Sidor som bilder
PDF
ePub

Then dance by night, and dance by day,
With a ho, ho! follow me down;
For wine and women lead the way
Men travel to the devil's town.

Fill up the cup with sherris sack,

Fear not the monk with shaven crown;
None ever care to wander back,

Who once have found the devil's town.

Mr. Harris tells us that he condescended to be the devil's amanuensis in order to shew us what a devil he is. Did any one need any such instruction? Don't we know pretty well by all the murders, wholesale and retail, by all the violences and oppressions, the frauds and rascalities, the hypocrisies, and the nastinesses that riot through the earth, and through what we call civilized society, what are the doctrines and the doings of the hells? Yet Mr. Harris, with all this pandemonial demonstration in the world, willingly took up the devil's censer, and scattered abroad a fresh outpouring of blasphemy and moral defilement, at the very time that he was branding all conscientious and pure-minded Spiritualists as dealers with the devil! What a fine example of the privileges of saints, as Hudibras had set them forth long ago:

The saints may do the same things by
The spirit in sincerity,

Which other men are tempted to,
And at the devil's instance do:
And yet the actions be contrary,
Just as the saints and sinners vary!
For as on land there is no beast,
But in some fish at sea's expressed;
So in the wicked there's no vice,
Of which the saints have not a spice;
And yet that thing that's pious in,
The one, in t'other is a sin.

In

But the inconsistencies of Mr. Harris do not end here. the Apocalypse, p. 396, he gives us this description of the moral and social condition of England:-"Age after age, the guiltiness of the people has been absorbed as a poison, till the elements reek, and the earth is tainted thereby. Over well nigh extinct feudalism, all victorious Mammonism, in this last age, erects its throne. It is a social hell. Every man who sins through the body, infuses, through bodily sin, bodily poison into the body of nature. What then must the body of this terrestrial England be? It is this all-pervading elemental taint that benumbs the rational faculties, and that makes even the just connivers at the iniquities of the unjust, till Christians take pleasure in the triumphs of aggressive war, and benches of bishops uphold slavery and the slave trade; that makes this nation esteem itself the best and purest on the globe; that

causes it to sit in lordly places, the Pharisee of peoples. It is rich and increased in goods; it enlarges its store-houses; it is the fool that saith in his heart there is no God.' But the crimes that are buried in its soil are coming forth to take possession of its body; the judgment of this nation is at hand.

"This is the land of common-sense; the hard, shrewd, practical, bargaining, money-getting, power-holding country, that has undertaken to be the merchant, the manufacturer, and middleman for all the globe; the land of the heavy purse and the strong arm. Well has it thriven upon its traffic in human flesh. Men dimly discern in this hour the sins of their fathers. We now see what accursed wretches were the Crusaders, who met Mussulman cruelty with a worse cruelty and wickeder lust. We see what thrice-besotted tools of despotism were the old Tory priesthood, who grovelled for preferment at the feet of king's mistresses, and held that every crowned oppressor was the Lord's anointed, who grew fat from the spoils of rapine and butchery, till the oppressed were maddened with scepticism, and no God was believed in but that false god who helps the strong against the weak. There is a judgment in this world. The enlightened conscience now re-hears, and sets aside the decisions of the past. Righteousness, that always was a sentiment, is fast becoining a science. The thunders of the four Gospels are loosening their voices. Lips, crushed into dumbness for generations, and trodden into dust, are faintly heard! and lo, all around us, it is the cry of our brother's blood that goeth up from the ground. The invisible Hades has broken loose, and like a subterranean torrent, men hear the hollow voices of the under world. Men stand upon an earth that is crumbling, and beneath a firmament that is being cleft asunder, by the swift down-rushing of the final breath of fire.

"Sodom and Gomorrah would have repented before that preaching of Divine Love which proved ineffectual in Capernaum and Jerusalem; in other words, the nations grow harder as they grow older, and the world grows old about them. The truth that would reclaim an African and transfigure a Japanese, provokes, in stiffened, antiquated lands, like this, the sneer of derision and the cold smile of incredulity. In fine, we have marched in the progress of civilization, and by the outgrowth of nationality from nationality, to the Spiritual West, as the men of the age of bone, to the edge of the Material West of the known world. We have graded and terraced the precipitous mountain-sides, and planted our gardens, and built our palaces thereon, but they overhang the pit. For this land in the future there is but one of two things possible; utter abnegation of self, utter abjuration of vices, utter casting out of devils, utter acceptance

of Divine life in all things,-or the last days and the last experiences of an old man grown grey in evil, paralysis, and imbecility, and idiocy, and death, and judgment and hell!”

There is, no doubt, great truth in these statements, but in proportion to the truth is our amazement at the proceedings of Mr. Harris. In the second chapter of this same volume he points out the evil effects of spiritually-opened men being surrounded by anti-spiritual and diabolical influences. The last place, therefore, where you would suppose that Mr. Harris would think of going to, would be to a country like England, thus saturated and reeking with such influences. Yet it is into this very tainted and bedevilled land-into this old haunted house of the nations, as he terms it-that he directly rushes to dictate and print his new spiritual volumes! Whilst all America, "the Spiritual West" as he terms it, is open to him, with all its vast solitudes and airy mountains, whilst he is in such a sensitive and contagious condition that he cannot see the face of a single English friend, touch the hand of the most spiritually-minded, but shuts himself up a second St. John in a Patmos of self-isolation, for the parturition of a new Apocalypsehe steers his eccentric course right into the heart of the land which swarms with demons more densely packed than those which Luther anticipated on the tiles of Wurms; into this "social hell," as he knows and pronounces it, festering with the crimes of ages, fetid with the breath of Mammon bishops, " of bloated Plutocrats,' and murderous and adulterous kings. If we find in the volumes thus produced to the light, doctrines and revelations bearing the marks of wild inspirations and of imposing spirits, we shall not greatly wonder thereat. Our present purpose is to notice the two psycho-theologic volumes whose titles head this article; his new poem, "The Great Republic: A Poem of the Sun," will require a separate analysis.

To understand the character and drift of these volumes, we must first understand the pretensions of the writer. Thomas Harris does not come before us as a simple, uninspired writer, giving us a careful and earnest statement of his views of theology; but as a seer, a prophet, and an authorized and commissioned revealer of the arcana of heaven. He takes not a position on the same plane as Swedenborg, nor of St. John the seer of the Apocalypse nor of the Apostles in general, but on a far higher elevation. He treads in the steps of Swedenborg so far as to assume the same office of interpreting the inner meaning of the Scriptures; but he ascends avowedly far above Swedenborg, and opens up to us mysteries to which, he says, neither Swedenborg, nor any other man, has yet been admitted. Let us hear his own announcement. These are the words with

which his Apocalypse opens:-"The Apostle John did not possess the gift of opened respiration, neither did any of the Apostles." But Thomas Harris possesses it; and the whole of these two volumes is occupied with his assertion of this superior condition, and with the mysteries into which it has introduced him. "There were twelve methods of respiration peculiar to the inhabitants of the earths and suns of the universe, before the ancient harmony was invaded. These were respectively as follows:-First, respiration from internals to externals, through. the Celestial Heaven; Second, through the Spiritual Heaven; Third, through the Ultimate Heaven; Fourth, through the Ultimate Earth of Spirits; Fifth, through the series of World-souls; Sixth, through the life-world of each Heaven; Seventh, through the love-world of each Heaven; Eighth, through the form-world of each Heaven; Ninth, through the essence-world of each Heaven; Tenth, through the harmony-world of each Heaven; Eleventh, through the most intimate access of the Divine Spirit through the inmost degree of the Will; Twelfth, through the full and plenary possession of the Man by the Divine Spirit." Apocalypse, p. 25.

The Apostles had none of these; but Thomas Harris has them all; and through them, as he tells us, enters all spiritual regions, damned or divine; converses with all angels, devils, fays or fairies, aromal spirits and others; and possessing and possessed by the Divine Spirit itself, comprehends all mysteries, and reveals just as many as becomes a prophet and saint of such beatific and sublime proportions, and as may keep simple, anserine souls gaping for a glimpse of more. "Patmos," he tells us, "signifies isolation and reflection. The man who desires to become celestial-natural, that is, to breathe by influx from the Lord, through the Celestial Heaven, must be isolated from all ties, which have their origin and action in the principle of self-love. To him there must be literally no country, since he must esteem all men, of whatever race, as with an equal nearness, brethren and friends. To him also, there must be no kindred in the principle of self-love. He must place the children of his own loins at an equal remove from himself, with the children called from others, acting and doing towards them as the Lord's agent of benefaction, guided by Him. Coming out of all personal and private friendships in the same manner, he loves companions; but as the Lord loves in and through him, dissociating himself from them, conjoining himself to them, ministering, or ceasing to minister, solely by direction from above. The state which he is in is then called Patmos." Yes, that is Patmos, and that was the Patmos which he made of England when he dictated these books. But step one step further.

"There will arise on earth a society called the 'BROTHER

HOOD OF THE NEW LIFE,' internal respiration being the bond of union in the soul. In Christian and Pagan nations, both bond and free, this fraternity will exist. Whoever becomes a brother

of the New Life through the full re-opening of the respirations, being in preparation to become a living human tabernacle of Christ, will henceforth stand to the Lord, to the angels, to men, to evil spirits in relations radically different from those of others." Apocalypse p. 32. But the mysteries unveiled to the New Brotherhood, can only in part be communicated to the outsiders. "Further arcana on this point should not be written for the indiscriminate public, they belong to the husbands and wives in the Brotherhood of the New Life. It is perfectly impossible for men and women to advance beyond a preliminary stage without such knowledges," p. 234. "The arcana here are for the most part of too sacred a character for publication in a work designed for general circulation," p. 235. "Becoming the members of a solidarity (New Brotherhood) the true education is begun it is only through education in solidarity that the Divine Wisdom can take possession of us," &c., p. 352.

Mr. Harris tells us that 66 a new society called the Brotherhood of the New Life" will arise on earth: but every one who knows anything of the career of Thomas Harris, knows that this society has been in existence for some years in America, nearly since the time that he was before in England. That he is the head of it, and these very volumes bear on their title pages the name of this society as their publisher, namely, "New York and London, Brotherhood of the New Life, 1867."

With these particulars before him the reader cannot be unconscious of their bearing, tendency and significance. The Brotherhood of the New Life is a society exclusively for those who possess the internal respiration according to Mr. Harris's conception of it: Thomas Harris is the head of this association, he is God's appointed expounder of all divine mysteries, and these mysteries are not communicable to any one without the pale of this elect society. In fact, it is a new species of Popery, of which Thomas Harris is the Pope. That we do him no injustice in this statement, his own repeated declarations in this Apocalypse volume testify-" In treating of the celestial sense of the Apocalypse the task has been easy, so far as the letter has been concerned, notwithstanding the fact of various readings and interpretations. I have seen that temple of harmony, the glorious image of which was let down into the mind of St. John. So far as it has been possible and lawful, I have described it," &c., Apocalypse p. 9. To qualify him for this great task, he has traversed more continents of heaven, hell and intermediate regions, as well as planetary and other cosmical

« FöregåendeFortsätt »