proof that the "course of true love would run smooth;" and how (in later days) the grave theologians of Christendom declared that sneezing was undoubtedly "a work of the devil." We might twit the ladies generally with the spiritual naughtiness of their sex, which, from the time when Eve "beguiled" the first man, downwards, has never ceased to monopolize more than a fair share of human intercourse with the immaterial world; so that, while sybils and witches have terrified the weak-headed of all ages, a really bona fide wizard has been a rara avis. We might alarm the lawyers, by describing to them the contents of that goodly book, published in the year 1698, and adorned with a picture of the devil in full costume (ie., horns, wings, claws, cloven feet, and bushy tail), as black as ink could make him, dancing between two steady looking gentlemen in wigs, bands, and gowns, which purports to be "A Full and True Account of the Devil's appearing to one Mr. Field, a lawyer of Shevelt, in Buckinghamshire, as he went to Parson Johnsey's house a rattle, it is often to be caught by chaff. But as a "philosophical" question, my object must be to show the irrationality of modern diablerie; and therefore, in the hope that I may be enabled to confirm the doubting, and to rescue those who may not have the inclination or opportunity for thinking deeply or unravelling carefully the deceptions of the professors and the monomania of the converts of spirit-rapping and its kindred follies, I now turn from mirth to argument. It is painful to be compelled to assume a position of isolation from those in whose conclusions I concur; but I feel so deeply that truth claims my sole allegiance when endeavouring to aid in forming the opinions of the readers of this magazine, and that nothing can be so unworthy as to connive at a false premise for the purpose of bolstering up a true result, that I must be allowed to enter a disclaimer of any participation in the doctrines of materialism which (if I understand his article) are advocated by "Halket." This avowal will explain the total omission of any allusion to his otherwise ably written and how he was frighted to death at the article. I can scarcely agree with W. G. D. horrid appearance And of another in thinking that "little could have been said lawyer being affrighted almost as bad as he, on our side with effect, till an article on the &c." So we might puzzle a divine by re-affirmative had appeared." It is not wise to questing an explanation of the "exorcisms, slumber in careless security until the foe has confessions, interrogations, postulations, con- entrenched his camp, be his fortifications citations, and protestations," which the Ro- ever so flimsy. Simply to answer "Benjamish church directed to be used in order to min" is but defeating a single section of the drive a devil out of possession; and might great army of credulity. When writers of horrify a chemist with the recipe for the acknowledged position,* but of most opposite profumigatio horribilis to be employed in tendencies, write in defence of this great the same pious endeavour; or amuse the imposture when Robert Owen uses it in juveniles by describing how, in case of obsti- favour of his socialism, and Mr. Godfrey to adnacy, the devil was to have his likeness vance his morbid ultra-Protestantism-when drawn "effigie horribili et turpi," which," Benjamin" regards it as a valuable adjunct after suffering many indignities, was finally to the Bible revelation, and as assisting to be burnt. And let it not be thought that such an entertainment would be mere useless trifling; it would sow distrust and suspicion broadcast in the enemy's camp. Our mirth would throw down the Dagon of superstition for a time; and however soon men might replace him on his throne in their minds, his empire would be weakened by the fall, and his votaries would become in some degree more amenable to the power of reasoning. Credulity, like its twin-brother ignorance, is perfectly logic-proof; but will often yield to a laugh rather than lose it. Frightened by "pious, believing souls" and "honest sceptics" to believe in the fundamental truth of Christianity, the immortality and life beyond the grave brought to light by the gospeland when Messrs. Gillson and Beecher view it as a crafty attempt to beguile the very elect-when all this, I say, takes place, it becomes us to refuse any longer to waste our energies in skirmishing separately with stray bodies of the foe; to unfurl a flag of defiance against all, and, like the builders of Jerusalem, first to fortify the gates of our own faith, though with sword in hand, if any attack us. Credulity is a tendency of human nature; and when driven from "pillar" is apt to betake itself to "post," and to lead its assailants a wearisome and fruitless chase. Acting on these considerations, therefore, I shall endeavour to take a general review of the subject, without special reference to the articles of "Benjamin" and Co. If space allow I may, in conclusion, show that even if their arguments be admitted, they fall entirely beside the question. Meanwhile, I leave the reader to judge of the respective results of W. G. D.'s light musketry and the heavy cannonade of the Hieroglyph. The disciples of M. Comte would answer the question before us by denying the existence of a "spiritual world" (in the sense here and generally applied to the words); and as a purely philosophical question, it would be no easy matter, though perhaps not impossible, to reply to their arguments. But those who (conscious that our knowledge, even of the physical world around us, must rest chiefly on testimony, since no individual experience can be sufficiently extensive to justify an attempt at that "co-ordination of phenomena" which is the sole aim of science, according to the positive philosophers) have applied themselves to an examination of the claims of revelation, and have felt bound to admit it as a faithful and true witness, are compelled to believe in the existence of a spiritual world. The question immediately arises, Can man have any communications from, or hold any intercourse with, spiritual existences? On the testimony of scripture, I venture to assert that such events have occurred. Thus much I concede. On the other hand, I maintain that we have no purely human evidence that can be deemed trustworthy to prove that such communica tions ever occurred; and that the scriptures warrant a belief that, with one exception, they have entirely ceased. 66 I have alluded to one exception." I admit and believe that beings of another sphere may communicate with man by direct mental suggestion. Few, I should think, have revolved the great "problem of existence" in their own thoughts without feeling that inward struggle, so admirably described by Tennyson, in "The Two Voices," without hearing the still small voice "speak in their ear," or without recognising "a sullen answer slid betwixt." Few are those who have not felt that some unseen power was forcing its blasphemies upon an unwilling mind, and destroying all inward peace by the suggestion of painful, cruel doubts. The history of Bunyan is a remarkable illustration of this subject. But the doctrine of direct mental temptation by Satan and his kindred spirits seems so plainly laid down in the scriptures, that I presume this species of "communication from a spiritual world," together with the similar but opposite influence of the Holy Spirit, are tacitly excluded from the question. Let us turn, then, to examine what testimony is to be found in favour of any other kind of spiritual intercourse. We have no record in Holy Writ of evil spirits (human or Satanic) ever appearing to man in bodily shape,* or appealing directly to his bodily senses. They appear to have been restricted, by a merciful ordinance of God, from all material agency, except in the cases of the demoniacs of our Saviour's age. Of demoniacal manifestations since the days of the apostles (I quote a great living theologian of the national church) 66 no proof has ever been given that could satisfy any but the weakly credulous. And on the other hand, there have been several instances in which it has been fully proved that cases of pretended possession and cure have been tricks of crafty impostors ... Satan "was to be made manifest, on purpose it should seem that Christ's triumph over him might be openly displayed. . . . The * The case of the witch of Endor, and similar versally admitted to have been the result of venaccounts in the Old Testament, are now so unitriloquism and natural magic, by all theologians of any pretensions, that I scarcely need allude to them. All readers of eastern travels will be aware that similar marvels are practised in those countries to this day. great enemy was permitted, about that time more especially, to exercise a direct, perceptible, and acknowledged agency over mankind, in order to render his defeat the more conspicuous, that we might, as it were, 'behold Satan like lightning fall from heaven."" The course of nature is fixed. The material world obeys prescribed laws imposed upon it by the Divine Creator. Every infringement, therefore, of these laws by purely spiritual agency, is an infringement of the divine prerogative. Is it reasonable to suppose that He would permit such an insult to his wisdom and power? No! He has permitted the powers of evil to exert a spiritual agency, in suggesting evil to beings endowed with free will, because man can there meet Satan and his hosts as an equal; but to allow them to use a material agency would place man at a disadvantage, and leave him to the mercy of his foes without the possibility of resistance. This God hath not done. If Satan could work one miracle,—aye, if he could turn one table, or rap one rap on earth, -man would be in his power, soul and body. By what was Christ's mission confirmed? By miracles. On what is our faith in Christianity based? On its divinity, attested by its miraculous origin and power. Will God, then, deliver over his sign-manual to Satan's keeping, and allow his arch-enemy to present the credentials of Omnipotence to those whom Christ died to save? I trow not. "Resist the devil, and he shall flee from you"-but how can puny mortals resist the evidence of their senses? How can they disbelieve a miracle performed before their eyes? We have been warned against "lying wonders," but not against real miraculous signs. Again, if evil spirits were permitted to exercise a material agency, how could we reconcile their general quiescence with their activity of evil wishes? "Devils," says the learned and pious Dr. Watts, "would not content themselves with the mere temptation of souls, but would always be making wretched mischief in this natural world, and overspread it with plagues and fire, with earthquakes and misery, if they had an innate and natural power* to move bodies." *The reader will observe that Dr. Watts denied power of spiritual beings to make use of material agency. But even if this were granted, it appears to me inconsistent with God's mercy to man that he should permit them to exercise such the power. When we learn that the devil restricts his power to moving a table, and that frequently in the presence of a clergyman intent on cross-examination, one becomes strongly reminded of the satirical remark of honest old Reginald Scot-"Truly he is a gentle and godly devil!" Angelic messengers undoubtedly have appeared in bodily shape in our world. They appeared to Daniel as he prayed; to Zacharias as-he ministered; and sung our Saviour's natal song on the plains of Bethlehem. We have no evidence, however, that they have ever exercised material agency on earth except to accomplish the express and beneficent intentions of Divinity. There can be no reason for supposing them restricted (if capable) from such agency, since, as the ministers of God, they could only use it for his glory; but the age of miracles being passed, there are no grounds for believing that they now interfere with physical nature; and as no one has yet had the audacity to suppose their agency in spirit-rapping, I pass on. We have no instance of the human spirit during life ever acting directly on matter without the intervention of the body. We may imagine a machine, a picture, a movement of some physical existence from its place, for ever; and unless we exert our muscular frame, there will be no result. In all material agency the body is the necessary physical instrument of the mind. We may, therefore, philosophically conclude that a departed spirit, having cast aside its tools, is powerless as regards the production of physical effects. The delightfully lucid explanation of the rappings quoted by "Benjamin"-" they are, to a certain extent (!), produced by the control which spiritual beings have over the electrical mediums of the nervous system"-I leave those who can fathom its meaning to refute : it sadly interferes with the little knowledge which I have been able to gather from Sir John Herschel's "Treatise on Sound," or Dr. Young's "Chapters on Acoustics." Since there seems no reason why "the electrical mediums of the nervous system" should not apply to the nerves of feeling as well as those of hearing, I fear that "Benjamin" will some day be made to experience the sensation of being soundly belaboured for his concluding insinuations against the charac ter of the spirits. Raps on the tables may increase his faith, but I fancy that raps on the knuckles will not improve his temper. For my own part, I should exceedingly dislike to suffer an ignominious kicking, or to have my face mysteriously slapped, and my nose invisibly pulled, by spiritual agency. But to restrain our mirth. The parable of Dives and Lazarus plainly shows that supernatural warnings will not be vouchsafed to those who despise a gospel revelation; and I have too cheerful a faith in divine goodness to believe that He will allow the departed spirits of evil-doers to harass us with physical deceptions. Indeed, if the parable* in question nion that the soul remains unconscious till the be intended as an actual representation of the future state, the fact that Dives never suggested that he himself might be sent to warn his brethren, seems to show clearly that he was conscious of the impossibility of his escape from the place of torment to the scenes of earth. Reason and revelation both condemn the idea of the agency of departed spirits in any of the material phenomena of the universe. The experience of history has been dearly bought; and ought, in consequence, to be highly prized. Now the history of supernaturalism in this world is one tissue of deceit, delusion, and credulity. Its experimental lessons have been bought at a fearful cost of inhuman cruelty and fiendish malice; its testimony is sealed with the blood of its victims. One shudders with horror at the recollection of what has resulted from man's desperate resolve to "seek after a sign," in spite of the concurrent testimony of reason and religion, that "no sign shall be given." Delusion has followed delusion, and each in turn has perished miserably. I had extracted a few illustrations, particularly striking, but I must confine myself to one. In 1692-3, a belief in witchcraft seized upon the colonists of New England. No less than *The subject of an intermediate state is shrouded in mystery. For myself, I confess I can only see two alternatives-either to understand the words of Paul literally, and to believe that for the christian "to depart" is to be at once "with Christ," where he is; or to adopt the opiresurrection, that the "sleep in Jesus," promised to believers, is absolute and literal. The confusion of my opponents' reasoning seems only equalled by its frequent incomprehensibility. We are told that the Jews believed in an intermediate state, and called it sheol; but this word literally signifies the grave, and thence, by a very natural process, might occasionally be used to signify the condition (if any) of the dead. In the same way hades, in its primitive form an adjective signifying unseen, and thence annihilated, was used as a sub-fifty miserable wretches confessed themselves stantive to designate the future state of mythological fable, which (scouted by the philosopher) was regarded as a useful bugbear to awe the populace--a “black dog" for the nursery. The Jews had no revelation of a future state; it was witches; and in one part of the state alone nineteen were hanged, one was pressed to death, and 150 were imprisoned, within the space of sixteen months. The memoeven denied by a large and educated part of theries of my readers will furnish a multitude nation. To bring immortality to light, we are assured was the peculiar office of the gospel. The parable of Dives we must, from the very meaning of that word, regard as a merely metaphorical illustration; to accept it as a literal of fearful parallels. Surely "the dark places"-that is, the superstitious places"of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty." The testimony thus fearfully witnessed is to be summed up in a sentencethat "Supernaturalism is the offspring of imposture and ignorance." Optics have proved the fearful apparition of the Brocken, which so long haunted the Hartz mountains of Germany, to be but a distant shadow of its terrified beholder, as he stands between the sun and the opposite range of hills. Chemistry has resolved will-o'-the-wisp into the spontaneous combustion of a gas. En representation, which we are forthwith to translate spiritually, without reference to time and space, is simply contradicting all rules of interpretation. The reasoning which represents Dives in hell, and Lazarus in heaven, while the brothers of the former are yet on earth, is not the intermediate state of Protestantism, continuing till the resurrection, but (in spite of "Hieroglyph's" disclaimer) the Romish purgatory, with au extra ward for making the bad worse, as well as the good better. Heaven and hell are states undoubt edly, but they are also localities: the believer is not only to be like Christ, but to be "with Him and to see Him as He is." According to "Benjamin's" theory, heaven and hell are to be respectively a dead level of joy and of woe, of good and of evil! The dead are to be kept up in the inter- cessarily inserted in the spirit-world, or interme mediate state until they reach the given standard! diate sphere," to receive influxes of good and of But there is a sufficient reply to all this in the evil, and yet that he is left to deduce this fact fact that the existence of an intermediate state is from "the great gulf" of the parable, and " Bennot clearly revealed. The scriptures are emi-jamin's" cloudy reasonings, is little less than a nently practical. To suppose that man is "ne- libel on Christ and his gospel. of the death-watch to be but the miniature carpentry of a tiny insect. Joseph Collins confessed himself to be the spirit whose "rappings" drove away the parliamentary commissioners from Woodstock; and whose supernatural doings were (before the return of Charles II. had rendered confession safe) chronicled by Dr. Plot. The Stockwell ghost turned out to be a servant girl. When will men learn wisdom? tomology has explained the fearful ticking | rican family named Fox (sadly ominous of craft and imposture), dwelling in a house reputed by popular superstition to be haunted by the ghost of a man who had been murdered there some years previously. The family, or at least the females (!) of the family, established by dint of perseverance a code of signals with the ghost, and on leaving home found, to their astonishment (?), that the ghost accompanied them; in fact, he had a partiality for the company and conversation of the female sex. The marvel spread: committees were appointed to examine into the matter, and the raps being duly determined to be the doings of the ghost, others tried the same plan of holding converse with the dead, and in a few months there were 30,000 media in the United States. Human folly silenced the voice of reason; and the clergy, ever ready to trust in broken reeds, endeavoured to fortify the bulwarks of their faith by admitting the alleged miracle, and declaring it to be the immediate result of devilish agency. Protestantism was not ashamed to imitate those artifices which it so fiercely ridiculed in the Romish church! For my own part, I would sooner believe the wildest legends of saintly miracles, than confess that I had so far deserted discretion as to admit that the souls of the departed and the fallen angels had selected such an introduction to the society of man. I know not whether astonishment or merriment prevails when I think of this new gospel of the nineteenth century, the possession of tables by demons and ghosts. Surely the common phrase “devil's tattoo," applied to a monotonous, tapping sound, must have first suggested the scheme to the sharp-witted members of the Fox family. I have now cleared the way for an answer to the question at the head of these pages. The "sufficient evidence" spoken of must be evidence strong enough to rebut the testimony of the Bible, to overrule the decision of the intellect, and to repel the presumption of that fraud which history proves to have been the uniform accompaniment of supernaturalism. Unlike Christianity, supernaturalism can find no internal corroborative testimony in the heart of man; can discover no responsive chord of love or reason; but only sweeps over the jarring and tuneless strings of a mind enslaved by cowardice and unstrung by credulity. The evidence required, therefore, must be personal and individual. No human testimony, unsupported by internal fitness and probability, can be sufficient" to establish miraculous events. The question is, accordingly, determinately answered in the negative, with respect to all who have not had the miracles of modern demoniac influence submitted to their own senses. I confess myself of this number. I have seen the "table-turning," and have been satisfied that it is the result of unconscious muscular exertion; but the "spiritrapping" and "table-talking" (confined only to the initiated) have not come within the range of my observation. To those who are convinced that they have had that direct personal evidence which I have pointed out to be essential, I can only venture to suggest the question, "Which is the more probable event that human nature, so prone to superstition, and so liable to deception by its own senses, through disease or intentional deception, should error that reason and revelation should be blind guides, and history a useless and deceitful lesson?" 66 Spirit-rapping," though especially patronized by "Benjamin," as far as I am aware, has made but very slight progress in England, compared with the clerically-patronized "table-talking." Media seem scarce; and the spirits have betaken themselves to visible as well as audible communications. Those who believe, would do well to place the Bible on all tables whose quietude they desire to insure. Painful thought, that Let us, however, waive these conditions God's great book should be degraded to serve for a time, and calmly examine the origin the place of the relics and charms of ancient and results of the absurd superstition of the mummery, in the nineteenth century after day. Spirit-rapping originated in an Ame-Christ! We had, however, at one time an |