CHAPTER XV.

THE ULTERIOR PROJECT.

It may be asked why I wished Priscilla to return with me, against her will, since I had no passion for her, and respected the honor of her husband. I wished it partly from spite, and partly because it was necessary to my purpose. She had induced me, or had had more influence to induce me than any one else, to embark in a cause which I loathed, and which at the same time I felt myself totally unable to abandon, and I wished to make her suffer with me. Then, again, I could do nothing without an accomplice, and that accomplice a woman. I travelled abroad in the character of a simple American gentleman, not as a mesmerizer, a magician, or one who commands invisible powers. Nobody abroad, or even at home, ever suspected me, unless it was good old Mr. Cotton, of any thing of the sort. In all cases when the mysterious force was to be exerted, as long as she was connected with me, I employed Priscilla as my agent. I gave her my orders, which she, without exciting any suspicion against her or myself, seldom failed to execute to the letter.

Even after her own views and feelings began to change, and she felt the slavery and degradation of her position, she dared not disobey me. She stood in awe of my power, and knew well the merciless punishment that awaited her. Often, often has she begged me, with tears and in the deepest agony, to undo my spell over her, and to let her go free. I would not. Had she not declared her spirit eternally wedded to mine? The truth is, I was half afraid to undo the spell, and emancipate her. She knew too many of my secrets, might expose me, and defeat all my plans; and once freed from me, once restored to the empire of reason, she would feel herself bound in conscience to do so; and when a woman once takes it into her head to act from conscience, she is, whether she have a good or a false conscience, as unmanageable as if she were in love. She is as headstrong under conscience as under passion, and of course absolutely uncontrollable, because in either case she uses her reason simply in the service of her feelings. Then, again, I did not like accepting a new accomplice.

Priscilla, not daring to resist, finally persuaded her husband to consent to return home. We crossed the Channel to England, and hastened to embark at Liverpool on board a steamer for New York. We had a stormy passage, and came near being cast away; but at length arrived in port, and soon found ourselves in Philadelphia, after an absence of six years and six months amidst scenes and events of the most exciting character. We were all changed in looks, but still more in feelings. The fire of our enthusiasm was extinct, the freshness and sanguine hopes of youth had fled forever; our labor had been in vain, and there was no bright or cheering prospect before us. I took my leave of Priscilla at the public-house where we stopped. When I saw her faded cheek, her sunken eye and withered form, the wrinkles gathering on her brow, and heard her, in a broken voice, renew her oft-repeated request, and remembered what she was some ten or twelve years before, and thought of what I was too at that time, and what I was now, I had a touch of human feeling, and pressing her hand to my lips—I had not the heart to refuse—I told her I would consider it, perhaps I would, and hurried out of the room, to conceal my emotion, not sorry, after all, to find that I had not wholly ceased to be human.

The next day, I started for my home in Western New York. Home, alas! no longer. The house was desolate. During my prolonged absence, my mother and my only sister had died, and all my family were gone. My library and my laboratory remained as I had left them. They had no charms for me now. I looked out upon the familiar scenes of my childhood; they seemed changed all, and were tame and listless. I met some companions of my earlier life; there was nothing in common between them and me. Their voices sounded strange, and grated on my ears. The sad conviction, for the first time in my life, forced itself upon me, that I was alone, and deeply I felt my loneness. I had lost my childhood’s faith, which, though meagre and but a shadow, yet was something. I had no Father in heaven, no brother or sister on earth. I believed in neither angel nor spirit. All existence, all being, had dwindled into one invisible, elemental, impersonal Force, which indeed I could wield, but to what end?

In my loneness, I felt that the vulgar belief in the devil, in ghosts, and goblins damned, would be a solace. They would be something, and any thing is better than nothing. Better is a living dog than a dead lion. Alas, I had sold myself, and my redemption was far off. Strange enough, I felt something like passion revive in my guilty breast. I felt, I even regretted Priscilla’s absence; and it seemed that she was dear to me, and that I could not endure life without her. I pictured her to myself as I had first known her, and I wept as I remembered how for long years I had enslaved her. A voice whispered in my heart, emancipate her. A momentary feeling of generosity possessed me. I summoned her, as I knew how, to my presence. She appeared, instantaneously.

“Priscilla,” said I, “I am sad and weary. Life has lost its charms for me, and I care not how soon I die. I have nothing to live for. You are a wife and a mother. I absolve you from your pact; be free; return, and devote yourself to your husband, who is worthy of you, and to your boy. I have, and will no longer have, power over you.”

A gleam of joy spread over her face, a smile of gratitude played on her lips, and a look of love shot from her eyes, and the place where she stood was vacant. She had vanished; but a chattering, as of a thousand mocking voices, filled my room, and then impish, mocking faces were seen all around, making mouths at me. I cared not for these. I silenced the former, and sent away the latter with a word. I retained my magic force still. But there was joy as well as sorrow in that house in Arch street, Philadelphia. Priscilla, the day of returning to her own house, had been taken ill; her husband was alarmed, and called a physician, who could understand nothing of her case. She grew worse and worse; and during the time I had summoned her to me, she fell into a sort of stupor, a complete trance, and to all except her husband, who had seen her in that state before, and knew that she was subject to trances, she seemed to be dead. The moment I had absolved her, she came to herself, a sweet smile on her face, with the hue of perfect health. She arose in bed, embraced her husband with a warmth and sincerity of affection which he had never before known, and for the first time since his birth looked upon her boy with the glad joy of a mother’s heart. But at this moment her husband was more to her than her babe. She hung on his neck, she pressed him to her heart, she half-smothered him with kisses, spoke in the terms and tones of the tenderest and sweetest affection, and it seemed as if she would pour out upon him, in a single moment, the loaded affections of a lifetime. “My dear husband, you must forget and forgive the past. I am yours, yours now, yours alone; heart, soul, and body, forever. The spell is broken. The delusion is gone; take me, take me, dear James, to your heart.”

James was a man. He had been dazzled by the beauty and accomplishments of Priscilla, and thought it enough to be accepted as her husband, without much scrutiny into the state of her affections. She had, for a moment, imposed upon him, and he had accepted her notions of woman’s rights, philanthropy, and world reform. But he did not lack good sense; he had even a strong mind, firm principles at bottom, and all the elements of an upright, manly character. A few months’ practical experience served to cure him of a good deal of his philanthropy, and to damp the ardor of his zeal for reform. He was, of course, displeased with my intimacy with Priscilla, and he owed me, it must be owned, no good will. But his observation pretty soon satisfied him, that whatever the bond of that intimacy, it was not what directly affected his honor as a husband, and he resolved that he would seem not to regard it. It was a bitter trial to him.

His tour abroad, his observation, and his conversations with gentlemen and ladies, not always of our clique, had opened his eyes to many things, and made him a stanch conservative. He abandoned all the loose notions he had previously entertained, renounced his Quaker quietism, and had become sincerely converted to a real objective Christian faith. His first thought and care were to reclaim his wife, and, if possible, to release her from the mysterious power which I seemed to have over her. He found her as anxious to be released as he was to release her, and he thought he discovered in her, at times, a growing affection for himself. It was a difficult case to manage, but he thought it best to be prudent and discreet, and to avoid every thing that could excite remark, or that he himself might afterwards regret.

Feeling now that he had himself not been entirely free from blame, that he was bound to be forgiving, that Priscilla was really his wife, the mother of his child, and that she probably was freed, though he knew not how, and did now really love him, he responded with a warmth nearly equal to her own, to her strong expressions of love, frankly forgave her all, and pressed her to his heart as his own, his truly beloved wife. It was for both the happiest moment they had ever known, and in that one moment James seemed to have been compensated for his patience, forbearance, and suffering, for so many years.

Priscilla immediately regained her health and cheerfulness, and resolved, if possible, to recover me from the bondage in which she knew I was held. How she sped in this, and what new trials, if any, awaited her, will appear as I proceed in my narrative.

My own feeling of loneness, of desolation, was not relieved by my release of the woman I had so long held spell-bound, but was aggravated by the constant annoyance of a passion which I had seldom before experienced, or which, without much trouble, I had always been able to subdue. As Priscilla became purified and less unworthy of her husband, and as she seemed the more completely to have escaped me and to be lost to me forever, the more did I feel that I could not live without her, and the more impossible did I find it quietly to endure her absence. I was mad. I called her. The charm was broken, and she came not; I saw only a vague, undefined form, flit before my eyes, and heard only a wild mocking laugh.

Weeks passed, but they seemed ages. Priscilla, in all her loveliness, in all her gracefulness and dignity, in all the brilliancy of youth and beauty, was constantly present to my morbid fancy by day, and to my dreams at night. I was completely unmanned,—wept now as a child over a lost toy, or now raved as a madman. I could not eat, I could not sleep. I could endure it no longer. I sold my house and furniture, disposed of my laboratory and scientific apparatus, packed up my library, and resolved that henceforth I would take up my residence in Philadelphia.

I had no sooner established myself in my new home, than I called in Arch street to see Priscilla. Instead of her I found James. He received me civilly, even kindly, conversed with me of what we had seen abroad, but Priscilla did not appear. No matter, I would call again. Did so; saw Priscilla only in presence of her husband. She was looking well, was affectionate in her tone and manner, but offered me not her hand, and seemed to take care that I should not so much as touch her dress. Well, said I to myself, be it so. The weakness shall last no longer. I will be myself again, and resume the project I had contemplated. I went home, not cured, but resolved, and immediately commenced my evocation, and communicated my orders to all the circles I had established throughout Europe.

I have already hinted what this new project was. It was clear to me, from my historical reading and my personal observations amid the exciting scenes of the more recent European revolutions, that the grand support of social order, and what I have somewhere called the system of restraint and repression, is Christianity, and that the political and social reformers can never fully carry out their reforms till they have totally rooted out from modern society all belief in the Gospel, and all peculiar reverence for its Author. This is more than hinted by Mazzini and Kossuth, although the latter is a vice-president of the American Bible Society, boldly avowed by M. Proudhon, and stoutly contended for by the German Turnverein and Freimänner. If you concede the Christian idea of God, says Proudhon, you must at once and forever abandon your idea of liberty.

It was equally clear to me, that the attempt, by means of political organizations, and revolutions directed against the papacy, or any church organization, Catholic or Protestant, to root out Christianity from the hearts of the people, must at last prove a failure. After all, there is a natural religiosity in man, and though he will often restrain and mortify it, and act only in view of purely secular ends,—practically live as if there were no God, and no hereafter,—he will almost always return to the order of religious ideas, and adopt or institute some kind of religious worship to which he will subordinate his political ideas, and his secular ends. An Epicurus may deny Providence, a Lucretius may sing, in no mean poetry, that it is impossible, “_revocare defunctos_,” and even Cicero may laugh at augurs and aruspices, and doubt the immortality of the soul, yet the sentiment of an invisible Force, of a mysterious Power that overshadows us, is universal, and the sceptical philosopher feels an indefinable shudder of awe, perhaps of fear, whenever he finds himself alone in the dark. Everywhere the shades of Acheron wander or flit around and before him.

Even in the midst of our pleasures the thought of the invisible and the supernal intrude unbidden to mar our festivities, and to dash our joy with an indefinable sadness, shame, and remorse. Even a Voltaire trembles and blasphemes in dying, at the thought of being denied Christian burial, and a Volney, who resolves God into blind Nature, and Christianity into astrology or astronomy, prays lustily to the God he disowns, in a storm on Lake Erie. Do what we will, we cannot divest ourselves of the belief or apprehension of invisible powers, who hold our destiny in their hands; and a people absolutely without any religion, or at least superstition, is never to be found.

Never had unbelievers a fairer chance for rooting out Christianity by political and social revolutions, than in the eighteenth century. The laugh was everywhere against religion and the clergy, a decided materialistic and infidel philosophy pervaded literature, possessed the schools, ruled in the courts, and domineered over thought and intellect. There was lukewarmness in the religious, there were scandals among the clergy, there were abuses in the state, and therefore an imperious call for reform. The reformers directed all their movements against religion, and their means were democratic and social revolution. They were strong, they were overwhelming in their power. At their bidding, down went throne and altar, and in ten years the religion they had abolished was reëstablished, the churches they had closed were reopened at the order of the soldier they had made their chief, and for democracy in the state they had an incipient Cæsarism, which, two years later, became a fully developed and perfect Cæsarism. The same result had followed our own movement. In January, 1850, religion was far more vigorous in Europe, than in January, 1840, and democracy at a far greater discount.

It was idle, then, to hope either to destroy political and social authority in the name of absolute unbelief and irreligion, or to root out Christianity by political and social movements. Christianity could be eradicated only by means of a rival religion, and a religion which could appeal to a supernatural origin, and sustain itself by prodigies, or what the vulgar would regard as miracles. I had suspected this from the beginning, and resolved now, that instead of working with the purely secular passions of men, I would make my appeal to their religiosity. Mahomet, in the seventh century, had done this admirably for his time and the East, but had incautiously fixed his superstition in the Koran, and made it unalterable, and therefore incapable of adapting itself to the new face which things might assume in the vicissitude of events, the development of society, and the progress of the race.

Swedenborg had done better, and so had Joe Smith, but neither had sufficiently provided for the progressiveness of the race, or with sufficient explicitness consecrated the principle of innovation and change, and both had retained too many conceptions taken from the old religion. Yet Swedenborg was to be taken as our starting point, and we were only to avoid his mistakes, the principal of which was a too strict and rigid church organization.

When I returned from Europe, I found the directions I had given, before going abroad, had been pretty faithfully followed; and mesmeric revelations, through Andrew Jackson Davis, and spiritual communications, through the Foxes, were beginning to attract public attention. The spirits were becoming exceedingly anxious to communicate, and made, as it was supposed, many important revelations. In a few months, spiritual knockings were becoming quite common, and mediums were found in all parts of the country. At first, intercourse with the spirits was obtained only in the somnambulic state, or through the slow and toilsome medium of raps, but at the same time intimations and assurances were given that before a great while a more easy and direct method of communication would be vouchsafed; but, as yet, the public and individuals were not prepared for that more direct method. The spirits were willing, but the mediums were not sufficiently advanced, nor sufficiently spiritualized; and the public was too gross, too materialistic, and too sceptical. As soon as minds should become more refined, spiritual, and believing, open vision would be permitted them, and easy and regular communication would be established, and whoever wished would have as free and familiar intercourse with the spirit-world as with the world of the flesh.

At first the great object was to establish the reality of the spiritual communications. This was to be done by the communication of secrets, either known only to the interrogator, or incapable of being known to the medium in any ordinary human or natural way. Sometimes the spirits played the part of fortune-tellers; sometimes they assumed to be prophets, and ventured to predict future events, but always events which either depended on them, or lay in the natural order, and which a knowledge of natural causes and effects could easily enable them to foresee.

As the spiritual intercourse extended, and believers multiplied, the somnambulic and rapping mediums ceased to be the only mediums. The artificial somnambulic mediums, or mesmerized mediums, disappeared almost wholly, and to the rapping mediums were added writing mediums and speaking mediums, and in some instances the spirits became actually visible to the seers, and telegraphed their messages by visible symbols, and occasionally in words. Spiritual telegraphing, in some one or all these ways, became, in a few months, common in all parts of the country; and, at the expiration of two years, there were three hundred spiritual circles or clubs in the single city of Philadelphia, and more than half a million of believers in the United States. The epidemic had broken out in the North of England and Wales, had spread all over Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and Northern and Central Germany, penetrated France in all directions, and made its appearance even at Rome. In France and Italy, where the population is either profoundly Christian or profoundly infidel, the spiritual manifestation had to adopt more discreet and less startling forms than in our own and some other countries, and to give place at first to doubt whether it was not mere trickery, or explicable on recognized scientific principles; and confined itself, to a great extent, to the phenomena of table-turning, which excited curiosity without alarming conscience. In France, in the most polished, fashionable, and, I may almost say, most Catholic society, table-turning became an amusement.

The next point to be attended to, was the doctrines, the philosophy or religion, that the spirits were to teach. It would not do to attack the Gospel too openly, and it was necessary to undermine, rather than to bombard it. In some respects even, it was advisable to seem to confirm, as it were by one rising from the dead, some portions of Christian belief,—such as the immortality of the soul, and the reality of an invisible spirit-world. The latter was doubted by the free-thinkers; but it was essential to my project that the free-thinkers, in this respect, should be converted, for their conversion and acknowledgment of belief in God and a spirit-world would do much to commend our spiritualism to a large body of silly and ill-informed Christian believers, who, seeing such apparently good effects resulting from it, would conclude that there could be nothing bad in it. By their fruits shall ye know them.

In the American community, to a very great extent, the belief in the immortality of the soul is supposed to be identical with the belief in the resurrection of the dead, taught by Christianity; and our Unitarians, with their rationalistic erudition, very generally hold that the peculiar and distinctive doctrine taught by our Lord was the immortality of the soul. But the immortality of the soul was believed by the whole ancient world, Gentile as well as Jewish; and, though questioned by some ancient and modern sophists, there never has been found a people who, as a body, were ignorant of it, or that denied it. All the ancient, as all modern superstitions recognize it. All believe the soul is imperishable, though many suppose it will be absorbed in the Great Fountain of Life, as a drop in the ocean—a misinterpretation of the Christian doctrine of union with God in the Light of Glory, as the ultimate end or final beatitude of the just. The doubt was as to the body, or the _umbra_, the material envelope and companion and external medium of the soul in this life. The gross outward body they believed returned to dust, and mingled with its kindred elements; but this _umbra_, shade, the manes of the dead, which all antiquity carefully distinguished from the soul, was also, for the most part, believed to be imperishable; but its reunion with the soul, I do not find the heathen world ever clearly asserting. In other words, the ancient heathen world, though it retained the primitive belief in the immortality of the soul, had lost belief in the resurrection of the body, and the reunion of soul and body, or at least only retained some traces of it in their doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls.

The peculiar Christian doctrine, or the doctrine so insisted on by the Apostles, was not the immortality of the soul, which was always presupposed, but the resurrection of the dead, the return to life, not of that which had not ceased to live, but of that which had died, to wit, the body. Hence the article in the Apostles’ Creed is not, I believe the immortality of the soul, but, I believe the resurrection of the body, _resurrectionem carnis_, the resurrection of the flesh; and to this belief, it must be remarked, that the spirit-manifestations afford no confirmation, and indeed they virtually contradict it.

The distinguishing trait of Christian morality is charity, which is distinguished from philanthropy or benevolence, as a supernaturally infused virtue is distinguished from a mere human sentiment, but, in the minds of but too many of those who call themselves Christians, really confounded with it. The spirits were then, under the name of charity, to teach a philanthropic, sentimental, and purely human morality, for in doing so, they would seem to the mass of superficial Christians to be confirming the distinctive trait of Christian morality, and at the same time appealing to the morbid spirit of the age.

Bald, naked Universalism is not popular; but there is a very general disbelief, among the leading men of the times, in the old orthodox doctrines of heaven and hell, of the last judgment, the everlasting punishment of the wicked, or that our eternal state is fixed by that in which we die. Swedenborg had greatly modified these doctrines, and taught that the punishment of the wicked is purely negative; that men are in hell only inasmuch as they are not in harmony with God; and not to be in harmony with God, that is, good, is to be out of the Divine protection, and exposed to all the sufferings incident to our abandonment to the natural order of things. He had also recognized different heavens, rising one above another, and different hells, one below another; and had hinted or asserted the possibility of the inhabitants of each improving, and advancing in wisdom and virtue, by their intercourse with the inhabitants of this world. He had himself even instructed angels, and assisted feeble and undeveloped souls. Here were the germs of all that was required. The spirits were to teach that there are different circles in the other world, into which souls are admitted according to their respective tastes and degrees of development, with the chance to rise in due time, if faithful, from the lowest to the highest. In the lower circles, they are improved by intercourse with us, as we are ourselves improved by intercourse with spirits of the higher circle.

The dominant doctrine of our age is that of progress; that the universe started from certain rude and imperfect beginnings, and, by a continued series of developments and transformations, is eternally advancing towards perfection, without however reaching it; and that man, beginning, if not in the oyster or the tadpole, at least in a feeble and helpless infancy, develops and advances towards perfect manhood. This doctrine, which a few facts in natural history, in geology, and anthropology, at first sight seem to favor, is at bottom wholly repugnant to the Christian doctrine of a fixed creed, of final repose or beatitude in God, of final causes, and the final consummation of all things. So the spirits are to accept it, systematize it, and propose, as the highest reward of virtue, to be placed on the plane of eternal progression.

The age is indifferent, syncretic, and disposed to accept all religions and superstitions as true under certain aspects, and as false under others, and to pronounce one about as good and about as bad as another. The spirits, therefore, make no direct war on any of them. In some places they teach that the Catholic Church is the truest and best of prevailing religions, but that Protestantism is nevertheless a safe way of salvation, and that the spirits do not, in the other world, think so much about differences of churches and creeds, as they did when in this world. In other places they teach that the Catholic Church is false; that it is wicked, the enemy of moral and social progress, and that effectual means should be taken to prevent its extension in the United States. They do not deny the Bible, nor affirm its inspiration, but take, to a great extent, the neological view of it, conceding it to be truthful in many respects, but maintaining it to be unreliable in others. It was very well when men had nothing better, and no surer means of information in regard to the spirit-world.

Such is a brief outline of the new religion, which was intended to supplant Christianity, and to open the way for that “good time a coming,” for which all our philanthropists and reformers are looking, as any one may satisfy himself by reading the _Shekinah_, the _Spiritual Telegraph_, or Judge Edmands’s work, from the prolific press of Partridge & Brittan, New York. This new religion, which, indeed, contains nothing new, and which it certainly needed no ghost from the other world to teach or to suggest, would amount to very little if promulgated on mere human authority, unsupported by any prodigies, mysterious or marvellous facts; but, communicated mysteriously from alleged denizens of another world, bearing the imposing names of William Penn, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, assumes in the minds of the vulgar a high importance, and can hardly fail to be regarded as overriding Moses and the prophets, our Lord and his Apostles. It strikes at the foundation of Christianity itself, and once accepted, it will seem to have a directness and a completeness of evidence that will entirely set aside, in the minds of the spiritualists, that in favor of the Gospel. This is what I intended, and what I hoped.

Having set the so-called spirits in motion, and through them set afloat a system which I fancied would supplant Christianity, whether in its Catholic or its sounder Protestant forms, my work seemed done, and I could retire from my labors. My superintendence was no longer necessary, and whether the agents I employed were really the spirits or souls of the dead, as they themselves asserted, or mere elemental forces of nature, as I was inclined to believe or had wished to persuade myself, became to me a question of no interest. The work would go on of itself now, and in a few years Christianity and the Church would be undermined and fall of themselves. Then monarchy, aristocracy, republicanism, all forms of civil government, would crumble to pieces, and universal freedom, leaving every one to believe and do what seems right in his own eyes, will be realized, and all here, as well as those not here, will be placed on the plane of eternal progression—progression towards—what?