of the skies,
And mightier miracles than His perform;
They shall remove all sickness from the race,
Cast out all devils from the church and state,
And hurl into oblivion’s hollow sea
The mountains of depravity. Then earth,
From the Antarctic to the Arctic Pole,
Shall blush with flowers; the isles and continents
Teem with harmonic forms of bird and beast,
And fruit, and glogious shapes of art more fair
Than man’s imagination yet conceived,
Adorn the stately temples of a new
Divine religion. Every human soul
A second Adam, and a second Eve,
Shall dwell with its pure counterpart, conjoined
In sacramental marriage of the heart.
God shall be everywhere, and not, as now,
Guessed at, but apprehended, felt and known.”—p. 1.
I will take, says Mr. Howitt, as a fair specimen of the poetry and broad Christian philosophy of this spiritual epic, the recipe for writing a poem. In this, we see how far the requirements of Spiritualism are beyond the standard of the requirements of the world in poetry. They include the widest gatherings of knowledge, and still wider and loftier virtues and sympathies.
“To write a poem, man should be as pure
As frost-flowers; every thought should be in tune
To heavenly truth, and Nature’s perfect law,
Bathing the soul in beauty, joy, and peace.
His heart should ripen like the purple grape;
His country should be all the universe;
His friends the best and wisest of all time.
He should be universal as the light,
And rich as summer in ripe-fruited love.
He should have power to draw from common things
Essential truth!—and, rising o’er all fear
Of papal devils and of pagan gods,
Of ancient Satans, and of modern ghosts,
Should recognise all spirits as his friends,
And see the worst but harps of golden strings
Discordant now, but destined at the last
To thrill, inspired with God’s own harmony,
And make sweet music with the heavenly host.
He should forget his private preference
Of country or religion, and should see
All parties and all creeds with equal eye;
His the religion of true harmony;
Christ the ideal of his lofty aim;
The viewless Friend, the Comforter, and Guide,
The joy in grief, whose every element
Of life received in child-like faith,
Becomes a part of impulse, feeling, thought—
The central fire that lights his being’s sun.
He should not limit Nature by the known;
Nor limit God by what is known of him;
Nor limit man by present states and moods;
But see mankind at liberty to draw
Into their lives all Nature’s wealth, and all
Harmonious essences of life from God,
And so, becoming god-like in their souls,
And universal in their faculties,
Informing all their age, enriching time,
And blinding up the temple of the world
With massive structures of eternity.
He shall not fail to see how infinite
God is above humanity, nor yet
That God is throned in universal man,
The greater mind of pure intelligence,
Unlimited by states, moods, periods, creeds,
Self-adequate, self-balanced in his love,
And needing nothing and conferring all,
And asking nothing and receiving all,
Akin by love to every loving heart,
By nobleness to every noble mind,
By truth to all who look through natural forms,
And feel the throbbing arteries of law
In every pulse of nature and of man.”
The peculiar doctrine of the Spiritualists seems to be the belief in Spiritual intercourse, and in mediums; as The Spiritual Magazine tells us “the only media we know accessible to the public are Mrs. Marshal and her niece, of 22, Red Lion-street, Holborn,” we need not give ourselves much trouble about them. Concerning intercourse with departed spirits, an American Judge writes, “The first thing demonstrated to us is that we can commune with the spirits of the departed; that such communion is through the instrumentality of persons yet living; that the fact of mediumship is the result of physical organization; that the kind of communion is affected by moral causes, and that the power, like our other faculties, is possessed in different degrees, and is capable of improvement by cultivation,” and from this doctrine the believers gather comfortable assurances. The Judge adds, “These things being established, by means which show a settled purpose and an intelligent design, they demonstrate man’s immortality, and that in the simplest way, by appeals alike to his reason, to his affections, and to his senses. They thus show that they whom we once knew as living on earth do yet live, after having passed the gates of death, and leave in our minds the irresistible conclusion, that if they thus live we shall. This task Spiritualism has already performed on its thousands and its tens of thousands—more, indeed, in the last ten years than by all the pulpits in the land—and still the work goes bravely on. God speed it; for it is doing what man’s unaided reason has for ages tried in vain to do, and what, in this age of infidelity, seemed impossible to accomplish. Thus, too, is confirmed to us the Christian religion, which so many have questioned or denied. Not, indeed, that which sectarianism gives us, nor that which descends to us from the dark ages, corrupted by selfishness or distorted by ignorance, but that which was proclaimed through the spiritualism of Jesus of Nazareth in the simple injunction—‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment; and the second is like unto it—Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ ”
In the case of Mr. Harris, it seems to us, he lays his stress upon these peculiar doctrines, and rather aims at a universal Christianity; in all sects he sees goodness, and he would combine them all into his own. He and his disciples have found what all the rest are seeking after. His Christianity is the faith which all good spirits own, which all angels reverence. Christ came to reveal this faith: the whole world is but an expression of it; the whole universe but an illustration of it; and as we become Christ-like, in the renunciation of self, and the acceptance of the great law of service in the Lord and to the Lord, more and more we attain to an internal perception of the verities of that faith. The Word is opened before us, and the natural universe is perceived to be its outward illustration. The new church takes its stand upon this fundamental doctrine of regeneration, and it is to the putting forth of this in art, science, literature, poetry, preaching, in all the uses of an ordered life, that the energy of the true churchman is continually, in the Divine Providence, directed. And to those thus regenerated it is given to become mediums. Mr. Harris, in his sermon preached at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution,