I had, almost from the first, suspected Mr. Merton’s conclusion, and should never for a moment have doubted it, had I not grown up in the disbelief of evil spirits. Science, or what passes for science, had long denied all supernatural and all superhuman intervention in the affairs of mankind; and I, like the majority of my contemporaries, had grown up a complete Epicurean. There was, perhaps, a God who had created the world, but having created it, and impressed upon it certain fixed and invariable laws, he left it to take care of itself. I denied his providence, or, what is the same thing, resolved it into the uniform and inflexible laws of nature, and like my friends of the French Eclectic school, saw the Divine intervention only in the necessary and immutable elements of human history. God was for me simply Fate, Invincible Necessity, and therefore no free person, no object of reverence, love, or worship.
Having excluded Providence, I necessarily rejected the ministry of angels. I resolved all nature into a collection of forces operative by intrinsic and necessary laws. Man is one of these forces, neither the strongest nor the weakest. In his own intrinsic strength he is not much, but by placing himself in a right position with regard to the other forces of nature, he may make them work in him and for him, and thus increase his strength by the whole of theirs, as the millwright makes use of the force of the stream to turn his mill, the inventor of the magnetic telegraph of the lightning to convey his messages, or as the sailor avails himself of the wind to propel his ship.
Belief in the free or voluntary intervention of the Divinity in human affairs, I had been taught by received science to regard as superstition. Religion, Christian or Mahometan, Jewish or Pagan, inasmuch as it always presupposes the supernatural, or the intervention of God extra naturam, or otherwise than in and through the laws of nature, was superstition. The ministry of angels was superstition. The assertion of Satanic interposition was, beyond all doubt, superstition. The facts which had led to the supposition of Divine providence, and of the ministry of good and evil angels, were, no doubt, real; but ignorant of the laws of nature, men had misinterpreted them, and assigned them causes which are unreal. All religion has, I said, its origin in ignorance, and necessarily recedes as science advances. Hence I felt that it would be only a proof of my ignorance and superstition to ascribe the mysterious phenomena to any spiritual or supernatural agency.
Even after the explanations of Mr. Merton, and after my reason was silenced, I was unwilling to abandon my prejudices, and accept his conclusion. What, should I, in this nineteenth century, in this age of genuine science, which has done so much to roll back the clouds and dissipate the darkness which enveloped past ages, consent to adopt the vulgar belief of the sixteenth century, when men were but just escaping from the thraldom of Romanism—of the thirteenth century, when they were but just beginning to emerge from barbarism—of the first century, when still buried in the night of heathenism? My pride of science, my pride of intellect, revolted at the thought. What ridicule would not be showered upon me by the wits and free-thinkers of the age, should it be known, or even suspected!
I hesitated long, for I saw at once, that if I admitted the existence and influence of Satan, I must go farther, and concede the Christian mysteries. I must abandon liberal Christianity, deny the supposed progress of recent times in religious notions, and return to old-fashioned orthodoxy. Perhaps I should find it necessary to go even further back than the orthodoxy of my own country. This was no pleasant thought. To unlearn all I had learned, to regard all my most cherished convictions as so many delusions, to become in reality as a little child, and to commence life anew, as Jesus Christ taught we must do, if we would enter into the kingdom of heaven, was too humiliating to be contemplated with pleasure even on my dying bed, and when the world was fast disappearing from my view. What would have been the result of my internal struggle, if I had been left wholly to myself, I will not pretend to say. But I was not so left. Mr. Merton was with me almost daily, and seemed always to read my thoughts before I expressed them, and to comprehend my difficulties.
“Your great mistake,” said he to me one day, when the subject came up, “is in supposing that religion is the offspring of ignorance, and stands opposed to science. Your assumption that man began in ignorance, and has attained to science only by long and patient research and laborious experiment, is at best gratuitous. Some things, of course, have been acquired only in process of time. Man has made progress in the knowledge of all that which he himself has done, or has suffered; but nothing requires you to assume that his progress in knowledge is any thing more than progress in the knowledge of his own doing and suffering. It is not likely that Adam knew the history of the battle of Pharsalia, of Hastings, Bovines, or Waterloo; it is not probable that he was acquainted with the steam-engine, the cotton-gin, the spinning-jenny, the power-loom, or the lightning telegraph. But he may have received from his Maker, as religion teaches, a knowledge of the nature and causes of things, and of his moral relations and duties, equal to that possessed by the most enlightened of his posterity.
“Historically considered,” proceeded Mr. Merton, “the earliest belief of mankind was the existence, unity, and free providence of God—a belief in strict accordance with the deductions of genuine science in every age. Every language under heaven bears indelible traces of that belief, and would be unintelligible, absolutely insignificant, if it were denied. Yet all languages are radically one and the same, and must, in some form, have been given supernaturally to man, for man speaks only as he has learned to speak; and it would have required language to invent language.”
“But if all languages are radically the same, how do you explain their manifest differences?” I asked.
“That is a question which I leave to the philologists; but they, I believe, very easily prove that these differences are not radical, and that they are due principally to the differences of pursuits, of circumstances, temperaments, and pronunciation of different tribes having little or no intercourse with one another. However great or small they may be, or whatever their causes, it has been proved that they are only modifications of one and the same original tongue.”
“But you know,” said I, “that religion is progressive, and that the earliest religion of mankind was a gross fetichism, a worship of animals and inanimate things. From that gross superstition we can trace its gradual purification and progress towards the sublime monotheism of Moses, Socrates, Plato, and Jesus, moulded by the Church fathers into Christian theology.”
“I know no such thing,” replied Mr. Merton, “and St. Paul, who was a good philosopher as well as an inspired apostle, tells us that men left the true God to worship creeping things and four-footed beasts. The monotheism you speak of is historically older than the fetichism of which you would make it a development. What you are pleased to call the monotheism of Moses, was older than that lawgiver. Moses, under Divine inspiration and direction, founded the Jewish state, or commonwealth, and instituted the Jewish worship, but he did not introduce a new faith or theology. The faith or doctrine he taught concerning God and moral duty, was that of the old patriarchs, and the same which had been held from Adam. Christian faith and theology have come down to us through the line of the patriarchs and the Jews, not through that of the Gentiles, and, if a development at all, is not a development of heathenism, but of the earlier patriarchal religion preserved in the synagogue. Hence St. Augustine says, that faith has not changed; as believed the fathers, so we believe—only they believed in a Christ who was to come, and we believe in a Christ who has come.
“Then, again, the monotheism, if monotheism it was, of Socrates and Plato, was not a development or gradual purification of fetichism or of the gross forms of nature-worship. They themselves tell you as much, and always claim to be restorers, not innovators. In asserting the unity of God, they profess always to revive the belief or the wisdom of the ancients. No one can have studied the various forms of heathenism without finding in them ample evidence that they are not primitive formations. They all bear witness to a type which is not in themselves—a type from which they have departed, not a type which they are approaching or realizing. They bear the deep traces of corruption, and are evidently travesties of the old patriarchal or primitive religion, without a knowledge of which they are absolutely inexplicable. The memory of the loss of its primitive perfection, all heathenism retains in its heart. All heathenism is imprinted with profound grief for a lost good, and never does it show signs of a true joy. There is sadness in all its rites, gay and joyous as it tries to make them. Its joy is a drunken joy, and its boisterous mirth is the wild laugh of the maniac. But over the whole of heathenism, even in its grossest forms, there hovers always the primitive monotheism. It retains always some reminiscence of the belief in one supreme God, Father of gods and men. Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, and others, acquainted with the Jewish belief, and meditating on this reminiscence, undoubtedly rose to sublimer and more rational views of the Divinity than those which were entertained by the vulgar; but this says nothing in favor of that gradual development and purification of heathenism, which you and a well known modern school assert, and assert without one single fact to support you.
“You must rely on history,” continued Mr. Merton, “for your theory professes to be historical, and to sustain itself by facts. But history has been tolerably authentic for some thousands of years. How happens it, if your theory be correct, that we find no instance of this gradual development and purification of heathenism? In all the cases where the history can be traced, it is undeniable that the purest or the least deformed state of any heathen superstition is its earliest; and the grossest, the most corrupt and revolting, is always its latest. Nothing in this world ever reforms itself, and the inevitable tendency of all error, as of all vice, is from bad to worse. Compare the popular religion of Rome under the kings, with the popular religion under the pagan emperors, and you will find this proved.
“Indeed, my friend, your whole theory is false. Never yet has religion receded before the advance of true science, and religion, as you well say, has always asserted the supernatural, the interposition of God in human affairs, extra naturam. Always, too, has it asserted the existence of good and bad angels, and their intervention on the one hand by Divine command, and on the other by Divine permission, in the affairs of mankind. This belief of all ages is itself a phenomenon to be explained, accounted for; and you will find it impossible to explain it, or account for it, without admitting its substantial truth. Men may err in supposing a supernatural or superhuman intervention where none takes place, and undoubtedly they have so erred time and again; but they could not have so erred if they had not already had the idea or belief of such interposition. Whence comes that idea or belief? If that is false, explain whence comes the general error before the particular? A general à priori error is impossible. All error is in the misapplication of truth. A general error is nothing but a generalization by way of induction of particular errors, or misapplications of truth to particulars, and is therefore necessarily subsequent to them. If there were in reality no true religion, there could be no false religion, as if there were no genuine, there could be no counterfeit coin. Always is the true prior to the false; and how then could mankind come to assert a false supernatural interposition, if they had no prior belief in a true supernatural interposition, or believe in such an interposition, if no such interposition had ever taken place?”
“But how will you clear this belief in Satanic interposition from the charge of superstition?” I asked.
“Superstition, my friend, is a word oftener used,” replied Mr. Merton, “than understood. The heathen religions were all superstitions, I grant, because they all ascribed effects to unreal or inadequate causes. To believe in the existence of good and bad angels is not superstition, if good and bad angels really exist, any more than it is to believe in the existence of men and women, horses or oxen. Where there is no error, there is no superstition. Suppose a fairy really to exist, there is no superstition in believing the fact. Suppose the ministry of angels to be a fact, there is nothing superstitious, unreasonable, or unscientific in believing it, or in ascribing to that ministry real effects. Suppose fallen angels or wicked spirits do really exist, do really tempt us, and by Divine permission, do really besiege or possess us, there is no superstition in believing it, in taking the proper precautions against them, or the proper measures to disperse or expel them. If the real origin of the phenomena we have been considering is diabolical, nothing is more reasonable than to believe it; and to ascribe them to natural causes, would be unscientific, and itself a sort of superstition. Undoubtedly, the spirit-rappers, or spiritualists, as they call themselves, are superstitious. What they call spiritualism is rank superstition, because they believe the phenomena are produced by the shades or spirits of the dead, and the word superstition was originally used, I believe, to imply a belief in, and a dread of, the influence of the departed on the living; but to ascribe them to fallen angels, if such they are, is no superstition at all, for then they are ascribed to an adequate cause, and to their real cause.
“There are two opposite errors,” concluded Mr. Merton, “both equally hostile to religion and to good sense,—superstition and irreligion. Each is an abuse, as the schoolmen say, an excess in a contrary direction; and unhappily, the tendency of most men is to one or the other. Nothing is more certain than that in every age much superstition has been connected with the doctrine I have contended for.”
“That,” said I, “is what makes me dread and hesitate to accept it.”
“I know,” Mr. Merton replied, “all that you would say on that score. I have myself read history, and, no less than you, been shocked by its abuses. But there is no truth that cannot be or that has not been abused. I am as much opposed to these abuses as you are. It will not do to suppose that every event a little out of the range of our ordinary experience, is a miracle, or effected, if good, by Angelic, if bad, by Satanic agency. Every time a murrain prevails among the cattle, it will not do to ascribe it to sorcery, or when the butter will not come, to lay the blame upon Robin Goodfellow. The tendency to do so is undoubtedly a superstitious tendency. But the contrary, or Sadducean tendency, to believe in neither angel nor spirit, is even more dangerous. I do not believe every tale of witchcraft I hear, and I am slow to believe in actual Satanic invasion in any particular case that may be alleged. The Church has always asserted the possibility of such invasion, but she does not permit a resort to exorcism on every apparent instance of it. She demands previous consultation, long examination, and the judgment of the most rigid science. While the greatest caution should be exercised as to every case of supposed actual Satanic invasion, we should guard equally against running into the contrary error of denying that such invasion ever takes place. An unreasonable scepticism is as far removed from true wisdom and virtue, as an unreasonable belief. Modern science is sceptical; and it is more important just now to guard against scepticism and its irreligion, than it is to guard against superstition.
“Yet we deceive ourselves, if we suppose that the scepticism of science has penetrated far into the popular mind, even in our own country. Science can never root out popular superstitions. While the few laugh at the superstition of the vulgar, that superstition, though modified perhaps as to its forms, continues to thrive, and attains, not unfrequently, even a more vigorous growth. The old popular superstitions, brought hither by our ancestors, still live in the heart of the people, and in forms as gross and as revolting as in the seventeenth century. Superstition is cured, not by a sceptical science, denying altogether the spirit-world, but by religion, which, while it recognizes that world, teaches us to draw accurately the line of demarcation between genuine and counterfeit spirit-manifestations. The people cannot live in absolute irreligion; and where they have not religion, they will have superstition. The tendency of modern science is to destroy all religious faith, and therefore to promote, indirectly, the very evil it proposes to cure,—the common effect of all unbaptized science, as of all unbaptized philanthropy.”
“There is some truth in that, I must own,” I remarked. “I know not why it is so, but every effort made, although with the purest and best intentions in the world, outside of Christianity, seem always to fail, or to end only in aggravating the very evils they were intended to cure. There is less real liberty in France to-day than there was before the meeting of the States-General in May, 1789. The revolutions which, during the last sixty or seventy years, have so terribly raged on European soil, though made in behalf of liberty or of popular representation, have resulted only in depriving each nation in which they have taken place of its former too feeble checks on power, and in rendering the monarchy more absolute. The same may be said in principle of all our efforts at philanthropic reform on a smaller scale.”
“Undoubtedly,” replied Mr. Merton; “and the reason is, that the glory of whatever is good is due to God, and he will suffer no plans to succeed that would rob him of his due. He has himself given us his law, and provided us the means of salvation, temporal and eternal; and whosoever seeks salvation by any other means, or in contempt of that law, must fail, and shamefully fail.”
