The spirit-rapper; an autobiography

When I returned in the evening, I found Priscilla in high spirits, more radiant and fascinating than ever. Her company were slowly assembling in her luxuriously, and even elegantly furnished rooms. Among the earlier arrivals were my friend, Mr. Winslow, and strange enough, my Puritan acquaintance, Mr. Cotton, who had recently become a resident of Philadelphia, and pastor of a Presbyterian church in that city. Others were announced, some whom I knew, but more whom I knew not. The majority were from the middle and upper classes, although all classes of society had their male or female representatives. The principle on which they came together was universal philanthropy, and whoever was a philanthropist, and had an idea, or the smallest fraction of an idea, had the entrée, unless he had African blood in his veins. All were of course abolitionists, or friends of the blacks, and therefore excluded studiously the negroes from their social gatherings. Generally speaking, all professed universal democracy, and hence were very exclusive in their feelings, and aristocratic in their tone and bearing; that is, so far as aristocracy consists in a consciousness, not of one’s own worth, but of the worthlessness of his brother. The company was too large to have only one centre, and gradually separated into groups according to their special tastes and tendencies.

In the centre of each group was some male or female reformer, distinguished from the rest by superior knowledge, volubility, or impudence, and regarded as the oracle of his or her own set, for however loud people’s profession of democratic equality, nature will show itself, and every set of them will have its chief, honored as my Lord or my Lady.

Mr. Winslow had been dismissed from his parish, and having no other means of getting his living, he had followed the example of Mr. Sowerby, and devoted himself to lecturing and experimenting on mesmerism. He was urging upon Priscilla the importance of forming mesmeric circles in all the cities, towns, and villages, of the Union. The first thing to be done was to organize a philanthropic Ladies’ Aid Society, for the purpose of supporting a mesmeric travelling agent or missionary, whose business should be to form these circles or associations, instruct some member of each in the art of mesmerizing, and serve as their common centre and bond of union. If no one more worthy were found he would himself consent to accept, for a moderate salary, such agency, or to be such missionary. These circles formed, and affiliated, visibly and invisibly to each other, would become a powerful body, and exert a moral influence which both the church and the state, politicians and clergymen, would be obliged to respect. In this way he was sure all the elementary forces of nature herself could be brought to bear on the great and glorious work of world-reform.

Mr. Edgerton, a New England Transcendentalist, a thin, spare man, with a large nose, and a cast of Yankee shrewdness in his not unhandsome face, was not favorable to this plan. “I dislike,” he said, “associations. They absorb the individual, and establish social despotism. All set plans of world-reform are bad. Every one must have a theory, a plan, a Morrison’s pill. No one trusts to nature. None are satisfied with wild flowers or native forests. All seek an artificial garden. They will not hear the robin sing unless it is shut up in a cage. The rich undress of nature is an offence, and she must be decked out in the latest fashion of Paris or London, and copy the grimaces of a French dancing-master, or lisp like an Andalusian beauty, before they will open their hearts to her magic power. Say to all this, Get behind me, Satan. Dare assert yourselves; plant yourselves on your imperishable instincts; sing your own song of joy, your own wail of grief; speak your own word; tell what your own soul seeth, and leave the effect to take care of itself. Eschew the crowd, eschew self-consciousness, form no plan, propose no end, seek no moral, but speak out from your own heart; build as builds the bee her cell, sing as sings the bird, the grasshopper, or the cricket.”

“I never dispute,” replied Mr. Edgerton. “I utter the word given me to utter, and leave it as the ostrich leaveth her eggs. Men should be seers, not philosophers; prophets, not reasoners. I never offer proof of what I say. I could not prove it, if asked. If it is true, genuine, the fit word, opportunely spoken, it will prove itself. If it approves not itself to you, it is not for you. You are not prepared to receive it. It is not true for you. Be it so. It is true for me, and for those like me. Fash not yourself about it, but leave us to enjoy it in peace.”

“Sir, you will excuse me. I am no logician, and eschew dialectics. Truth is one, it is the Whole, the All, the universal Being. It is a reality in, under, and over all, manifesting itself under an infinite variety of aspects. Every one beholds it under some one of its aspects, no one beholds it under all. Each mind in that it is real, is itself, is a manifestation of it, but no one is it in its integrity and universality, any more than the bubble on its surface is the whole ocean. Under each particular bubble lies, however, the whole ocean, and if it will speak not from its diversity, its bubbleosity, in which sense it is only an apparition, an appearance, a show, an unreality, but from what is real in it, from its real substantial self, it may truly call itself the whole ocean. So, under each individual mind lies all truth, all reality, all being; and hence, in so far as they are real, all minds are one and the same. Men are weak, are puny, differ from one another because they seek to live in their diversity, and to find their truth, their reality, in their individuality. Let them eschew their individuality, which is to their reality, their real self, only what the bubbleosity of the bubble is to the ocean, and fall back on their identity, on the universal truth which underlies them. If they will be men, real men, not make-believes, strong men, thinking men, let them be themselves, sink back into their underlying reality, on the One Man, and suffer the universal Over-Soul to flow into them, and speak through them without let or impediment.”

“We must,” said another Transcendentalist, sometimes called the American Orpheus, “return to the simplicity of childhood. ‘Except ye be converted and become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ The man who thinks, Rousseau has well said, is already a depraved animal. All learning is a forgetting; science and wisdom are gathered from babes and sucklings. We are not prepared as yet to talk of world-reform. We must be before we can do; be men before we can do men’s work. All being is in doing; rather all doing is in being. Ideas are the essences, the realities of things. Seek ideas. They will take to themselves hands, build them a temple, and instaurate their worship. Seek not ideas from books; they are lies. Seek them not of the learned and grey-haired; they have lost them. Be docile and childlike; seat yourself by the cradle, at the feet of awful childhood, and look into babies’ eyes.”

“What we want to cure the evils of society,” broke in Mr. Kerrison,—a tinker, I believe,—a small man in a snuff-colored frock coat, with sharp grey eyes, lank cheeks, a short nose, a pointed chin, and squeaking voice, “is a Children’s Protection Society; a society that shall protect children from the indelicacy, the cruelty, and inhumanity of their brutal parents. There is nothing more shocking to our finer sensibilities, or more outrageous to true philanthropy, than to see a full-grown woman, tall and stout, with a red face, fiery eyes, and a harsh voice,—or a full-grown man, yet taller and stouter, stern and awful in his look, terrible in his anger tones,—seize a poor helpless little boy or girl,—yes, or girl,—not more than three or four years old it may be, and taking him or her across the knee, strike on the very seat of her or him, blow after blow, till the poor little thing screams with pain and agony. It is indelicate, cruel, barbarous. How would the father or mother like to be treated in the same way? It blunts the delicate sensibility of the child, sours his temper, hardens his heart, develops and strengthens all his harsh and angry feelings, and prepares him to be, when he grows up, as bad as was his father or his mother.”

“Our friend,” added Mr. Silliman, an amiable young minister, a Unitarian, I believe, or, as he said, a Preacher of the religion of Humanity, “has, I think, gone to the root of the matter. The evils of individuals and of society have their origin in the harsh, cruel, unfeeling, and indelicate manner in which parents bring up their children. Children should never be restrained, should never be crossed; they should always be caressed by the soft, delicate hand of love, be surrounded by sweet and smiling faces, by lovely and attractive images, live in communion with fresh and fragrant nature, and find life all one fairy day.”

“Young America,” interposed Mr. Merton, “will thank you both, I have no doubt. The abolition of corporal chastisement will meet the decided approval of our little folks, and perhaps of our patriots. It is questionable whether this flogging of children is not an infringement upon equal rights. I do not see what the father in my town, universal democrat as he was, had to reply to the question put to him the other day by Young America. A little rascal, some ten or twelve years old, had done some mischief, for which his father flogged him. Young America bore it with heroic fortitude, as if the honor of his country and of the race was at stake in his person, and when it was over, with the calm and dignified air of a man and a freeman, folded his arms across his breast, looked up to his father, and asked,—‘Father, is not this a free country?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘By what right, then, do you flog me?’”

“Parents,” said a cross-grained old maid, “are wholly incapable of bringing up their children. They have no judgment, no steadiness; at one moment whipping them without rhyme or reason, and the next soothing them with candy, and smothering them with caresses. They impart to them their own tempers, passions, weaknesses, and prejudices. There should be established infant schools at the public expense, where all the children, as soon as twelve months old, should be placed, and brought up by proper persons trained and prepared in normal schools for that purpose.”

“You will have to go farther back than that, my good woman,” said Mr. Long, an English gentleman just arrived in the country and announced as the Prophet of the Newness. “Children are born with an inclination to evil, and are hardly born before they manifest vicious tempers and a fondness for doing precisely what they ought not to do. If suffered to have their own way, they would never live to grow up. They must, as they are now born, be restrained and even whipped, for their own good. Here the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. We must begin with the parents. We live in a depraved state, and children inherit vitiated moral and physical constitutions from their fathers and mothers. We must look to this fact, and sternly prohibit all persons of obviously vitiated moral or physical constitutions from begetting or bearing children. After that we must turn our attention to improving the breed, as our English farmers have done in the case of their horses, oxen, cows, sheep, swine, dogs, and hens.”

“That may be rather difficult to manage in a free country,” said Dr. Muzzleton, a professor of Surgery in a Western medical college, “and can hardly be tried, except by the master with his negroes on our Southern plantations. The hopes of philanthropists must rest on something more practical, and less difficult to be accomplished. The philanthropist’s dependence is on dietetic reform. The vitiated moral and physical constitution of parents, and which they impart to their children, comes unquestionably from the use of animal food. It is necessary, therefore, to abolish the use of animal food, and have people feed only on a vegetable diet. Nature shows this in the very construction of the human teeth, which are very different from those of the lion, the tiger, and other carniverous animals. Carnivorous animals have no grinders, and their teeth are fitted only for tearing. Man has incisors and molars, which shows that he was intended to cut and grind his food.”

“But which serve him very well, since he does not usually eat flesh raw, but cooks it,” remarked Mr. Merton. “But the antediluvians eat no flesh. They lived on a vegetable diet, were vegetarians, and yet they became so corrupt that the Almighty sent a flood and destroyed them all, with the exception of eight persons.”

All stared, and many broke out into a loud laugh, at the joke of citing the Bible and tradition as authority in an assembly of philanthropists and reformers. Dr. Muzzleton looked round with great blandness, and said to Mr. Merton, “You see, my young friend, the majority is against you. I respect the Bible in matters pertaining to another world, but I am speaking now as a man of science, not as a theologian. I leave theology to the clergy,” bowing on his right to Mr. Cotton, and on his left to Mr. Winslow.

“I respect the Bible in theology no more than I do in science,” said Miss Rose Winter, a strong-minded woman, and a decided reformer, of Jewish descent. “The first thing for all reformers to do is to destroy the authority of the Bible and emancipate the Christian world from its morality. It is the great supporter of all abuses, and it and the church are almost our only obstacles to overcome. It sanctions the use of wine and animal food, slavery and the restitution of the fugitive slave, war and capital punishment. It asserts the divine right of government, and forbids resistance to power. It is the fountain of superstition, and the grand bulwark of priestcraft. It calls woman the weaker vessel, forbids her to speak in meeting, and commands her to be in subjection to her husband. We are fools and madmen to talk of our reforms as long as we regard the Bible as any thing more than a last year’s almanac.”

“I esteem the Bible a good book,” said Mr. Winslow. “It contains more genuine and sublime poetry than any other book I am acquainted with, not even excepting Homer. But I do not accept its plenary inspiration, and I feel bound to believe only the truths I find in it.”

“The Bible,” interposed Priscilla, “is a genuine book, and faithfully records the real experience of prophets and seers of old times, and is of no value to us save as interpreted by the facts of each one’s own inner life. Much of it is local, temporary, colored by the nation and age that produced it, and is no longer of any significance for us; but what there is in it universal, that is the genuine utterance of universal nature, and true for all persons, times, and places, should be accepted, as we accept every genuine word, by whomsoever uttered.”

Mr. Merton shrugged his shoulders and said nothing; Mr. Cotton looked black, was scandalized, and muttered, “Rank infidelity.” “And what else,” said a very gentlemanly young man, who had been talking nonsense for an hour to a bevy of young ladies in a corner of the room, and apparently indifferent to the great matters under discussion, “and what else did his reverence expect in a company of reformers? Yet we are not really infidels. We have only thrown off the mask, and ceased to be hypocrites. Whatever man’s profession, ever since it was said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone,’ and Eve was brought blushing to his bower, woman has been the real shrine at which he has worshipped. This is our ancestral religion, and true to the religion of my fathers, I make woman my Divinity, and lay my offering at Leila’s feet.”

“Do not believe him,” said a saucy young thing, with a sparkling eye and pouting lips. “He worships only himself. Here I have been this half hour trying to convince him that there is something mystic in woman, and that science and religion, as now organized, are false and mischievous, because they are the product of man’s genius alone. I have said all the flattering things I could to make him take up the cause of Woman’s Rights, and he has only laughed at me.”

“But that,” said Mr. Merton, “would be hardly fair to us men, and would moreover be dangerous to republican liberty. Mademoiselle Leila would of course be a candidate for the Assembly. All the young men would vote for her, because they would secure her good graces, and all the old men would do the same, in order to prove that they are not old, and have not yet lost their sensibility to female loveliness and worth; she would be elected unanimously. In the Assembly she would rise to propose some measure, throw aside her veil, beam forth upon us with all her charms, and for the same reasons all would support her. She would reign as a despot, which, as a republican, I must protest against.”

“You are hard upon us women,” pleaded Priscilla. “Women have their weaknesses as well as men theirs, but they can love and admire beauty in their own sex, as much as they do ugliness in men. I do not suppose that placing them on an equality in all respects with men will increase their power as women, but it will increase their power as reasonable human beings. I think woman would lose much of her peculiar power as woman over man, and this I should by no means regret. I would break down the tyranny of sex as I would that of caste or class. I would have men and women so trained, that they could meet, converse, or act together as simple human beings, without ever recurring, even in thought, to the difference of sex.”