Всего за 5.99 руб. Купить полную версию
For what man of virtue is there who does not know that those souls which are severed from their fleshy bodies in battles by the sword, are received by the ether, that purest of elements, and joined to that company which are placed among the stars; that they become good demons and propitious heroes, and show themselves as such to their posterity afterward? Josephus, Wars of the Jews, B. VI., chap. 1, sec. 5.
and many others might be quoted to the same purpose; but let this suffice as to the character and origin of these demons; and it may suffice also for the theory of To Daimonion , as to the particular mystery here to be explained.
During the interval between the autumn of 1845 and the spring of 1847, a book, wonderful for its inculcations both of truth and error, was dictated in the mesmeric state by an uneducated boy A. J. Davis in which the following similar prediction occurs:
It is a truth that spirits commune with one another while one is in the body and the other in the higher spheres and this, too, when the person in the body is unconscious of the influx, and hence can not be convinced of the fact; and this truth will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration. And the world will hail with delight the ushering in of that era when the interiors of men will be opened, and the spiritual communion will be established, such as is now being enjoyed by the inhabitants of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Nat. Div. Rev., pp. 675, 676.
months after the book containing this passage was published, and more than a year after the words here quoted were dictated and written, strange rapping sounds were heard in an obscure family in an obscure village in the western part of New York. On investigation, those sounds were found to be connected with intelligence, which, rapping at certain letters of the alphabet as it was called over, spelled sentences, and claimed to be a spirit . The phenomena increased, assumed many other forms, extended to other mediums, and rapidly spread, not only all over this country, but over the civilized world. And wherever this intelligence has been interrogated under conditions which itself prescribes for proper answers, its great leading and persistent response to the question, What are you? has been, We are spirits! Candor also compels us to admit that this claim has been perseveringly maintained against the combined opposition of the great mass of intelligent and scientific minds to whom the world has looked for its guidance; and so successfully has it been maintained, that its converts are now numbered by millions, gathered, not from the ranks of the ignorant and superstitious, but consisting mostly of the intelligent and thinking middle classes, and of many persons occupying the highest positions in civil and social life.
At first its opponents met it with expressions of utter contempt and cries of humbug. Many ingenious and scientific persons volunteered their efforts to expose the trick; and if they seemed, in some instances, to meet with momentary success in solving the mystery, the next day would bring with it some new form of the phenomenon to which none of their theories would apply. Being finally discouraged by repeated failures to explain the hidden cause of these wonders, they withdrew from the field, and for many years allowed the matter to go by default; and only within the last twelvemonth has investigation of the subject been re-aroused by the introduction into this country of the little instrument called the Planchette an instrument which, to our certain knowledge, was used at least ten years ago in France, and that, too, as a supposed means of communicating with departed spirits.
This little board has been welcomed as a toy or a game into thousands of families, without suspicion of its having the remotest connection with so-called Spiritualism. The cry has been raised,
Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,
Should our grave and learned philosophers find themselves overcome by this little three-legged spider, it will be mortifying; but in order to avoid that result, we fear they will have to do better than they have done yet.
On the other hand, before the Spiritualists can be allowed to claim the final victory in this contest, they should, it seems to me, be required to answer the following questions in a manner satisfactory to the highest intelligence and the better moral and religious sense of the community:
Why is it that spirits communicating through your mediums, by Planchette or otherwise, can not relate, plainly and circumstantially, any required incident of their lives, as a man would relate his history to a friend, instead of dealing so much in vague and ambiguous generalities, as they almost always do, and that, too, often in the bad grammar or bad spelling of the medium? Or, as a question allied to this, why is it that what purports to be the same spirit, generally, if not always , fails, when trial is made, to identify himself in the same manner through any two different mediums? Or, as another question still allied to the above, why is it that your Websters, Clays, Calhouns, and others, speaking through mediums, so universally give the idea that they have deteriorated in intellect since they passed into the spirit-world? And why is it that so little discourse or writing that possesses real merit, and so much that is mere drivel, has come through your mediums, if spirits are the authors? And why does it so often happen that the spirits if they are spirits can not