, for her
sophistry never for a moment deceived me. Never was there a moment when
I did not see through the philanthropists, radicals, and revolutionists
with whom I associated, or when with a breath I could not have swept
away their cobweb theories; never for a moment was I deceived as to the
actual character of the devilish movements I myself set on foot.
It may be thought strange, such being the fact, that I could or would
have played the part I did. It might be enough to say Satan had power
over me; but I associated with the prophets of “the Newness,” and led on
the movement, partly because I did not know what else to do, and partly
because I could not endure absolute idleness. I saw indeed the
destructive character of my movements, but I cherished a hope that by
making things worse, I should prepare the way for making them better.
You must demolish, I said, the old edifice, and clear away its rubbish,
before you can erect a new, a more beautiful, or a more convenient
structure on its site. I accepted, after a manner, the opinions and
theories of the Neologists, not because they satisfied me, but because I
knew not what else to accept; and, though not true, they might conduct
me to truth. The road to the temple of Purity runs through the Bower of
Bliss, the path to heaven crosses the devil’s territory, and error is
the prodrome of truth. Such were the maxims I adopted, not indeed
because I believed them, but because they were convenient, and because I
saw not otherwise how to justify myself, or solve the problem of
experience. I adhered to my philanthropy, infidelity, and radicalism,
not because I loved or believed them, but because I saw nothing true in
the principles and reasonings I was accustomed to hear opposed to them.
The religious and conservative people I knew, and I supposed them the
most enlightened and the least irrational of their class, seemed to
believe and retain either too much or too little. On one side they
seemed to accept and act on the principles which I and my party
professed, and on the other to insist on conclusions which could be
logically obtained only from a contradictory set of principles, and
which they with one voice condemned as false, mischievous, and leading
only to superstition, idolatry, and spiritual thraldom. Their denials
struck me as too sweeping for their affirmations, and their affirmations
as quite too broad for their denials. I found myself in the unpleasant
predicament, either of divinizing humanity, or of embracing a religion
which they held to be worse than the rankest infidelity.
For a time, while I was in good health, while I possessed and wielded a
more than human power, and had not yet exhausted the world in which I
did believe, or despaired of recasting it after my own image, I got
along without much difficulty; but when I no longer saw any object in
life, when there was from my own point of view no longer any work for me
to do, and I was thrown back on my own failing godship, and left to
devour my own heart, I became wretched, more wretched than I can
express. The blow which prostrated me, and the disease which it
developed, and brought me to handgrips with Death, changed the current
of my thoughts, but unhappily only to render them for the time still
more painful. “You know, O Socrates,” says Cephalus in Plato’s
_Republic_, “that when a man thinks that he is drawing near to death,
certain things, as to which he had previously been very tranquil, awaken
in his bosom anxiety and alarm. What has been told him of hell and the
punishment of the wicked, the stories at which he had formerly laughed
or mocked, now fill his soul with trouble. He fears that they may prove
true. Enfeebled by age, or brought nearer to the frightful abodes, he
seems to perceive them with greater clearness and force, and is
therefore disturbed by doubts and apprehensions. He reviews his past
life, and seeks what evil he may have done. If he finds, on examination,
that his life has been iniquitous, he awakes often in the night,
agitated and shuddering, as a child, with sudden terrors, trembles and
lives in fearful expectation;” or, as I may add with St. Paul, “a
certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation.” As I
found myself on my dying bed, things began to wear to me a very
different aspect from what they did when I was in the heyday of youth,
in the full flow of my animal spirits, or filled with the vain and
delusive hope of subjecting all nature to my will. The lessons which I
had heard in my childhood, and which I had ridiculed or forgotten, came
back with startling power; and in my lonely reflections I was forced to
ask what, if that which they tell us of death and judgment, of heaven
and hell, the rewards of the good and the punishment of the wicked,
should turn out to be true?
My trouble, my anxiety, and my alarm increased in proportion as Mr.
Merton forced upon me, by his conversations, the full conviction that I
had really been dealing with devils, that Satan is really a personal
existence, and that I had made a covenant with him, and had acted under
his influence. My rationalism had led me to question his personal
existence, and to attempt to explain the demonic phenomena without the
supposition of his interposition. Denying Satan, I had denied Christ;
and being now forced to recognize Satan, I was forced to confess Christ,
and all the Christian mysteries. By the same process by which I had
explained away the demonic phenomena, I had explained away the miracles
and the supernatural character of Christianity. By that same process of
reasoning by which Mr. Merton compelled me to admit the false miracles,
the lying signs and wonders of Satan, I was forced to admit the true
miracles, therefore the Divine commission, and therefore the Divinity of
Christ, because Christ claimed to be the Son of God.
Here is, I apprehend, the principal source of that difficulty which so
many people find in admitting the reality of the demonic phenomena. They
cannot admit Satan and his works, without admitting Christ and
redemption, purchased with his own blood on the cross,—in a word,
without admitting all the Christian mysteries and dogmas,—Christianity
itself, and that not as an opinion, not as a speculation, but as the law
of God for conscience. Most men have, at least, a dim perception of this
fact; and as they do not like to admit Christianity in a Christian
sense, they will not suffer themselves to believe that there is any
thing Satanic in the dark phenomena of human history. For, whatever may
be the professions we hear, whatever the apparent zeal displayed in the
cause of a bastard Christianity, our age is an unbelieving age, and
hates, I may say, with a perfect hatred, Christ and his Church. The age