The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 3, March, 1864

But assume, on the contrary, that the prediction is essentially well founded; that we have before us, in the immediate future, a period of extreme exhaustion, depression, and even of temporary discouragement in the public mind. All this need not, to the philosophic mind, cause the slightest apprehension of permanent evil results—of any serious check even, to our inevitable destiny, as the heirs of unbounded prosperity and the leaders of the vanguard of the progress of the world. A halt, in this sense, in the rapidity of our career, would be only the necessary price of our immense and invaluable achievement, the elimination of chattel slavery from the constitution of our social and political life. We have still other and great social evils remaining behind. The scientific and harmonious adjustment of the relations of capital to labor, of the employers to the employed, in the constitution of our free competitive society as it will still remain after Slavery is dead, is the next great practical question which will force itself upon our attention, and insist upon being definitively settled, before we can enter upon that ulterior triumphant national development which is reserved, in the decrees of destiny, for us as a people. This problem, seemingly so difficult, will be found unexpectedly easy of solution, so soon as the thinking and practical mind of the people is seriously called to its consideration. It is worthy of observation, that periods of great pecuniary depression are favorable to the progress of ideas. It is written in the Providence of God that the American people must, within the few years to come, solve the whole problem of justice to the laboring man; must, indeed, accept its office as the Champion and the Illustrator, in a practical way, of Universal Justice, in all the relations of life. Are we prepared to enter on this career, intelligently, lovingly, and with voluntary alacrity, from affection to the True and the Good; or must we be again scourged into the consideration of great questions lying immediately in our way, by the providential inflictions of disaster and distress?

We can now see easily enough, that had we been ready and desirous, as a people, to do justice to the black man, we should have escaped the horrors of a great war. We may predict, with the assurance of a religious faith, backed, we might almost affirm, by the certainty of a scientific demonstration, that if we are already sufficiently prepared to be simply just, we shall be saved from the serious infliction of more national suffering; and that if, on the contrary, this preparation of the heart and the head has not been wrought in us by what we have already endured, we shall be called directly and continuously to the suffering of more and perhaps greater inflictions. 'Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,' but not blindly nor uselessly, and not, therefore, after the right frame of mind has been wrought in the subject of the punishment. The law is precisely the same, whether we speak theologically or from the profoundest philosophical principles; and it may almost be said that the American people have only to choose whether they will immediately enter, with the close of the war, upon a higher career of prosperity, or whether they will endure an additional term of tuition in the school of adversity. These words may seem mystical, unaccompanied with further illustration and elaboration of the ideas, but it is not the place here to pursue them.

Let us proceed with the supposition that we have before us, at the conclusion of this war, a period of great national suffering. Such periods, we have already said, are favorable to the development of thought. We may add, they are alike favorable to the growth of earnest purpose. Through suffering we are perfected. Thought and high purpose are secure bases of noble achievement. If we are not yet prepared to be inducted into our national mission, through providential favor, then let us come to it through the inverse method: through Ulterior and Reactionary Consequence.

It may be that we are to endure still more grievous afflictions than pecuniary and commercial revulsion and depression. Our political constitution still bears in its bosom, even after Slavery is removed, dangerous seeds of anarchy and prospective revolution. Within the two years past, grave mutterings, to which American ears have been heretofore altogether unused, have been heard in various quarters, touching the superior advantages of 'strong government,' the speakers, mostly of the higher or wealthier order of life, meaning thereby, the old and retrograde forms of monarchy, or something of that sort. Periods of disaster tend to reveal a latent lack of confidence in the permanency of existing things. Investigations in Sociology impeach the wisdom of our institutions, in common with that of all others that have been tried in the past, from another point of view. Periods of distress and privation stimulate the turbulence of the 'dangerous classes.' All national experience reveals, in fine, the existence, in the very nature of human society, of great antagonistic principles struggling with each other in mighty conflict, and with which no political or governmental arrangements heretofore extant have been adequate rightly to cope.

The great and bloody contest with Slavery, now going on, is an instance of such a conflict; and the fact that we, in the midst of this nineteenth century, had arrived at the knowledge of no better solution of it than an appeal to the old, barbarous, uncertain, and terrible ordeal of battle, is an illustration of the incompetency in question. Slavery, bad as it is, is the representative of a great social principle, which, separated from the special mode of its manifestation, has in it that which is good and right. Mr. Cobden justly characterizes the great American war as an insurrection of aristocracy against the principle of democracy. But aristocracy is not wholly wrong, nor is democracy wholly right, in the nature and constitution of things. These are two great antagonistic principles, when sifted to the bottom; one the principle of Order, through Subordination, the soul of Conservatism; and the other the principle of Freedom, through Individuality, the soul of Progression. Neither will ever expunge or expel the other from the constitution of man, individually or collectively; and it pertains to Science, the Science of Politics, based on the Unity of the Sciences below that level, to be arrived at by humanity in the future, to discover and lead in the complete harmony and reconciliation between the two. The writer of these papers has in manuscript a labored document upon the Slavery question from this more radical and philosophical point of view, which was prepared just previous to the outbreak of the existing war, in the hope of attracting the leading minds, North and South, to the peaceable and scientific solution of the whole Slavery question. But the antagonism was too far advanced, passions too much aroused, the popular ignorance of the existence of higher methods of solution too dense, and the crisis too imminent for the existence of any demand for such considerations then; and the publication of the document was withheld. In it were shown the significance of Slavery as a Fact in History and a Principle in Nature; its Compensations and Advantages; its positive value, in fact, in the larger sense, in the development of human society on the planet; then its destiny to give way in our advancing civilization to the higher doctrine of abstract rights and individual culture through intellectual means; and again, the insufficiency of the latter doctrine, when taken for the whole truth; and finally, to show how, by the intervention of the science of the subject, the value of both the Principles in conflict could be extracted and made coöperative, and their evils completely neutralized. The world not being ripe for the adoption of the superior and rational methods here intimated for the adjustment of our difficulties—the readiness of one party even, without the equal readiness of the other, being inadequate—the crisis and the conflict could not be averted; and that again being the case, it is of the utmost importance that the second in order of the two adverse principles, the principle of democracy, be completely triumphant; not because it is more true, but because it is a more advanced truth, and one step nearer, therefore, to the final solution, which will then lap back, and subsume and assimilate and reconcile the whole family of fundamental principles upon which the existence of human society is inexpugnably based. It is upon this lower ground of adaptation to the exigency of the age and the occasion, and as a means to the development of still higher truths, that we urge the inestimable importance of the effectual conquest over the South by the North.

But the two Principles, thus brought face to face with each other, in deadly array, under the present guise of chattel slavery and republican freedom, are not extinguished in the world, nor in America even, nor are they to be permanently reconciled with each other by any outcoming whatsoever of the present war. These principles are the Aristocratic and the Democratic; the principle of conservative order and progressive freedom. Both are vital and essential forces, ever living, ever active; always antagonistic; never reconciled in the past; never to be reconciled in the future, till it be done finally, effectually, and forever, through the SCIENCE of the subject. By the contingencies of this war still future, by the lingering and disastrous sequelæ of the war, or by other and possible eventualities not yet sufficiently developed to be distinctly cognizable, the inherent and unconquerable antagonism (until reconciled through science) of the great opposing forces in human society is liable to be burst upon us with a conflagration in comparison with which even the devastations of the present war will seem trifling. The writer of these papers anticipated and predicted for a long time, and has not yet fully ceased to anticipate, that the present conflict may gradually shape itself into a desperate and universal struggle, North and South, between these two principles, in their bald, undisguised, and unmitigated hostility; that, in other words, as a party of freedom should be developed at the South, there would be developed pari passu at the North a great reactionary party; assimilating the elements of a bogus democracy and all those who by organization or position are inherently and overweeningly aristocratic; a party bold, powerful, and desperate enough to bring home the civil war to our own doors; in other words, that the war would become a war wholly of Ideas; and those defined down to their sharpest and most ultimate differences of logical significance. In that case, the events of the French Revolution would have been, or will be, repeated in America, on a more gigantic scale. Warning symptoms have already appeared among us of the possibilities of all this. If it be in the good providence of God that we are to escape this terrible ordeal—if it be permitted that this cup of national evils pass from us—it can only be that we are a step farther on in the completion of our education, as a nation, than was obviously revealed to the investigation of the observer; that, as a people, we are nearer to a genial and willing acceptance of truth and obedience to the dictates of justice than appeared.

Still the conflict of principles endures in the world at large—the Aristocratic Principle, represented by autocracy, absolutism, prelacy, and slaveholding authority, on the one hand, and the Democratic Principle, represented by republicanism, Protestantism, dead-levelism, with free and destructive competition, on the other. As Slavery and Freedom have been preparing for their local conflict in America during the thirty years past; so, for the whole century gone by, the threatening cloud of the final conflict between the two great governing ideas in the world has been gathering. Occasional sharp and some terrific encounters have been had. Is this conflict of opinion to become more and more consolidated and defined, and finally embodied in two great hostile camps, covering the whole earth with an actual war, replete with desolation and carnage—not a war of distinct nationalities, but of the partisans of the two great antagonistic drifts of human development? Is there to be literally the great battle of Armageddon in the world before the incoming of a better age? or has the ignorant wrath of man sufficiently prevailed, and are we in truth prepared to investigate with sobriety, accept with simple honesty, and faithfully to practise the lessons of wisdom which the experience of the past or the new discoveries of the present or the future may bring? The religious world is becoming deeply penetrated with the conviction that we are, in the world at large, upon the verge of great events—that we are nearing the termination of an Old Dispensation and the commencement of a New; without, perhaps, defining very clearly, or attempting even to define distinctly to the imagination the nature of the change. The deepest philosophy of the age forecasts similar eventualities for an early day and for the whole earth. Thus it is that the investigation of The Great American Crisis, actual and urgent, might properly lead us up to the consideration of a Great World Crisis, impending and probable. On some other occasion it may be thought proper to give to this latter subject a distinct and more elaborate treatment. The object which we have proposed in the present series is now sufficiently accomplished, and the writer takes leave of the reader, with a profound conviction that to the anxious cry, What of the night? the answer, All is well, can be conscientiously returned. Even should the seemingly disastrous features sketched above in the alternative programme of our national future yet providentially reveal themselves in the scroll of our nation's history, let not the patriot or the lover of mankind for a moment despair. It will be but the intensified darkness preceding the light—the crisis of a deep-seated disease prognosticating health. The destiny of America is the destiny of man; and that is, that we come soon into the inheritance of new glories—an unlimited development and prosperity, founded on Religion married to Science, eventuating in the reconciliation of Order and Progression, in Universal Justice, and in the elevation, protection, mutual coöperation and happiness of all.

THISTLE-DOWN

 
Pale and fleecy, ghosty and white,
Onward borne in their unknown flight—
Flimsy and fragile, pure and fair—
Mystic things the thistles are.
 
 
Drifting about on a windy day—
Ghosty children at their play—
Revelling up above the trees,
Hither and thither on the breeze.
 
 
Slow and sadly, how they fly,
Chasing shadows in the sky!
Never resting, never still,
Through the valley, o'er the hill.
 
 
Walking round o'er the churchyard mould,
Up above the bosoms cold;
Flitting past each marble door,
Sadly breathing: 'Gone before!'
 
 
Spectres wild with their viewless steeds,
Riding on where nothing leads;
Up to the sky when the earth gets brown—
Ever restless thistle-down.
 
 
Through the forest cool and dark,
Never hitting the destined mark;
Over the earth and through the air,
Downy thistles everywhere.
 
 
Darting in at the open door,
Telling of joys that come no more;
Robed in grave clothes fine and thin—
Shades of phantoms, ever dim.
 
 
Up the church-aisles Sabbath-days,
Where the dusky twilight plays;
Round the altar, o'er the bier,
Preaching more than priests do here.
 
 
Solemn are the words they say—
Silent sermons free ofPAY;
And the lessons they impart,
Never vanish from the heart.
 

THE LOVE LUCIFER

[The author of 'The Love Lucifer' says in regard to it: 'I enclose a narration of facts. Not noted for assurance, I yet feel well assured that its publication in The Continental 'will do uses.'' Should there be any among our readers who have inquired into our modern necromancy, they will not fail to recognize in the excited, wild, incoherent, and uncultured jargon of the spirits of 'The Love Lucifer,' the same style and character evinced by those to whom they may have been introduced by the 'mejums.' The two Bulwers, the Howitts, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Halls, the De Morgans, &c., have taken a deep interest in these half-comic, half-serious, and always incoherent demonstrations.

Perhaps the matter-of-fact experience of our author may shield some of our readers from 'obsessions, delusions, magnetic streams of Od,' be they angelic, human, demoniac, or Koboldic in their origin.—Ed. Con.]

CHAPTER I

The things herein might well remain in soak for one decade, at least. The writer certainly did well to let a dozen sane, practical years pass between these experiences and their narration.

I was a youth after the own heart of my Presbyterian preceptors—proposed to become a Presbyterian preceptor. The son of a New York merchant, I was schooled in the schooling of such; and was steadfastly minded to know no life-purpose but the salvation of sinners. But I was a little restive—felt that the limits of the Shorter Catechism were too short and strait for me. The shadow of Schleiermacher's readjustment of Christianity was upon me. I felt that some old things were passing away. In common with so many others who inclined toward the sacerdotal office, I was unconsciously turning my back upon it, on account of the crudities contained in the only existing creeds for which I had any respect. American Protestant youth have not been alone in this regard. Says the London Times, 'The number of men of education and social position who enter into orders is becoming less and less every year.' Let then ancient, true, everlasting Christianity be speedily adjusted to modern facts, lest it further lapse.

Free thoughted, earnestly disposed toward the acquirement and dissemination of absolute spiritual truth, as was not unnatural, I thoroughly investigated the 'Supernaturalism' of the day. I soon assented to the general proposition that sociability with the invisibles is practicable, if not profitable; but ever held at a cheap rate the philosophies and religions, harmonious and other, which the full-blooded ghost-mongers so zealously promulgated. I still maintain that great good will result from these chaotic developments; for instance, that the impartial mind will find in them that scientific foundation for belief in much of the supernaturalism (to repeat the absurd expression) of the Bible, of which the age stands in such woful need. That this generation does experience such a lack is made sufficiently apparent in the 'Essays and Reviews.' On no other point are the noble freemen who therein and thereby grope after the 'readjustment,' so utterly deaf, dumb, halt, and blind, as they are in respect to Scripture miracles. In fact, these writers cast the most wondrous of the actæ sanctorum to the winds. Methinks the more thoughtful and earnest men of Christendom must, then, assent to the proposition that we have pressing need of a new flood of such practical phenomena as sturdy old Baxter gave to the Sadducees of his day, in his 'Certainty of the World of Spirits.' Whether these strange doings gradually cease, or take on new and more striking aspects, I doubt not they will help to give a healthy vigor to our emaciated faith in the existence of an unseen and spiritual world. Let us not, then, utterly scorn the strange rabble who have rushed headlong after this curiousest curiosity of modern times—except the rebellion—even though they may remind us of 'the Queen's ragged regiment of literature.' It should be taken for granted that so startling a novelty would attract the floating scum of society, whether the solid folk heeded or derided it.

Though the following narrative may bring upon me an infinite derision, I have long felt that it should be published, on account of the light it throws upon some of the most mysterious facts of existence. Others may have had similar experiences; but, if so, pride keeps them from confessing how utterly they have been hoodwinked and enslaved by those invisible loafers who form so large a portion of the newcomers and who are permitted—not to put on too fine a point—to do the dirty work of cleansing the modern mind of its gross Augean Sadduceeism. The only theory promotive of self-complacency that I could ever concoct, as to why I was put through such an ordeal, is, that I was suffered for my own and the general benefit to see the dangers of necromancy, and especially the awful psychodynamical methods used by spirits to obsess and gradually craze human brains. I, at least, received a scare that made me careful, ever after, how I called spirits from the vasty deep, or elsewhere. After passing perils manifold, both carnal and spiritual—having gone, torrent-borne, through the yawning chasms represented in Cole's 'Voyage of Life' pictures, I come into calmer seas, the lines fall in pleasant places; and now I sit me down, in life's high noon—having lighted on a certain place where was a den (a pleasanter than Bunyan's)—to write the strange things that befell me in the seeming long ago—the dew and freshness of my youth. And though I be reckoned of many a dreamer of dreams, he shall not, I think, go unprofited, who can rightly 'read my rede.'

To come, then, to the details. I had been for several months, whether wisely or unwisely doth not appear, a link in one of those human chain rings supposed to be as peculiarly receptive of extra and super and ultra mundane facts as a legislative 'ring' is of the loose change of the lobby; and had sought in vain for personal contact with the world to come, when one afternoon a streak of the 'od' lightning suddenly ran down my right arm, as I sat in my private apartment, and behold I was a 'writing mejum.' The usual 'proofs' of relationship were given. Not being very credulous, however, I did not, at first, acknowledge them as such. But as my time was at my own disposal just then, I gave myself up to the influence for several days. The consequence was, that I became so thoroughly mesmerized, or 'biologized,' that I ceased to be complete master of my own faculties, and was forced to give a half assent to all the absurdities that were communicated. Be it understood, then, that these experiences are given as those of a person whose will, whose very soul and proprium had been temporarily subjugated by some other will or wills; and whose natural powers of discrimination were as much distraught as are those of the subjects of the itinerant biologist; who are made to believe, most firmly, that cayenne pepper is sugar, that water is fire, that a cane is a snake. As for the readers of this periodical who still insist that even animal and spiritual magnetism are humbugs, I can only say, with the author of the 'Night Side of Nature,' 'How closely their clay must be wrapped about them!' For one, I have generally avoided any witnessing of marvels of this class—priding myself in believing in their occurrence because of the pure à priori reasonableness of the thing.

It will be observed that in this, as in most other alleged intercourses with the invisible world, there is persistent, continuous attempt to excite the vanity of the mortal who is venturing the dangerous experiment. If the secret history of all the modern mediums were revealed—no matter what their natural disposition to vanity—it would be found that the vast majority of them had been incessantly flattered by their spiritual familiars, and each informed that he or she was the very individual of whom a forlorn, misguided world had been all this while in anxious expectation! This appears to have been the history of necromancy from the beginning. Flattery has ever been the chief stock in trade of those beings who are so properly called 'seducing spirits.' 'Tis ever with glozing words that these children of the wilderness gain the ear and the affections, and entrance through the heart-gates kept by Parley the Porter. Let me not be supposed to include in this class all the spirits who have been of late years so busy among us mortal and immortal Yankees. I consider that the old expression 'white, black, and gray' fully describes the denizens of the 'interior.' In fact, all seers insist that human creatures, in and out of the body, appear to them white or variously shaded toward black, according to their moral status. It is probable that the reason why the black and gray varieties have been so almost exclusively heard from, of late, is to be found in the fact, that it is contrary to the laws of God and nature for us to seek society beyond the terrestrial plane; and that our only proper course, in this regard, is to avoid the supernatural, as a general thing; and when it is apparently thrust upon us, to have only so much to do with it as is quite inevitable. When the authorities of heaven have anything to say to a mortal, they will force him to listen, if necessary—even if they have to throw him, like Paul, from his horse.

Well, I had embarked, like Virgil, or Dante, on my perilous tour through Hades. There was, at once, a crowding about my pathway (only a bridle path) of ostensible, estimable deceased relatives, who, after imparting a variety of priceless information, started off in the usual style, magnifying mine office. According as their influence over my rational faculties became more complete, the proportions of their Munchausenisms increased. Unfortunately for the duration of the fantasy, their jumble of Scripture prophecies concerning me—which was then made to appear nearly coherent—was so plainly writ, that as soon as the blockade of my faculties was raised, the illusion, never more than half complete, was dispelled. My 'great mission' was not fully developed at the first session; but when I had become perfectly clairaudient (I never became clairvoyant), and could dispense with the pencil, a queer mixture of metempsychosis and Parseeism was poured into my ear. It ran somewhat as follows: The two beings first created were, a Lucifer predominant in love, and a Lucifer predominant in intellect; whom we may call the Love Lucifer and the Intellectual Lucifer. The latter was the individual who fell, who played the copperhead in Eden, and has been kicking up such a bobbery ever since. The story ran, that these two persons—the original Ahriman and Ormozd—have been tilting against each other all through earth's career—appearing in the forms of the principal good and bad men. Thus their quarrels gave the outline and the skeleton to the whole story of Adam's race. According to this new 'philosophy of history,' these spirits of light and darkness have been, from the beginning, striving for the mastery; on the one hand, in the persons of the most eminent saints, from Abraham to Augustine, and others not yet canonized; on the other hand, in the persons of the world conquerors noted for heartless intellectuality, from Nimrod to Napoleon (shall we add Jeff. Davis?). Well, I, great I, was to enjoy the distinguished honor of finishing the list of Love Lucifers; and, after winding up the small affairs of earth, was to lock up the other big dog—after he had appeared in his last great role—and then inaugurate the millennium—a new latter-day Jacob's ladder having been established in the centre of Africa to forward the work.

It soon appeared that there was a star, a prima donna, in this company who—after adding a few loose planks to life's little stage—were striving to still personate mortals and put off immortality. A deceased damsel, of whom I had heard as 'a morning star among the living,' appeared now, as 'a Hesper among the dead;' and was imposingly introduced to me, by a quasi near 'relative,' as being only too happy to learn that she was one half of the eternal unit of which I was the complement. I began to be as lordly and self-satisfied as the bewildered sot in the 'Taming of the Shrew.' After exhausting my small stock of writing paper, I concluded to allow my new friends to spend their loquacity on some old college note books, the handiwork of a relative—every other page being blank. The venerable professors of Columbia College would have had their dignity and propriety quite frightened out of them, had they seen what weird statements were presently sandwiched in with their dry disquisitions on science and philosophy. Whenever an especially startling announcement was made, a furious gust of the 'od' would run down my arm; and each word would be made to cover half a page. We went into the new business regardless of expense.

My invisible charmer, who had—it must be said, not very prudishly—proposed for my hand, no sooner got possession of it, than 'she' began to protest that when she learned what a splendid fate was in store for her, as tender to my royal highness, she could only weep for joy for several days. Presently she sent out through my captive digits the following:

'We have, indeed, a long journey to travel together, most loving partner; and how my innermost soul exults, in view of that unending oneness, of soul and spirit, which is to be our portion! .... Ah me, why was I chosen to join my eternal being with yours? when innumerable seraphs would salute you 'husband' with enthusiastic joy and gratitude!....'

Here is one plain fact, whatever else may be doubted. After conversing for two days with this extraordinary visitor, I became most desperately in love with her, or him, or it—as you please. Though past my majority, my placid nature had never before been thoroughly aroused in this direction. Now, by reason of the tact and knowledge of my nature, possessed by the invisible party, and still more because of my state of mesmeric subjection, I was sighing like a furnace or a Romeo. Not Ulysses, Circe tempted—not Sintram seeking his Undine—not the hapless sailor wight pursuing the maiden of the mer, was more utterly enamored than was I. As a proof that I was no bad specimen of the 'gushing' persuasion, at this period, read the following expressive though sometimes commonplace retort. I do not profess to know, and do not much care, whether it was the utterance of an artful fiend, a misguided saint, or one of those 'sympathetic spirits' of whom Swedenborg makes frequent mention. According to his statement, these beings are in such a condition, that whenever they come in contact with a mortal, they chime in with and encourage the views and tendencies of their terrestrial acquaintance; and often, without meaning it, lead him into great errors—being themselves used as cats' paws by decidedly evil spirits. But here is the tender missive, which I transcribe from between two heavy pages of notes on the Aristotelian and Baconian philosophies: