CHAPTER IX.
THE CONSPIRACY.
I slept late the next morning, and it was the middle of the forenoon before I awoke. I arose, made my toilette, drank a cup of coffee, and went to arrange my future plans with Priscilla. I found her sad and apprehensive. She was a true woman, and had no misgivings as to the excellence of the cause she had espoused, but she feared that the conversations of the previous evening might have disheartened me, and made me change my resolution. I set her mind at rest on this point, and assured her that, though I might often change my methods of effecting a resolution once taken, yet nothing could prevent my persistence in it but an absolute conviction of its wickedness, or its absolute impossibility. I had wedded myself to the spirit of the age for better or for worse, and would, if need be, devote myself body and soul to the cause of World-Reform.
On hearing me say this, her face brightened up, and shone with a radiance I had never seen it wear before. She seemed perfectly happy, and turned to me with a look of perfect satisfaction. I will not say that at that moment I had not forgotten the lady’s husband, and I will not pretend to say what words of misplaced tenderness might have been uttered or responded to, if we had been left to ourselves. She was young, beautiful, fascinating, and I was a man in the prime of life. Happily, as the interview was becoming dangerous, Mr. Merton was announced. This young man, who seemed to have thought beyond his years, had deeply interested me the previous evening. I knew not who he was, whence he came, or why he associated with persons with whom he seemed to have very little sympathy. He was evidently a gentleman, and well educated. His dress was rich but plain, his manners were simple and unpretending. He was tall and well proportioned, with a classical head, a high, broad forehead, large, black eyes, and very thick, dark hair. His features were open and manly, and his voice low, rich, and musical. It was a pleasure to hear him speak. His name was English, but he seemed to be of foreign descent, although I afterwards learned that he was an American, and even a New Englander, but bred and educated abroad. He apologized for calling, but he could not refrain from paying his respects to his fair and amiable hostess of the evening. He hoped that she had enjoyed herself with her guests, and that she had suffered no inconvenience from the heat of the rooms occasioned by so great a crowd. He was most happy also to meet me. He had heard of me, knew and highly esteemed some of my friends, and regretted that he had not previously had the honor of making my acquaintance.
He was requested to be seated, and assured that his call was most agreeable, and that we both hoped to meet him often and cultivate a further acquaintance. The conversation ran on for some time in an easy natural way, on a variety of general topics, till Priscilla, whose soul was absorbed in her philanthropic projects, asked Mr. Merton how it happened that she had the pleasure of meeting him so often among reformers. “You evidently,” said she, “are not of us. The quiet remarks, sometimes serious, sometimes sarcastic, which you every now-and-then make, prove that you have no sympathy with us.”
“I am not surprised, my dear Madam, at your question,” replied Mr. Merton, “yet I too am a reformer, in my way, perhaps not precisely in your way, nor on so large a scale as that on which you and your friends propose to carry on reform. I have not the talent, nor the disposition to engage in any thing so magnificent. I think reform, like charity, should begin at home.”
“But not end there,” said I.
“Certainly not,” he replied; “certainly not with those who have leisure and means to carry it further. But I find that it is more than I can do, by my unassisted efforts, to reform myself, and if I can succeed in saving my own soul, I shall be quite contented. It is, I fear, more than I shall be able to do.”
“I see, sir, you are no philanthropist,” said Priscilla.
“Perhaps not, I am comparatively a young man, but am quite old-fashioned in many of my notions.”
“One of those, I dare say, who have eyes only in the back side of their heads, and live only among tombs,” said I, in a tone between jesting and earnest.
“I have not yet sufficiently mastered the wisdom of antiquity to be authorized to cry out against it,” he replied. “I make no doubt, however, but you, dear lady, and you my learned friend, are quite competent to reject the old wisdom for the new.”
“On the contrary, I am inclined to think that my present tendency is to reject the new for the old, the modern for the ancient. Or, rather, it seems to me that the progress of modern science is rapidly and surely leading us back to the ancient wisdom.”
“There were in the old world, as there are in the modern, two wisdoms, the wisdom from above, and the wisdom from below. May I be permitted to ask to which of these you regard modern science as conducting?”
“There has been in regard to these ancient wisdoms,” said Priscilla, “much misconception. The world in its nonage was imposed upon, and induced to call evil good and good evil. The wisdom I assume, and am laboring to diffuse, is that which the priests have branded as Satanic. Satan is my hero. He was a bold and daring rebel, and the first to set the example of resistance to despotism, and to assert unbounded freedom. For this all the priests, all rulers, despots, all who would hold their brethren in bondage, have cursed him. I take his part, and hope to live to see his memory vindicated, and amends made for the wrong which has been done him.”
“That is a candid avowal, my fair lady, and one which we seldom, especially among your sex, hear made. I suspect, that Madame Priscilla has listened or will listen to the modern spiritualism, which seems to me to be a revival of demonic worship. May I entreat you, dear lady, to pause and reconsider the conclusion to which you have come? The ancient Gentiles deserted the true God, the Creator of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible, and followed strange gods, erected their temples and consecrated their altars to devils, to fallen spirits, and I need not tell you how their minds became darkened, and their hearts corrupted. Do not, I entreat you, seek to revive the gross, cruel, and obscene superstitions of the ancient Gentiles, and on which Christianity has made an unrelenting war from the first.”
“I was sure, Mr. Merton, you were a parson. Will you deny it now?” said Priscilla.
“I am not aware that I have said any thing but what any honest Christian or fair-minded man, who really wishes well to his fellow beings, and who has read history, might not very well say. It is not necessary to be a parson, I should hope, in order to have good sense and good feeling.”
“I do not see, Mr. Merton,” said I, “any tendency to superstition in modern spiritualism. Superstition is in charging to supernatural intervention what is explicable on natural principles.”
“That is one form of superstition,” replied Mr. Merton, “but there is another, which consists in ascribing effects to inadequate causes, as where one augurs good luck from seeing the new moon over his right shoulder, or bad luck if on the day he sets out on his travels a red squirrel crosses his path. But I interrupt you.”
“I believe the spirits which are evoked in our days are real, but that they are the primal forces of nature, and that it is on strictly natural principles that they are called to our aid,” I resumed. “There is no superstition in this.”
“It is not improbable that the ancient Gentiles thought as much. I am by no means disposed to ascribe all the phenomena of mesmerism, table-turning, and spiritual rapping to superhuman or preternatural agency. Satan can affect us only through the natural, but through that he may carry us beyond or drag us below nature. I believe mesmerism, strictly speaking, is natural, but I believe also that its practice is always dangerous, and that it throws its subjects under the power of Satan. In the so-called mesmeric phenomena there are those which are natural, and those which are Satanic, although in the present state of our science it may not be easy in all cases to distinguish between them.”
Here the conversation, which was beginning to interest me, (for I had a lurking suspicion that Mr. Merton was right,) was interrupted by the entrance of Signor Urbini, who gave unequivocal signs that the presence of Mr. Merton was very disagreeable to him. Mr. Merton, probably not wishing to encounter young Italy, or to enter into a contest with him at that time, after a few commonplace remarks, took his leave. Young Italy was full of fire and enthusiasm, but at the same time, well informed, subtile, and clear-headed. He had been implicated in a conspiracy for overthrowing the Austrian government in Milan, and had escaped to England, where he had concerted with the friends of Italy a plan for revolutionizing the whole peninsula. He had come to the United States to enlist as large a portion of our own people as possible on his side, and to obtain pecuniary aid in carrying out his revolutionary projects. For himself be had no religion, and feared neither God nor the devil. At heart, as does every Italian liberal, he despised Protestantism, as a religion; but his chief reliance was on Protestant nations, and he made a skilful and adroit appeal to the Protestant hatred of Popery. Italy was the stronghold of Popery, and if Italy could be wrested from the Pope, the whole fabric of superstition and priestcraft would fall to the ground. But this could not be done by any direct attacks on the national religion, or any direct advocacy of the doctrines of the Reformation. Out of Italy the appeal might be made to the Protestant feeling, but in Italy, and by all the leaders of the Italian party it must be made solely to the national sentiment as against Austria, and to the love of liberty, the democratic sentiment, as against the Pope and the native princes. War must be made on the Pope indeed, but ostensibly on him only as temporal prince. Overthrown as temporal prince, and his States declared a Republic, and maintained as such, the church, as the upholder of tyranny on the Continent, would be annihilated, and universal democracy, and a purely democratic religion could be established throughout the world; and civilization, arrested by the Goths and Vandals, who overturned the old Roman Empire, might resume its triumphant march through the ages. Plans were forming to make the democratic revolution as nearly simultaneous as possible in France, Austria, Prussia, and Central Germany; at least to give these countries sufficient employment at home to render them unable to go to the assistance of the Pope.
Subsidiary to his purpose, he proposed a grand World’s Convention, composed of delegates from the whole Protestant world, to be holden as soon as possible at London. It might be assembled ostensibly for the purpose of bringing about a better feeling and closer union of the various Protestant sects, and none but those who could be safely trusted should be initiated into its ulterior objects. Only the managers need know its real purpose, or _modus operandi_. It might form a Protestant Alliance, and recommend the formation of Protestant associations in all Protestant States for the protection of the Reformation against Popery, the conversion of the Pope and his Italian subjects. These associations would have nothing to do but to raise funds, and meet once a year, hear reports, and listen to flaming speeches in praise of the Bible and religious liberty, and against the tyranny, idolatry, and superstition of Popery. Thus they would, without knowing it, prepare the way and furnish the means of driving the foreigner out of Italy, dethroning the Pope, establishing the Roman Republic, and spreading liberty throughout the world, and in a way, too, not to alarm the religious sensibilities of the Italians, because those who showed themselves to Italians would have apparently no connection with the Protestant movement.[2]
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Footnote 2:
This is in the main historical, and was communicated to the writer through a mutual friend, by a delegate from Connecticut to the World’s Convention, alluded to in the text.
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The plan of Young Italy, communicated with further details, and which was substantially carried out from 1845 to 1849, when, contrary to all human foresight, Republican—not Imperial—France suppressed the Roman Republic, and restored the Pope, struck Priscilla and myself as admirable, and we resolved to give it our hearty support. I hoped, by the new power I had discovered, or was on the point of discovering, to bring an unexpected force to its aid. The Signor accepted our pledges, enrolled our names, administered to us the oath, and gave us the signs and passwords agreed upon by the government of Young Italy.
When Signor Urbini had taken his leave of us, we, that is, Priscilla and myself, came to a mutual understanding of the respective parts we were to perform. We agreed that it was useless for either to attempt any thing without the other. Our covenant was sealed. Poor Priscilla, little did she foresee what the future had in store for her! But let me not anticipate. We embraced, and I returned to my lodgings, intending to leave the next day for my home in western New York. Hardly had I regained my lodgings at the hotel, when I was called upon by the stanch old puritan, Mr. Cotton. I have departed far enough from the stand-point of my puritan ancestors, and have few traces in my moral constitution of my puritan descent; but, I care not who knows it, I am proud of these stern old men, the Bradfords, the Brewsters, the Hookers, the Davenports, and the stout Miles Standish, who came forth into a new world to battle with the wilderness, the savage, and the devil. Stern they were, stout-hearted, and strong of arm, yet not without a touch of human feeling. They had their loves, their affections, and their soft moments, when Jonathan or Ezekiel wooed his Beulah or his Keziah, who blushingly responded to his addresses, and the husband kissed his wife, the mother her boy, if it was not on the Sabbath. Honor to their memory! They did man’s work, and earned man’s wages, and as well might one of the modern Trasteverini blush for his old Roman progenitors, as I for my old puritan ancestors, who brought with them the bravest hearts and the best laws and the noblest institutions of old England, which they loved so tenderly, though she sent them forth as the Patriarch’s wife did Hagar and the dear Ismael into the desert. I liked Mr. Cotton, too, for his great ancestor’s sake, for great, O Cotton Mather, thou wast in thy day; hard service didst thou against fiends and witches, and powers invisible; and a noble epic hast thou left us in thy Magnalia. The college thou lovedst so well, and which thou didst cherish in thy heart of hearts, “_pro Christo et Ecclesia_,” may have ceased to cherish thy memory, and the Second Church, over which thou wast pastor as colleague with thy father, has learned to blush at thy memory, and to imagine it shows its wisdom in calling thee a “learned fool.” I, who have as little sympathy with them as with thee, honor thee as one of the worthies of my country, and as one who was not the least among the worthies of my native land in thy day and generation. Men look upon thee as antiquated, and fancy that they have become wiser than thou wast. Would to Heaven they had a little of thy good sense, and of the truth, which thou wast not ashamed to profess and defend!
But this is quite aside from my purpose, and is artistically considered a blemish in my narrative. But few are the writers who, if they speak out from warm hearts their true, deep, genuine feelings as they arise, but will violate some canon of art. I love art, but I love nature more. I love a smoothly shaven lawn; I say nothing against your artificial garden, trim and neat, where each plant and shrub grows and flowers according to rule; but the wild forest, with its irregularities, decaying logs, huge trees, fresh saplings, and tangled underbrush, was as a boy, when it was my home, and is now I am a man, much more my delight. By the same token, I love Boston, whose streets were laid out by the cows going through the brushwood to drink, where you cannot find a square corner, or a street a hundred yards in length without a curve, better than the city of Penn, laid out by a carpenter’s line and chalk, and presenting only the dull monotony of the chess-board, without the excitement of the game. Yet the city of Penn has its merits. Many a pleasant hour have I spent there, and many a sweet association is entwined in my memory with its rectangles, and its plain, uniform, drab-colored costume. But I have left Mr. Cotton all this time standing. It was unintentional, for I was not displeased to see him. He knew me as the son of an old friend, and he had, both as a friend and as a minister of religion, called to expostulate with me. He was sure that I was imperilling my soul, and he could not answer it to his conscience, if he did not solemnly and yet affectionately warn me of my danger.
I have been sadly remiss in my faith and in my conduct, yet never have I allowed myself to treat with scorn or contumely any professed minister of religion who addressed me in tones of sincerity and affectionate earnestness. Mr. Cotton, I was sure, meant well, although I knew his expostulations would avail nothing, and his warning be unheeded. I listened with respect, but untouched. At that time my heart was hard. I was laboring under a perfect delusion, and body and soul were under the power of the Evil One. “You may not believe it, Doctor,” said Mr. Cotton, “but I tell you that you are forming a league with the devil. I know you have grown wiser than your fathers were; that you deny the existence of a devil or of evil spirits, but you are wise only in your own conceit, and you are now really dealing with the devil, are plotting to do the devil’s work, under pretence of science and world-reform. I have watched you these many months, and I see where you are going. You are also permitting yourself to be seduced by a Moabitish woman, and allowing yourself to be cheated, with your eyes open, out of your five senses by the sparkle of her eye, and the ruby of her lip. Why have you suffered her to bewitch you? Leave her, never see her or speak to her again, or you are a lost man.”
I am naturally a very mild-tempered man, and am not and never was very sensitive to wounds inflicted by the tongue; and Mr. Cotton might have abused me or said all manner of hard things against me till he was exhausted, and I could have remained unmoved; but when he alluded to my relation with another, especially since I could not defend it, and called the beautiful, the lovely, the philanthropic Priscilla a Moabitish woman, and attacked her honor, my blood was up, and I instantly resolved that he should suffer for it. I however kept this to myself, assured him that he was uncharitable, and judged an estimable lady rashly; that my relations with Priscilla were not precisely a matter for his cognizance, as we were neither of us under his parochial charge. I respected him as an old friend of my father’s, and as a descendant of one of the greatest men of the early Massachusetts Colony. I had no doubt of his good intentions, and affectionate interest in me and my family; but I was of age, and competent to take care of myself. What I was doing I was doing with my eyes open, calmly, deliberately, and from what I held to be justifiable motives. I was prepared to take the responsibility. Warnings, expostulations, would avail nothing. I was resolved to push my scientific investigations to the furthest limits possible. I would, if I should be able, wrest from nature her last secret, and avail myself of all her mysterious forces. I did not pretend to say whether there were devils and evil spirits or not, although I believed God made all things good, very good; but if there were, I had nothing to do with them, for I invoked mysterious agencies only for a good end, in the cause of philanthropy and human progress. If they were spirits I was dealing with, they must be white spirits rather than black; and if I studied and even practised magic, I was sure it was not black magic, but white.
“All that is very well said,” replied Mr. Cotton, “and yet you know that you are carried away by indiscreet curiosity, by an unholy ambition, and perhaps by lawless lust, and you dare not, alone in your closet, ask the blessing of God on your proceedings. Bear with me. I am an old man, and let my gray hairs plead with you, if not my sacred profession. I know that the young men of our time lose their reverence for religion, and turn up their noses in profound disgust when we speak to them of duty and the solemn responsibilities of life. I know they are impatient of restraint, and burning with a passion for liberty, as they call it. I know they deem it wisdom to depart from the old ways, to forsake the God of their fathers, and to hew out to themselves cisterns, alas, broken cisterns, which will hold no water. But let me tell you, my friend, that they are only sowing the seeds of future sorrow, and will reap only a too abundant harvest. No man in his old age ever regretted that he feared God and practised virtue in his youth.”
“All that may be very true, Mr. Cotton, but much of it comes with no good grace from a Puritan who has allowed himself the freedom of his own judgment in religious matters. It is not long since your fathers forsook their fathers’ God, and hewed out cisterns for themselves; whether broken cisterns or not, it is not for me to say; certainly they departed from the old ways, followed the new wisdom of their times, and you honor them for it. Perhaps posterity will in like manner honor me and my associates for daring to follow the new wisdom of our times, and to incur reproach for my adhesion to the work of human emancipation. I am enlarging the boundaries of human knowledge, laying open to view the invisible world, and proving that, under the old doctrine of the communion of saints, there is a great and glorious truth, cheering and consoling to us in this life of labor and sorrow. I am freeing the world from the monster, superstition, and delivering the people from their gloomy fears and terrible apprehensions. They shall no longer start and tremble at ghosts and hobgoblins, or be obliged, with the Papists, to cross themselves, or with our New England youth, to whistle Yankee Doodle to keep their courage up, when, after dark, they go by a graveyard. What torture did not my superstitious fears cause me in my childhood! I never have known what it was to fear any living thing. I have been tried, and have always found my courage and self-possession equal to the occasion, and I could alone face an armed host without trembling; but even now I cannot open the door into a dark room without trepidation, without starting back till reason comes to my aid. I never sit alone in my room reading till twelve o’clock at night, without having a mysterious awe creep over me. I am oppressed by the presence of the invisible, and my very lamp seems to burn blue. All is the sad effect of the frights I received in my childhood, occasioned by the ghost and witch stories which old people would meet together and tell of a long winter’s evening. I, a lad, listened with ears erect, and hair standing on end. My blood seemed to freeze in my veins, and I dared not look around me lest I should see the invisible. I was ready to shriek with agony when sent to bed in the dark, and unless watched would throw myself into bed without taking off my clothes, and cover up my head and face in the bed blanket. How terrible was the dark! The impression wears not out with time, and will remain till death. Now I would free the mind from all these idle fears, and save the people, especially children, from these terrible sufferings. It is a good work, and none but white spirits will aid me in it.”
“Alas! you seem not to have reflected that the devil, when he would seduce, can disguise himself as an angel of light. Human nature is terribly corrupt, and yet the great mass of mankind ordinarily are incapable of choosing evil, for the reason that it is evil. Evil must be presented to them in the guise of good, or they will not choose it The devil knows this, and knows the weak side of every one, and he adapts his temptations accordingly. The weak side of our age is a morbid sentimentality, a sickly philanthropy, and the devil tempts us now by appealing to our dominant weakness. He comes to us as a philanthropist, and his mouth full of fine sentiments, and he proposes only what we are already prepared to approve. Were he to come as the devil _in propria persona_, and tell us precisely who and what he is, there are very few who would not say, ‘Get behind me, Satan.’ Nothing better serves his purpose than to have us deny his existence; to ascribe his influence to imagination, hallucination, to natural causes or influences, or in fine, to good spirits, for then he throws us off our guard, and can operate without being easily detected. Never was an age more under his influence than our own, and yet they who pass for its lights and chiefs have reached that last infirmity of unbelief, the denial of the existence of the devil. Possessed persons are insane, epileptic, or lunatic persons, and the wonderful phenomena they exhibit are produced by an electric, magnetic, or odic fluid, and are to be explained on natural principles, and such as cannot be so explained, are boldly denied, however well attested, or ascribed to jugglery, knavery, or collusion. The marvellous answers of the ancient oracles are ascribed to knavery, as if the whole world had lost their senses, and could not detect a cheat practised before their very eyes, and so bunglingly, that we who live two thousand or three thousand years after, ignorant of all the circumstances of the case, can detect it, and explain how it was done, without the slightest difficulty. The devil laughs at this. He would have it so. Your natural explanations will hereafter create a suspicion that you are little better than natural fools. But go your way. I see by your incredulous smile that the devil has you fast in his grip. I have done my duty. My garments are clean of your blood; and hereafter, when you are feeling the gnawings of that worm which never dies, and the burning of that fire which is never quenched, say not, that no one had forewarned you.”
So saying, he took up his hat and cane, and, slightly bowing, left my room without hearing a word in reply, or giving me a parting greeting. When he was gone, I laughed to myself at his solemn admonition, and renewed my resolution that he should suffer for the manner in which he alluded to my dear Priscilla. He should know whether she was a Moabitish woman or not. Warn me! Pray what had I done? Where was the harm? Was it wrong to investigate the principles of nature, to learn what nature really is, and to call her forces into play, providing they were not applied to a bad end? Could it be a good spirit that would debar us from acquiring science, or a bad spirit that would bid us inquire, to learn our strength, and to use it? Would it be no slight service to relieve the more mysterious parts of science from the reproaches cast upon them? Has it not been computed that more than a million of persons alone suffered as sorcerers and sorceresses, or for dealing with the devil, in the sixteenth century and seventeenth alone? What injury has not been done to genuine science by the absurd legislation against magic, sorcery, and the so called black arts generally. No man could rise above the vulgar herd, and produce some ingenious piece of mechanism, but the rabble accused him of magic, and it was lucky if he escaped a criminal prosecution and conviction before the courts of justice. Was not that noble heroine, Joan of Arc, who saved France from becoming an English province, burnt as a witch? Was not Friar Bacon, the father of modern science, and the forerunner of his namesake of Verulam, accused of magic, imprisoned, and thus scientific discoveries and useful inventions postponed for centuries? Had not hundreds of old women, who had nothing of sorcery about them but their poverty, weakness, and imbecility, been dragged before the courts, and hung or burnt as witches? What more lamentable page in our own American history than that of Salem witchcraft? Is it nothing to disabuse the world, to save so many innocent victims, remove so great a hinderance to science and heroic deeds, by bringing the class of facts, superstitiously interpreted, within the bounds of nature and legitimate science? Then, again, what may not be finally obtained for the human race? Are the resources of nature exhausted? They sought once the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life, the fountain of youth; who knows but these may one day, and that not far distant, be found, if not in the shape sought, in others, more simple and convenient?
Thus I resisted the admonitions of the good old man, and confirmed myself in my resolution. I meditated a long time as to my future procedure, and how I could bring my new science, which I trusted soon to complete, to bear on the great revolutionary movement which the active spirits of the day had concerted, and which must soon break out. I could discern my way only dimly, but I trusted the mist would soon clear away, and my method be no longer obscure or uncertain. Monarchy must be overthrown because it upholds religion, and religion because it upholds monarchy, and imposes vexatious restraints. So much was clear, and determined on. Time and events would reveal the rest.
Late in the evening I called at Priscilla’s, saw her a moment, whispered a word in her ear, gave her one or two directions, pressed her hand, only as my accomplice, and henceforth my slave. The next morning I left Philadelphia, and returned home a much altered man. My body was light and buoyant, and I felt as if I was all spirit. I simply greeted my mother, but felt that the strong tie which bound me to her was broken; my sister, whom I had tenderly loved, was indifferent to me, and I hardly deigned to notice her. I went into my laboratory, saw that all was right there; from that I passed into my library to resume my experiments.