The religious sentiment was a flame which he could
blow up with his breath, or a spark that he could utterly extinguish.
It is unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and
saw that, if these things were to be believed, the individual soul was
virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present
life debased, and that the idea of man's eternal responsibility was
made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once impossible, and not
worth acceptance. But I would have perished on the spot sooner than
believe it.
The epoch of rapping spirits, and all the wonders that have followed in
their train,--such as tables upset by invisible agencies, bells
self-tolled at funerals, and ghostly music performed on
jew's-harps,--had not yet arrived. Alas, my countrymen, methinks we
have fallen on an evil age! If these phenomena have not humbug at the
bottom, so much the worse for us. What can they indicate, in a
spiritual way, except that the soul of man is descending to a lower
point than it has ever before reached while incarnate?
We are pursuing
a downward course in the eternal march, and thus bring ourselves into
the same range with beings whom death, in requital of their gross and
evil lives, has degraded below humanity! To hold intercourse with
spirits of this order, we must stoop and grovel in some element more
vile than earthly dust. These goblins, if they exist at all, are but
the shadows of past mortality, outcasts, mere refuse stuff, adjudged
unworthy of the eternal world, and, on the most favorable supposition,
dwindling gradually into nothingness. The less we have to say to them
the better, lest we share their fate!
The audience now began to be impatient; they signified their desire for
the entertainment to commence by thump of sticks and stamp of
boot-heels. Nor was it a great while longer before, in response to
their call, there appeared a bearded personage in Oriental robes,
looking like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights. He came upon
the platform from a side door, saluted the spectators, not with a
salaam, but a bow, took his station at the desk, and first blowing his
nose with a white handkerchief, prepared to speak. The environment of
the homely village hall, and the absence of many ingenious contrivances
of stage effect with which the exhibition had heretofore been set off,
seemed to bring the artifice of this character more openly upon the
surface. No sooner did I behold the bearded enchanter, than, laying my
hand again on Hollingsworth's shoulder, I whispered in his ear, "Do you
know him?"