GLEANINGS IN THE CORN FIELDS OF

SPIRITUALISM.

By WILLIAM HOWITT.

No. I.

AN APOLOGY FOR FAITH IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

"Tous pensent, personne n'ose dire. Pourquoi ? Le courage manque donc ? Oui, mais pourquoi manque t' il ? Parce que la verité trouvée n'est pas assez nette encore; il faut qu'elle brille en sa lumière, pour qu'on se devoue pour elle. Elle éclate enfin, lumineuse, dans un génie, et elle le rend heroique, elle l'embrase de dévouement d'amour et de sacrifice. Elle le place sur son cœur, et va à travers les lions."-MICHELET.

IN my papers in the Spiritual Telegraph, on the wonderful story of the Prophets of the Cevennes, I endeavoured to demonstrate that, though there may be from time to time, more es traordinary manifestations of the influence of the spiritual world operating on the incarnated world, "the principle is universal, and belonging to all times and all nations, as essentially a part of God's economy in his education of the human race as the rising and setting of the sun. I have alluded to many points of this in both ancient and modern history, and I am of opinion that one of the greatest works, which Spiritualists can do, is to bring forward the scattered evidences of this great fact: to clear them from the rubbish with which time and prejudice has surrounded them; and to gradually fill in the circle of these, till it stands complete and conspicuous beyond the power of indifference to overlook, or of interest to ignore. Every one in the course of his reading can render some service to this cause: every one can bring some brick, or stone, or piece of timber to the building of this temple of a great truth. The facts in question lie scattered over the whole wilderness of history. Some in Pagan and some in Christian records; some prior to Christianity; some in religions collateral with it; some amongst the ancient fathers; some in the middle, and others in recent ages. What would be a gigantic undertaking for any individual, may become extremely easy to a number, and I invite Spiritualists to put their hands to the work according to their several tracks of reading. The "TRUTH-SEEKER' has done already eminent service in this field, and I trust will do much more; but it will require many Truth-Seekers to range over the whole field of the world, over classical, mediæval, and modern ground, before the grand circle of ages and nations is filled in.”

Since writing that, every day has further convinced me of the great fact thus asserted. There is no part of human history, or human literature which does not abound in the plainest demonstrations of this influence. We find it in almost every book we open: we have it in the Scriptures from the first page to the last; from the Creation to Christ, a period of four thousand years. We have it in all contemporary literature; in the Grecian, the Roman, the Egyptian, the Persian, the Indian, and the Arabian. It glows in the Zenda-Vesta; it stands mountainhigh in the Vedas; Buddhu lives in it in divine reverie. Brahma proclaims it in his Avatas; it is the very life-blood of the Scandinavian Eddas. There

All succeeds to the will,
Because the Odreijer
Now have descended
To the old, holy earth.

If we go into nations that never had a literature, this eternal truth is walking there in all its strength. The American Indians, north and south, had it ages before the white man arrived. The Red Men felt the inspirations of the Great Spirit in their forests, and spoke as inspired by it at their councils. They declared that the angels of the Great Spirit walked as friends amongst their ancestors. The Mexicans prophesied of a people coming in a ship from the East to take from them their long-possessed Sovereignty. The Australian natives refuse to go out at night because then, they think, the powers of darkness are in the ascendant. The Obi of the Africans speaks the same language. The conviction of the permanent contiguity of the spiritual presses on the earth-walls of humanity wherever spirit lives.

Passing from the Bible to the book containing the finest writings next to the Bible, the Apocrypha, we find the same great principle taking its easy natural stand as a perpetual agent in human history. Josephus takes it up with the same sober assurance as he takes up his pen. We have the miraculous deeds of the Maccabees: we have the grand apparition of the fiery horse and horseman, and the radiant youths who punished the intrusion of Heliodorus into the Temple of Jerusalem. We have the inspired harbinger of woe, and the dread apparitions and prodigies of the siege of the sacred city. The fathers of the church received the miraculous as part of their gospel heritage. The Christian church -Roman, Grecian and Waldensian-never for a moment doubted the superhuman demonstrations of their religion. Every page of their several histories is freighted with the miraculous. Let anyone read the story of the Greek church, and of the ancient and never secularized church of the Waldenses. Let anyone read the two massy volumes of the Rev. Alban Butler, of the

could

History of the Saints, and the four volumes of Newman's History of the English Saints; and add to them the Legends of the Saints, by Mrs. Jameson. In these the perpetual stream of miracle flows without a ruffle of doubt. We have pious men and pious women in all ages curing diseases, quenching the violence of fires, walking on waters, raising the dead, as matters belonging to the life and business of Christianity. Has Rome, for secular purposes, invented or falsified some of these things? Probably. But what then of the Waldenses who had no worldly purpose? And are we to believe that most holy men of all ages-men who sought no earthly advantage or glory, and shunned no suffering or shame, are combined in a monstrous lie which every age confute? In this respect Rome only goes with every other church and every other record. And finally, we have this doctrine of spiritual protrusion maintained by the great leaders of Protestantism: by Luther, Melancthon, Calvin, Martyn Bucer, Erasmus, Knox; by some of the greatest bishops of the Anglican church; by the church itself in its collect for St. Michael and all Angels; by the founders of every school of dissent; by foreign teachers and philosophers: Oberlin, Böhmé, Swedenborg, Zchokke, Lavater, Stilling, Kerner, &c.; and by the most eminent of the great modern poets and philosophers: Milton, Bacon, Dante, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, &c., &c.

Thus, then, all times and regions, and greatly gifted and inspired men, held firmly in their several ages and places by the golden chain of Spiritualism, which we now too grasp. It is the great dogma of the universe; it is that "voice of God close whispering within" of Homer, which rebels impatiently against the sophism which would banish ethereal companionship from this material sphere. True, there have been in many ages a sprinkling of Sadducees, a little knot of spiritually-crippled men, as there have been bodily-crippled ones; but the grand total of the healthy world have felt the ever unrelaxed grasp of life from the invisible that surrounds us. It is only since Hobbes and Tindal and Hume, and their continental disciples the Illuminati of Germany and the Encyclopèdists of France, whose faith in nofaith culminated in the French Revolution, that the torpedo-touch of Sadduceeism has been able to enter into education, and to paralyze the science, theology, and literature of an age.

Can this endure? Impossible! The might of all nature, the momentum of all man's history is against it. As well might we expect an eclipse to become permanent; the cholera or the plague to rage for ever. The natural condition of humanity is alliance with the spiritual: the anti-spiritual is but an epidemic—a disease. Come, then, let us see the truth in the face of nature, and confirm our souls in its universality. Let us stroll through the

wide corn fields of Spiritualism. Let us lift our eyes and see that they are white for harvest. There are immensities of grain garnered in its barns, the libraries, that those who will may thresh out. There are too, standing crops-some green, some yet milky in the ear, some golden for the sickle-that we may wander amongst; and as we draw the awned ears through our hands, hear the larks, the poets of all ages, carolling above our heads. Hear Hesiod singing of

Aerial spirits, by great Jove designed
To be on earth the guardians of mankind.

Hear Homer tell us that

In similitude of strangers, oft

The gods, who can with ease all shapes assume,
Repair to populous cities.

We will sit by reedy brooks in the sunshine, whilst the embattled wheat rustles in our ears, and Socrates shall bid us, as he did Phaedo, "not to be inferior to swans in respect to divination, who, when they must needs die, though they have been used to sing before, sing then more than ever, rejoicing that they are about to depart to that deity whose servants they are. But men, through their own fear of death, belie the swans too, and say that they, lamenting their death, sing their last song through grief; and they do not consider that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold, or is afflicted with any other pain, not even the nightingale, or swallow, or the hoopoes, which they say sing lamenting through grief. But neither do these birds appear to me to sing through sorrow, nor yet do swans; but, in my opinion, belonging to Apollo, they are prophetic, and perceiving the blessings of Hades, they sing and rejoice on that day more excellently than at any preceding time. I, too, consider myself to be a fellow-servant of the swans, and sacred to the same god, and I have received the power of divination from our common master no less than they, and I do not depart from this life with less spirits than they.

We will hear Plato in his Euthyphron, speaking of the antispiritualists of his day :-" Me, too, when I say anything in the public assembly concerning divine things, and predict to them what is going to happen, they ridicule as mad; and although nothing that I have predicted has not turned out to be true, yet they envy all such men as we are. However we ought not to heed them, but pursue our own course.' We will stand with "Ruth amid the alien corn" of other lands, and the great Boaz of the field, the master-spirit of the world, shall bid his young men drop us handfuls as they reap. In these alien yet kindred fields, Dante shall give us marvellous passages from his Vita Nuova; Ariosto shall enchant us with miracles in woods and deserts; and

Boccaccio mingle the marvellous with stories of chivalrous and city life. Schiller and even the world-man, Göethe, shall open glimpses into the swarming regions of those who " are not dead, but gone before." We will have a day with Fenelon and Pascal in the monastic glades and amid the cloisters of old France. For the present, however, let us say a few words on the difficulties of Faith to men built up like enclosed knights and nuns of old, in the hollow walls of a one-eyed education.

เ

In the lesser work of Townshend, on Mesmerism, we find the following anecdote :-" A doctor of Antwerp was allowed at a séance to impose his own tests, the object of which was to demonstrate vision by abnormal means. He said beforehand, If the somnambulist tells me what is in my pocket, I will believe.' The patient having entered into somnambulism, was asked by him the question, What is in my pocket?' She immediately replied, A case of lancets.' It is true,' said the doctor, somewhat startled,' but the young lady may know that I am of the medical profession, and that I am likely to carry lancets, and this may be a guess; but if she will tell me the number of the lancets in the case, I will believe.' The number of lancets was told. The sceptic still said, 'I cannot yet believe; but if the form of the case is accurately described, I must yield to conviction.' The form of the case was accurately described. This is certainly very singular,' said the doctor, very, indeed; but still I cannot believe. But if the young lady can tell me the colour of the velvet that lines the case that contains the lancets, I really must believe.' The question being put, the young lady directly said, The colour is dark blue.' And the doctor allowed that she was right; yet he went away repeating,' Very curious, still I cannot believe!'"

Nor could the doctor have believed had he received an amount of evidence as large as the cathedral of Antwerp. How can a stone man move? How can a petrified man believe? And the scientific, as a class, are petrified by their education in the unspiritual principles of the last generation. These principles are the residuum of the atheistic and material school of the French Revolution. The atheism is disavowed, but the disbelieving leaven remains, and will long remain. It will cling to the scientific like a death-pall, and totally disqualify them for independent research into the internal nature of man, and of his properties and prospects as an immortal being. This education has sealed up their spiritual eye, and left them only their physical one. They They are as utterly disqualified for psychological research as a blind man for physical research. They are greatly to be pitied, for they are in a wretchedly maimed and deplorable condition. It is not from them that we have to hope for any