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 the past or the future, unknown to the living. You practise what the world has always called divination, and that species of divination called necromancy. Thus far, all is plain, certain, undeniable, and therefore you do that which the Christian world has always held to be unlawful, and a dealing with the devils. This, however, is nothing to you, for you place the authority of the spirits above that of Jesus Christ, and do not hesitate to make Christianity give place to spiritism. But what I wish you to tell me is, the evidence on which you assert that the invading or communicating spirits are really the souls of men and women who once lived in the flesh?”
“They themselves expressly affirm it, and prove it by proving that they have the knowledge of the earthly lives of the persons they say they are, which we should expect them to have in case they were those very persons.”
“The question, you will perceive, my dear Judge, is one of identity—a question with which, as a lawyer and a judge, you must have often had occasion to deal. Is the evidence you assign sufficient?”
“On my professional honor and reputation, I say it is.”
“Do you find the spirits always tell the truth?”
“No. I have said in my book they frequently lie.”
“Then the simple fact that a spirit says he is Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, George Fox, William Penn, or Martin Luther, is not a sufficient proof that he is.”
“I concede it. But I do not rely on his word alone. I examine the spirit, and I conclude he is identically Franklin only when I find that he has that intimate acquaintance with the earthly life of Franklin which I should expect to find in case he really were Franklin.”
“But that intimate acquaintance does not establish the identity, unless you know beforehand that the spirit could not have it, unless he were Franklin. The spirits, I find by consulting your book, have told you the most secret things of your own past life, and secrets which could by no human means be known to any one but yourself. Yet the spirit who knew these secrets was not yourself, but an intelligence distinct from you. Now, if the spirit could show himself thus intimately acquainted with your earthly life without being you, why might he not be intimately acquainted with Franklin’s earthly life without being Franklin?”
“That is a point of view under which I have not considered the question. But, nevertheless, I have subjected the spirits to severe tests, and compelled them to confirm what they say by extraordinary visible manifestations.”
“But the difficulty I find is, that there is nothing in those manifestations that necessarily establishes the identity pretended; for they do not necessarily establish the credibility of the power exhibiting them, as you yourself allow, when you acknowledge that the spirits are untruthful, and not unfrequently lie to you. Miracles accredit the miracle-worker, establish his credibility, only when they are such as can be performed only by the finger of God. If they are such as can be performed by a created power, without special Divine intervention, or such as might be performed by a lying spirit, they prove nothing as to the credibility of their author. A messenger, or a person claiming to be a messenger from God, performs a miracle which can be performed only by the hand of God, and thus establishes his credibility, because he proves by the miracle that God is with him, vouches for what he says; and God, we know, can neither deceive nor be deceived, and therefore will not endorse a deceiver. But prodigies, though superhuman, which do not transcend the powers of created intelligence, do not accredit the agent who performs them, certainly not when it is conceded the agent can, and in many cases does, lie and deceive. I must think, my dear Judge, that you have been hasty in concluding the identity pretended. All you can conclude, from the phenomena in the case, is, that there is present a superhuman spirit, personating or pretending to be Bacon, Franklin, Penn, Swedenborg, or some other well known person who has lived in the flesh, and is able to speak and act in the character assumed.”
“My attention, I grant, has not been so specially turned to the question of identity of the spirit with the individual personated, as it has been to establishing the reality of the spiritual presence,” said the Judge.
“And you have been mainly intent on and carried away, I presume, by the revelations you have received, or doctrines on the greatest of all topics taught you by the spirits.”
“That is true. I have been much more impressed and confirmed by them than by the visible or physical manifestations which I have witnessed. The sublime doctrines and pure morality which the spirits teach have chiefly won my conviction.”
“But these, however much they may seem to you, are very little to the Christian believer. In their most favorable light, they do not approach in sublimity and purity, human reason alone being judge, the Gospel of our Lord. There is nothing new in your spiritual philosophy, and your morality merely travesties a few principles of Christian morality. You assert the immortality of the soul, never, in ancient or modern times, denied by the heathen world; but the peculiar Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, and of future rewards and punishments, you do not recognize. You hardly stand on a level with Cicero or Seneca. You travestie the Christian doctrine of charity, or substitute for it a watery philanthropy, or a sickly sentimentality. There is in your system some subtilty, some cunning, chicanery, and ingenuity, but no deep philosophy, no lofty wisdom, no broad, comprehensive principles, no robust, manly virtue. The point on which you place the most importance is that of infinite progression, which is an infinite absurdity; and inasmuch as it denies the doctrine of final causes, denies God himself, and is, in the last analysis, pure atheism.
“That some true and good things are said by the spirits, I do not deny. The devil can disguise himself and appear as an angel of light. He is a great fool, no doubt, but not fool enough to attempt to seduce men by evil as evil. He must present falsehood in the guise of truth, and evil in the guise of good, if he would do evil. It is not likely that he would begin by shocking the moral sense of the community, and we should expect him to recognize and appeal to the moral sentiments and dominant beliefs of the men of the age; and this is all that you can say of the teachings of the spirits. But, except the confirmation of the fact taught by religion in all ages, that there are spiritual beings, superior to man, who surround us and may invade us, nothing they teach can be relied on, because their veracity is not established, and their unveracious and lying character is conceded.”
“There are lying spirits, I concede, but all are not,” interposed the Judge.
“Be that as it may, in what transcends your own knowledge, or is verifiable by your own natural powers, you have no means of distinguishing them, or of determining when the communication is true, or when it is false. When a spirit unfolds to you a system of the universe,—a system which comes not within the range of scientific investigation,—you cannot say that he is not deluding you, and giving you fairy gold, which will turn out to be chips or vile stubble.”
“You think us deluded, then?”
“In what you see and hear, no; in regard to what lies beyond, yes. I believe you honest; I believe you really receive communications from invisible spirits; I believe you fabricate, simulate nothing. I give you full credit so far as regards the mysterious phenomena you relate; I agree with you in the conclusion that these phenomena are produced by spirits; but I regard as not proved the identity of these spirits with the spirits who were once united as human souls to bodies; and what they teach of God, the universe, and human destiny, I regard as a delusion—a Satanic delusion, designed to seduce you from, or to prevent you from returning to, your allegiance to God and his Christ.”
“That this is the fact,” said I, “I am quite sure. If any proof of it were wanting, it might be found in the fact that these spirit-manifestations are even by Judge Preston himself identified with those which have always been opposed to Christianity, and by it pronounced Satanic; and by the further fact, that they teach as truth the principal doctrines which the movement party of the day oppose to the Gospel. Take the doctrines set forth by the Seer Davis, those which you find in the Shekinah, and even in Judge Preston’s own book, and you find them in substance the prevailing infidelity of the times, dressed out in a spiritual garb. I have very good reasons for knowing that these spirit-manifestations have been started for the very purpose of overthrowing Christianity by means of an infidel superstition. The prime mover had precisely this object, and no other.”
“We have,” said the Judge, “only your word for that. I regard these phenomena from God.”
“So the devil wishes you to regard them, for he seeks, by means of them, to carry on his war against the Christian’s God, and to get himself worshipped as God,” said I.
“The devil,” said Mr. Merton, “can go only the length of his chain, and that chain is much shorter than it was in old heathen times. He can do only what he is permitted, and it is very possible that what he is now doing will turn out to his signal discomfiture. It will give a serious blow to the materialism and Sadducism of the age, lead men to believe in the reality of the spirit-world, and when that is done, they will have made one step towards believing in Christ. The age is so infirm as to deny the existence of the devil; and even becoming able to believe once more in the reality of his Satanic majesty, will be a symptom, slight though it may be, of convalescence.”
“We,” remarked the Judge, “are no Sadducees. We believe in both angel and spirit, in good angels and bad angels.”
“That is something,” said Mr. Merton; “and, if you open your hearts, and keep them open to the light, you may in time believe more, and escape the meshes in which Satan has now entangled you. Your great mistake is in supposing that these good and bad angels are departed souls. I do not say that departed souls may not revisit the earth; they have done so, and they may continue to do so, but the human soul never becomes an angel or a demon. It is all very well to say of a departed dear one, he or she is an angel in heaven, but taken literally, it is never true. In the resurrection, our Lord says the just are like the angels of God, in the respect that they are neither male nor female, and neither marry nor are given in marriage, but he does not say that they are angels; and the Scriptures distinguish between the company of the angels and the spirits of just men made perfect. Men were created a little lower than the angels, and they are of a different order. The demons or devils are not wicked souls separated from their bodies, and wandering on this or the other side of the dark-flowing Acheron, but the angels who kept not their first estate, and were cast out of heaven.
“These fallen angels, under their chief, Lucifer or Satan, carry on their rebellion against God by seeking to seduce men from their allegiance to their rightful sovereign. They can and do invade men, because they are superior to men, and are malicious enough to do it. But the good angels never do it, for they work not by violence, but by moral, persuasive, peaceful, and gentle influences; and human souls cannot do it, for the strong keepeth the house till a stronger comes and binds him. Nothing remains then, my dear Judge, but to regard these spirit-manifestations, in so far as real, as the invasions of Satan, as produced, not by good angels or departed souls, but by the fallen angels, called demons by the Gentiles, and therefore, all these mysterious phenomena, in so far as they are not produced by natural agencies, as sheer deviltry. This is the only conclusion to which I, as a Christian philosopher, can come respecting them.”
