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Etext by Ian Hillman
IT IS A pleasure to read Mr. Owen's books, the evidences of his kindly nature, and of his intelligent interest in all the questions of the hour, so abound in them; and I doubt not, therefore, that his present work will attract many readers outside the pale of the spiritualistic faith. It is, in fact, addressed to such, being an attempt to persuade them that Spiritualism inherits of Romanism and Protestantism in the maintenance of the Christian doctrine of immortality. He thinks that “religion, such as Christ taught, though sure to prevail in the end, is yet for the time hard pressed; on one hand by the hosts enlisted under the banner of infallibility, on the other by the vigorous pioneers of science: and that in this strait experimental evidence of modern spiritual phenomena, if it can be had, would assist her beyond measure.”
Nearly a third of the work consists of an appeal to the Protestant clergy, designed to persuade them that what with the numerous accessions to Romanism out of the Protestant communion on the one hand, and what with the advances of scientific incredulity on the other, they have little ground for supposing the Protestant Church to be a finality of the Divine administration, and ought to be willing, therefore, to look about them for signs of an improved providential presence in the earth. Grant Mr. Owen his premises, and he reasons out his case very well. But the trouble is to understand how he reconciles himself to his premises. Within the past year the Pope has lost the political support of four great kingdoms, France, Italy, Spain, Austria; and by claiming to be dogmatically infallible, has so outraged the common sense and the sense of decency of his own clergy, as to have excited a schism of threatening dimensions in the bosom of the hitherto stagnant church. In a word, the Pope himself has become a heretic to the traditions of Catholicism; and this certainly does not look as if the church were thriving. I think, too, that we are apt to deceive ourselves as to the force lent the church by the accessions to it from the Protestant communion. It seems to me, that this force better deserves the name of weakness. I have known and heard of some dozens of Romish converts within the last twenty years; but I have found them generally more servile in their allegiance to the church than if they had been born in it. Now clearly what the church wants, in order to strengthen it, is the access of new intelligence, an intelligence quickened by that new and more intimate life of God in man, whose advent has been assiduously announcing itself, now for a century past, in the growing secularisation of the religious conscience, and the growing democratisation of the political conscience. If I could hear, for example, that the church had been augmented by a considerable number of Protestant tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and masons, men who are in contact, with the realities of existence, and carry the world along on their own shoulders, I should say the church was reviving. Or, if I could see any considerable body of Methodists, Baptists, or Presbyterians, as such, going over to the old church, and bent upon reanimating it with their own more modern spirit, I should say the remaining days of Protestantism were few and evil. As it is, no such cheering sight meets the eye; but what I see instead is a palpable augmentation by all these converts of the church's apparently inveterate imbecility.
The Debatable Land between this World and the Next, with Illustrative Narrations, by Robert Dale Owen. New York: Carleton, 1872.
Then again it is hardly fair to assume that science herself is hostile to religion; though undoubtedly there are many men of scientific name who evince a personal hostility to it, grounded as I suppose upon some ignorance or misconception of its spiritual aims. Religion, as to its spirit, restricts itself exclusively to the sphere of the individual conscience, which is the field of every man's filial or spontaneous commerce with God; although its letter no doubt has long been, and still too often is, stretched beyond these limitations, and so made to provoke the salutary resentment and reaction of the human mind. Science, on the contrary, limits itself to the sphere of man's outward or organic experience, and leaves that of his inward life completely untouched. It drops out of sight those strictly inorganic wants or individual aptitudes by which he feels himself spiritually constituted or related to God; and confines its attention exclusively to what he possesses in common, more or less, with all other existence that is, what relates him to nature and his fellow-man. There is thus no conflict possible between religion and science but what arises from a misconception of the functions proper to each, and is inflamed by some petty personal ambition or factional jealousy, on the part of the adherents to one or the other cause.
Mr. Owen, however, devotes the bulk of his book to a series of lively, anecdotical, and varied narratives of spiritual manifestations, gathered up from history, biography, contemporary testimony, and his own personal experience and observation. This part of his work is very entertaining, and will well repay the curiosity of those who are interested in the marvellous at second-hand. I am free to say, moreover, that I do not see how the facts reported by Mr. Owen on his own private authority are to be disposed of in candour, without conceding their truth. The rationale of the facts of course is one thing, and the facts themselves another and very inferior thing. Whether the “Spiritualists” have got any insight into the former may reasonably be questioned; but no one who knows Mr. Owen, and his perfect title to men's respect, can wantonly slight his deliberate testimony to the facts of experience he recounts. For my part, they claim my implicit confidence. And I may say, indeed, that the entire spirit of the book is eminently fair and honest and charitable, however much I may differ from the author as to the degree of intellectual importance attaching to the phenomena he depicts. On this point I should like to sketch out a little platform of disagreement with him, not unfairly conceived I hope.
In the first place, it is extremely prejudicial to the Christian dogma to represent the life and immortality it brings to light as the mere extension of our personal consciousness beyond the grave. That sort of immortality ought indeed, as it seems to me, to be held philosophically indisputable, for the simple reason that the human mind is incapable of conceiving non-existence; and what cannot be conceived by human thought assuredly transcends human belief. Besides, the instinctive hopes and fears of mankind in all time and place so clearly affirm immortality in this lower point of view, that scepticism will always be impotent to discredit it. But this is not the Christian idea of immortality. The life and immortality brought to light in the gospel pivots for its rationality exclusively upon the alleged resurrection of Christ from death in his own flesh and bones. This is the cardinal fact of revelation, without which the apostles felt that they would have no sufficing argument of the Divine love, and would be of all men most miserable. Now manifestly the human interest which this great fact represents is not that of any man's or of all men's personal resuscitation from death—-because we have none of us either the desire or the expectation to rise from death in these corruptible bodies—-but that exclusively of the race's regeneration, or the rehabilitation of human nature itself in every lineament of the Divine perfection. Upon the hypothesis of his exceptional birth, and his subsequent unprecedented personal history, Christ was an altogether extraordinary person, and it would be absurd, therefore, to reason directly from his personal chances to my own, or those of any other ordinary person. But I am none the less entitled to do so indirectly ; for by the hypothesis of his mission, Christ was exclusively a representative person, identified carnally with the interests and aspirations of the Jewish Church, and bound, therefore, to expiate in his own flesh the sturdy inhumanity with which that church was spiritually fraught in the Divine sight. If then he abased himself to this representative function with such unflinching zeal as spontaneously to separate himself from his own nation, and give up his life a ready sacrifice to the infinite love, the love of universal man, I see not how he could well escape personal glorification at the hands of that love. In other words, I do not see how “the flesh and bones,” which were the vehicle of his majestic and triumphant patience, could themselves help becoming transfigured with spiritual divine substance, and constituting thenceforth the true Shekinah, or spotless holy of holies, in which alone the inscrutable name becomes revealed without a cloud.
But the flesh and bones Christ wore were identical with your and my flesh and bones; for there is no personality in mere flesh and bones, save what we ourselves voluntarily concede to them. They were, moreover, derived in his case from as low and carnal a source as was ever opened upon earth; and covered doubtless as ugly an inheritance of pride, avarice, and all uncleanness, as consists with the sanity of the human bosom. It is by this community of flesh and bones alone that he and we alike are forever identified with our kind, and consequently forever individualized from God. If then he was confessedly so strong—-where you and I are confessedly so feeble—-as to withstand his carnal inheritance to the last gasp of its malignity, and outwardly disavow his Jewish cupidities. till the sympathies of his inward soul had expanded to the dimensions of universal love, and the very flesh and bones he partook in common with you and me and all mankind became inwardly deluged and informed by the tides of that infinitude,, he inevitably wrought a work for humanity no less signal than that which he wrought for himself; for he thus linked, not himself primarily, but you and me and every most abject partaker of the human form, in natural and therefore eternal espousals withy God.
This is the only “spiritualism” on the whole which I am capable of understanding, a spiritualism which has primarily nothing whatever to do with persons, but means the sheer recreation of human nature. And, pace Mr. Owen and the cause he advocates, this is the only immortality worthy to be divinely championed,—-an immortality divorced from the wretched rags of personality that now constitute our spiritual inheritance, and leaving us no consciousness but that of our equality or fellowship with every man of woman born. I do not mean to deny of course that it is of extreme personal moment to me to believe that my post mortem well-being is placed beyond the reach of adverse chances. All I mean to say is, that I should have the greatest difficulty to maintain my convictions on this point, if they were left for support to the ordinary light of nature, or if the course of history had nowhere received a supernatural illumination, showing me the Divine love and wisdom intent above all things upon the consecration of our natural life, or the building up of the race-consciousness itself in the fellowship of his essential purity. What men need in order to the cleansing of their personal conscience from all defilement is some authentic knowledge of God's spiritual perfection, showing it to be in harmony, not with their vain and foolish selves to be sure, but exclusively with their own great race or nature. In the fulfilment of history; doubtless this knowledge will directly avouch itself in the disclosures incident to the social evolution of humanity. But meanwhile and in the absence of such direct knowledge, the Christian revelation offers itself to men's faith and hope as the sole and all-sufficient pledge of God's final and unstinted mercy to mankind. I could not for my own part give a feathers weight of belief to Christianity as a Divine revelation, if its irresistible influence were not to divorce me from the natural tendency I feel to be interested in myself supremely, and to value my race only as a sounding-board to my own vanity. Indeed, the special claim which it puts forth to my regard, in my best moments, is the sheer and pointed rebuke it ministers to my unclean craving after personal holiness; to the sneaking hope I cherish, that however morally undistinguishable I may be from the publican and harlot in the Divine sight, I may yet find in my religious righteousness a cloak wide enough to conceal my real iniquity.
But even if we should allow this new gospel of spiritualism all the validity it claims, it would be a fatal day for human sanity, when men should consent to receive truth from others, instead of any longer perceiving it for themselves in other words, when our memory or passive mental stomach should supersede our active brain. The condition of man's distinctive life is, that his affection and thought control his sense, or that what is private and individual in him take precedence of what is public and common. But Spiritualism exalts sense to the primacy of intellect and affection; and, by providing its followers with a direct revelation addressed to their bodily organs, saps the very foundation of their human worth, and reduces such worth to an animal value. No pretended revelation of spiritual verities is worth a jot, which practically disqualifies the heart and mind of man for the pursuit of Divine truth, or leaves his faith and hope towards God contingent upon the fallacious and de-moralizing testimony of sense. Sense is an excellent because most obedient mirror of Divine truth; but it would be worthless, even as a mirror, unless it imaged such truth in an inverse form to that which it bears to the intellect and affections. Christianity itself would have perished in its cradle if it had professed directly to satisfy man's endless intellectual want towards God, and not simply to stimulate and educate it. This, indeed, constitutes its infinite superiority to all the ethnic religions, that it avouches itself no literal or direct, but an exclusively mystical and living witness of the ineffable Divine name.
Thus I reject the claim of the spiritualist to succeed the apostolic gospel, because it inflames our natural egotism in place of mortifying it. The primal curse of man is personal consciousness,—-the sense of a reality in. himself greater than God's reality, and waging implacable war with it. Every one of us feels himself to be “like God”; that is, an all-sufficient arbiter of good and evil; and the way we make our self-conscious divinity felt by those whose worship of us is at all lukewarm needs not to be here recounted. And what our modern gospel does is simply to ratify this curse, by proving the grave itself purely ministerial to our wretched natural personality. No man feels more keenly than I do the intoxication there is in our finite ties; how parent and child, how friend and lover, lap you in sweetness while yet you are deaf to the voice of any deeper life. I know what blessedness these ties have wrought for the race in all the past; how they have engendered all the miracles of our specious civilization; and how they still foster the hollow peace and order which constitute our existing social inequality.. But I know also that when the hour of one's intellectual emancipation strikes, and he feels himself divinely summoned to renounce all conventional jargon for the voice of unadulterated justice alone, he will none the less truly feel these same ties “to bite like a serpent, and sting like an adder.” What downright fatuity it is, then, to attempt projecting them beyond the grave, as if to drown out forever the hope of a Divine redemption. I love my father and mother, my wife and child, my friend and neighbour, with all the love I am capable of yielding to any persons, and I shall take extreme good care therefore that no more pretentious persons shall ever swindle these out of my fixed regard. But some day, to my great awe and amazement, I discern the dawn of a holier love than this in my soul; a wholly impersonal love, being the love of infinite goodness and truth. And then, upon the instant, the love which I before felt to be life gladly confesses itself to be death. Nothing outwardly results. No sensible change takes place. Father and mother, wife and child, friend and neighbour, are just as dear to me as ever, perhaps more dear. But they have ceased to be supremely dear. This is all the difference, and it is an exclusively inward one. Their love has silently moulded me to manlier issues than either they or I ever dreamed of. The lion is born lion, and the horse is born horse. But no man was ever born man; only and at most he becomes man. So these near and dear persons surround my spiritual cradle, nursing and educating me out of my otherwise inveterate selfish instincts into future social possibilities, by binding me in tender, grateful homage to their provisional superiority.
I do not know whether the reader has duly considered it or not, but the law of our immortal destiny formulate itself thus: If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. Hard law it may be, but still law. its hardness lies in its making one's real foes to be those of his own household, whom yet one is naturally prone to love for what is of one's self in them, if for nothing else. If this law bade me hate my neighbour's family, yea, my neighbour's life even, on occasion, it would be easy enough to fulfil it. For under our existing civic régime my neighbour's interests and my own are in more or less direct conflict with each other. But to hate what is one's own is monstrously unnatural; and if therefore the law is valid, it only proves that nothing I can properly call my own, or even myself, enters as an appreciable element into my essential happiness. That is to say; whatsoever is of the person in us is illusory and perishes; only what belongs to impersonal goodness and truth is real and immortal.