Harriet Beecher Stowe

“ Our own country has just been plowed and seamed by a cruel war. The bullet that has pierced thousands of faithful breasts has cut the nerve of life and hope in thousands of homes. What yearning toward the invisible state, what agonized longings must have gone up as the sound of mournful surges, during these years succeeding the war! Can we wonder that any form of religion, or of superstition, which professes in the least to mitigate the anguish of that cruel separation, and to break [108] that dreadful silence by any voice or token, has hundreds of thousands of disciples? ”

“ But here is a mind that can with one bold dive reach the inner mysteries of the sensible and supersensible world, penetrate the motives and impulses that govern the specific moral acts of men, and disclose at once to us the horrible secret of a conspiracy which, without preconcert, has been entered into by thousands of men, women, and children in all parts of the land, to cheat the rest of the human race—a conspiracy, too, in which certain members of innumerable private families have banded together to play tricks upon their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters! ”

“ Now, we appeal to the consciences of modern Christians whether this statement of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints represents the doctrine that they have heard preached from the pulpit, and whether it has been made practically so much the food and nourishment of their souls as to give them all the support under affliction and bereavement which it certainly is calculated to do?
Do they really believe themselves to partake in their life-struggle of the kindness and care of the blessed angels who take delight in ministrations for their benefit? ”

“ None of us can offer even the remotest conjecture as to what the law of the common action of what we call mind and body may be. If we could, the discovery would have been already made. But, instead of necessarily assuming, as the Salem people did, that what they witnessed was the operation of spiritual upon human beings, we have, as our field of observation and study, a region undreamed of by them—the brain as an organized part of the human frame, and the nervous system, implicating more facts, more secrets, and more marvels than our forefathers attributed to the whole body. ”

“ But let me say most emphatically, that you want a public religion that will tower high above all other influences whatsoever; that will predominate over all, and ask favors of none; that will unite mankind in charity and brotherly love, and not divide them into hostile sects, and that will infuse its spirit into, and thus give direction to, all social and political movements. Such a religion the world must have, or from this hour degenerate. ”

“ Christians are commanded without ceasing to pray for each other. As their faith forbade them to consider the departed as lost or ceasing to exist, or in any way being out of their fellowship and communion, it did not seem to them strange or improper to yield to that impulse of the loving heart which naturally breathes to the Heavenly Father the name of its beloved. On the contrary, it was a custom in the earliest Christian times, in the solemn service of the Eucharist, to commend to God in a memorial prayer the souls of their friends departed, but not dead. ”

“ Leaving out of view the multitude who are irrelevant to the case, from having no knowledge, and being therefore incapable of an opinion, there is the large company of the superficial and light-minded, who are always injuring the honor and beauty of truth by the levity, the impertinence, the absurdity of the enthusiasm they pretend, and the nonsense they talk about “some new thing.” No period of society has been more familiar with that class and its mischief-making than our own. ”

“ We have here spiritualistic phenomena worthy of a God—worthy our highest conceptions—elevated, poetic, mysterious, grand!
And communities, and systems of philosophy and theology, which have explained all the supernatural art of the Bible, or which are always apologizing for it, blushing for it, ignoring and making the least they can of it—such communities will go into spiritualism by hundreds and by thousands. Instead of angels, whose countenance is as the lightning, they will have ghosts and tippings and tappings and rappings. ”

“ Yet such is the hunger, the longing, the wild craving of the human soul for the region of future immortality, its home-sickness for its future home, its perishing anguish of desire for the beloved ones who have been torn away from it, and to whom in every nerve it still throbs and bleeds, that professed words and messages from that state, however unworthy, are met with a trembling agony of eagerness, a willingness to be deceived, most sorrowful to witness. ”

“ To all kinds of inquiries answers are given, intelligible at least, if not always true. A wonderful jumble of mental and moral possibilities is this little piece of dead matter, now giving utterance to childish drivel, now bandying jokes and badinage, now stirring the conscience by unexceptionably Christian admonitions, and now uttering the baldest infidelity or the most shocking profanity; and often discoursing gravely on science, philosophy, or theology. ”

“ I lay it down as a proposition which all history proves, that Infidelity, in all its forms, is an enemy to the human race, and that it never has done or can do anybody any good, but always has done and must do harm. But it is notorious that the spirits, if they be such, with their mediums and disciples, have generally (though not universally, I grant) assumed an attitude at least of apparent hostility to almost every thing peculiar to the Christian religion, and most essential to it, and are constantly reiterating the almost identical ribaldry and sophistry of the infidels of the last century. ”

“ The cold scientists who, without pity and without sympathy, have supposed that they have had under their dissecting knives the very phenomena which have deluded their fellows, mistake. They have not seen them, and in the cold, unsympathizing mood of science, they never can see them. The experiences that have most weight with multitudes who believe more than they dare to utter, are secrets deep as the grave, sacred as the innermost fibers of their souls—they can not bring their voices to utter them except in some hour of uttermost confidence and to some friend of tried sympathy. ”

“ All these things afford matter for grave thought to those to whom none of the great and deep movements of society are indifferent. When we think how very tender and sacred are the feelings with which this has to do—what power and permanency they always must have, we can not but consider such a movement of society entitled at least to the most serious and thoughtful consideration. ”

“ The Tragedy was, no doubt, the central interest of society, families, and individuals throughout the Province for the life of one generation. Then, as silence had been kept in the homes as well as at church and market, the next generation entered upon life almost unconscious of the ghastly distinction which would attach in history to Massachusetts in general, and Salem in particular, as the scene of the Delusion and the Tragedy which showed the New World to be in essentials no wiser than the Old. ”

“ Neither the sight of the eye, nor the touch of the hand, can discover the spring by which Planchette moves. Therefore it is not, in its movements, a toy. It moves—undoubtedly it moves. And how? Intelligently! It answers questions of any kind put to it in any language required. It does this. This can not be done but by intelligence. Well, by what description of intelligence? It can not be supposed that the Divine intelligence is the motive; for how can God be conceived to make such a manifestation of himself as Planchette exhibits? ”

“ When a whole people abandons the solid ground of common sense, overleaps the boundaries of human knowledge, gives itself up to wild reveries, and lets loose its passions without restraint, it presents a spectacle more terrific to behold, and becomes more destructive and disastrous, than any convulsion of mere material nature,—than tornado, conflagration, or earthquake. ”

“ The true structure and government of human society will be clearly hinted by the structure and laws of the universe, and especially by that microcosm, [105] or little universe, the human organization. All the great stirring questions of the day, including the questions of suffrage, woman’s rights, the relations between labor and capital, and the questions of general political reform, will be put into the way of an easy and speedy solution; and mankind will be ushered into the light of a brighter day, socially, politically, and religiously, than has ever yet dawned upon the world. ”

“ The pastures of the Church have been suffered to become bare and barren of one species of food which the sheep crave and sicken for the want of. They break out of the inclosure and rush, unguided, searching for it among poisonous plants, which closely resemble it, but whose taste is deadly.
Those remarkable phenomena which affect belief upon this subject are not confined to paid mediums and spiritual circles, so called. They sometimes come of themselves to persons neither believing in them, looking for them, nor seeking them. Thus coming they can not but powerfully and tenderly move the soul. ”

“ Amid the conflict of phenomena of the human [59] mind and body, we have arrived now at the express controversy of Psychology against Physiology. Beyond the mere statement of the fact we have scarcely advanced a step. The first can not be, with any accuracy, called a science at all, and the other is in little more than a rudimentary state; but it is no small gain to have arrived at some conception of the nature of the problem set before us, and at some liberty of hypothesis as to its conditions. ”

“ The most devoted affection seems to have had no effect in deferring a second marriage so long as a year. No time was lost in settling in life at first; families were large; and half-brothers and sisters abounded; and as they grew up they married on the portions which were given them, as a matter of course,—each having house, land, and plenishing, until at last the parents gave away all but a sufficiency for their own need or convenience, and went into the town or remained in the central mansion, turning over the land and its cares to the younger generation. ”

“ At the end of those two centuries anatomists themselves were slicing the brain like a turnip, to see what was inside it,—not dreaming of the leading facts of its structure, nor of the inconceivable delicacy of its organization. After half a century of knowledge of the main truth in regard to the brain, and nearly that period of study of its organization, by every established medical authority in the civilized world, we are still perplexed and baffled at every turn of the inquiry into the relations of body and mind. ”

“ ELECTRICITY HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
From much and varied observation and experiment in reference to the performances of Planchette, and of kindred phenomena, now extending over a period of about twenty years, I here record my denial, in the most emphatic manner, that electricity or magnetism, properly so called, has anything to do with the mystery at all, and call for the proof that it has. ”

“ As an effect of this spiritualistic rain, you may look for an immense harvest of both wheat and tares—the grandest growths in great principles and ideas on the one hand, and a fearful crop of crudities and disorganizing superstitions on the other. There will be seen floating on the flood many of our most sacred institutions. Old wagon-ruts, long-forgotten cow-tracks, every little hole and corner in the old highways, will be filled to the brim with the rain. You will hardly know the difference between the true springs and the flowing mud-pools visible on every side. ”

“ Now Planchette, I admit, is not always a saint—in fact, she sometimes talks and acts very naughtily as well as foolishly; yet at other times, when a better spirit takes possession of her, she is gentle, loving, well disposed, and does certainly give most excellent advice,—advice which could not be heeded without detriment to the devil’s kingdom, and which, if universally followed, would work its overthrow entirely. It is inconceivable that Satan would thus tear down with one hand what he builds up with another. ”

“ Curious, is it not? to see “electricity” seizing hold of this irritation, that horror, the other fright, and such and such a superstition, repugnance, and disgust, and, carefully arranging these mental emotions, building them up by a mysterious mason-work into a distinctly defined and sharply pronounced individuality, with a peculiar moral and intellectual character of its own, differing more from each and all of the parties present in the flesh than any one of the latter differed from another! ”

“ We might contrast it also with the wild exultation of those of the Spiritualists of our own day who can form no conception of the modesty and patience requisite for the sincere search for truth, and who, once finding themselves surrounded by facts and appearances new and strange, assume that they have discovered a bridge over the bottomless “gulf beyond which lies the spirit-land,” and wander henceforth in a fools’ paradise, despising and pitying all who are less rash, ignorant, and presumptuous than themselves. ”