Pliny, the Elder-London Review, 429 POETRY- 499 93 562 384 Anacreon, Ode on Himself Cavour, the Burial of— Dublin University 104 Farewell, the, of the Seal Blackwood's H Magazine, 78 Lost for a Time-J. W. THIRLWALL, 288 Love-a Remonstrance-Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, 537 Quarterly, 146 Historians, Modern French-Colburn's New Memories-WESTBY GIBSON, 285 Northman's Foray, the - Dublin University Monthly, 119 Magazine, 242 History of the Pope's Tiara, 423 History of the World, the, as Foretold in the Spirit-World, the-Sharpe's Magazine, 57 Sunny Side the Way, the, 271 Valediction, A, 431 cred Literature, Horse, the Foot of a, . 79 430 Press-Gang, Cruelties of the Insanity, the Incubation of-London Eclectic, 225 Revolutions in English History-British Quar- We may disbelieve every word of each particular narration-so perhaps did those who first listened to it; but if we as well as they had not a deep-seated belief in the general principle, and an instinctive desire toward that disencumbered nature, this lore would have no such charm for us. THAT there are powers above us and¡ ercise their forces in a far more direct and around us, unseen, but having intimate powerful manner than through the cumrelations with us, is a world-wide belief. brous organization of flesh and blood. Few nations have been found so degraded as to have no idea of Deity presiding over and controlling the powers of nature; and none that have any traditional literature are without the notion of a world of spirits occasionally manifesting itself to mortals. The charm of all ancient poetry-Oriental or Classical, Scandinavian, Romantic, or Teutonic-lies mainly in this, that it represents man in relation to the invisible world; man exercising his corporeal powers, aided or thwarted by incorporeal natures-Divine, angelic, demoniac, or human-which ex *Footfalls on the Boundary of another World. With Narrative Illustrations. By ROBERT DALE OWEN. Trübner. VOL. LIV.-No. 1 The traditions of men on this subject are confirmed as to their general principle by the records of inspiration. The Bible tells of miracles which were wont to attest every direct revelation of God to man; of visits which men used to receive from angels, (ayyeλo,) messengers not always nor even often making it plain whather they were disembodied spirits of men, or belonging to some other order 1 of intelligent beings. It tells also of principalities and powers of darkness continually acting as the enemies of God and man. In accordance with human tradition it represents flesh and blood as always quailing in the manifested presence of spirits, however friendly in their character; and it denounces as the grossest wickedness and rebellion against God the conduct of those who seek a forbidden confederacy with them, for the purpose of knowing what he has hidden in the future, or acquiring a power over the elements of nature beyond what he has permitted. The whole Bible is based on the idea of a spiritual world standing in intimate relations with our own. In the infancy, whether of individuals or nations, supernatural agency affords the easiest and most acceptable explanation of all phenomena of which no other cause can be traced. Let children be told that the thunder which they hear is the voice of God, the lightning the flashes of his eye, and they will reverently believe that some dreadful wickedness has been committed to call for such expressions of anger; just as Christopher Columbus is said to have persuaded the American Indians that an eclipse of the sun was the sure token of Heaven's displeasure against them for their evil intentions toward him and his companions. But as individuals or nations advance toward maturity, they learn that all natural phenomena depend on approximate causes more or less distinctly understood. The thunder, which was once regarded as a personal voice, turns out to be the echo of electric explosions among the clouds; the eclipse, which darkened the sun at mid-day, is found to be occasioned by the moon intercepting his beams, according to a wellknown law of her evolutions. We are taught that even the winds and waves, which appear so uncertain in their action, are subject to rules of sequence as invariable as those of the rising and setting sun. The beams of knowledge dispel the fairy frost-work of fancy; and the myths of infancy are surrendered for the studies of manhood. Now the reaction of our minds against the credulity of our ignor ance is likely to drive us for a time into the regions of skepticism; and only by slow degrees, do we learn to hold an even and steady course in that path which is illuminated by the light of science, blended with that of faith. It was the misfortune of European society that the ages of its ignorant faith were under the dominion of a crafty and avaricious priesthood, who worked on the credulity of the people to promote the aggrandizement of the Church. Hence the numberless and monstrous legends of medieval miracles, apparitions of ghosts, demons, and what not, the fabrications of willful deceit; or, at best, the offspring of imaginations perverted and diseased by the unnatural influences of monastic life. As the most profitable of all the lying wonders of Rome was the purgatory of a future life, so the very bathos of superstition was the belief that those regions of punishment lying beneath their feet might actually be entered from an opening on the surface of the earth; and that the man who could endure the discipline now in the flesh would be exempt from the liability to suffer it hereafter in the spirit. The purgatory of St. Patrick lay, relatively to the rest of Christian Europe, in the direction which mankind from the remotest ages had supposed to be the place of departed spirits-the somber regions of the setting sun, not absolutely inaccessible to the adventurous pilgrim. Here was a cave under the care of a small staff of Augustine monks, which was for ages the wonder and glory of Christendom. Whoever was bold and pious enough to endure for twenty-four hours the terrors of the purgatory to which it led might thus expiate all his sins, past and future, which otherwise would cost him ages of torment. Numbers from all parts of Europe made the attempt, and more perished than ever returned to tell their adventures; for, according to Jacobus Vitriaco: "Whoever went into it, not being truly penitent and contrite, was presently snatched away by demons, never more to be seen." In the case of those who were found alive when the cave was opened by the monks after the twenty-four hours, their experience in the various fields of punishment, the extremes of cold, followed by those of heat, fiery serpents, toads, spits, while tempting demons surrounded and threatened-all was carefully written down by the priestly guardians of the place for the edification of the faithful throughout Christendom. If the reader supposes that this was an obscure superstition, prevailing chiefly among that class of people who in modern times have resorted to the island for penance, let him turn to the patent rolls of Edward the Third's reign, bodied spirits, good and evil, and the and, under date 1358, he will find the possibility of intercourse with them; as copy of a testimonial of which the follow-well as a solemn sense of the sin of any ing is a free translation: "The King to all and singular to whom the present letters shall come, greeting. Malatesta Ungarus, a noble gentleman and Knight of Rimini, coming into our presence, hath declared that lately, leaving his own country, he has, with much toil, visited the purgatory of St. Patrick, in our dominion of Ireland, and for the usual space of one whole day and night remained shut up therein as one of the dead; carnestly beseeching us that in confirmation of the fact we would deign to grant him our royal letters. Though the assertion of so noble a man might be accepted by us as sufficient, yet considering the extreme perils of this pilgrimage, we are further informed concerning it by letters from our trusty and well beloved Almaric de St. Amand, our Justice of Ireland, also from the prior and convent of the said place of purgatory, and from other men of credit, as also by clear proofs that the said nobleman hath duly and courageously completed his pilgrimage; we have therefore thought proper to give to him favorably our royal testimony concerning the same, that there may be no doubt; and that the truth of the premised may more clearly appear, we have been induced to grant to him these letters with the royal seal. Given at our palace at Westminster, the twentyfourth day of October." There is also the copy of a safe-conduct, or passport, granted by Richard II. in 1397, to enable Raymond, Viscount of Perilhos, Baron of Seret, Knight of Rhodes, and Chamberlain of Charles VI. of France, to visit the purgatory with a retinue of twenty men and thirty horses; which Raymond afterward wrote a narrative of his adventures in the Limousin dialect, with all the usual horrors. "The most gifted tongue could not relate, the most forcible and copious writer could not adequately describe, such dreadful tortures and punishments. Woe to sinners! Alas for those who do not repent in this world! All the ills of this life, labor, poverty, exile, imprisonment, disgrace, misery, calamity, wounds, and even death itself, are nothing to the pains of purgatory." Such were some of the medieval "footfalls on the boundary of another world." The light of the Reformation dispelled, at least from the English mind, the terrors of purgatory, and the notion that a mitigation of its tortures might be procured through priestly influence. But there remained a general belief in disem commerce with evil ones. In the seventeenth century we find Jeremy Taylor, in his episcopal capacity, investigating a ghost story, which was afterward communicated in writing by his lordship's secre tary to the editor of Sadducismus Triumphatus. The leading facts of the story are, that the ghost of a man named James Haddock appeared first on horseback on the highway to one Taverner, whom he had known in the flesh, "a lusty, proper, stout, tall fellow," and desired him to carry a message to those who were wrong. ing his fatherless boy in the matter of a lease which ought to have stood in his name; the reason alleged for appearing to him being, that he was a man of more resolution than others. But Taverner did not care to meddle with what did not concern him; and the ghost returned again and again, threatening to tear him. in pieces if he did not carry the message. Whereupon Taverner, who was in the service of the Earl of Donegal, consulted his lordship's chaplain; and the chaplain took him for a further consultation with the incumbent of Belfast, whose only dif ficulty, after hearing the details, was whether it would be lawful to do the errand in case the spirit was a bad one. However, considering the justice of the case, it was determined to go, and the chaplain accompanied the man. It would seem the details of the wrong were admitted to be as the ghost had revealed them. A few days afterward the Bishop was holding a court at Dromore, and, having heard of this strange transaction, he summoned the parties before him for an investigation. Alcock, the secretary, who was present throughout, says that "my lord styled it a strange scene of Providence," and was satisfied that the apparition was true and real. He adds: "This Taverner, with all the persons and places mentioned in the story, I knew very well, and all wise and good men did believe it, especially the Bishop and the Dean of Connor, Dr. Rust." That the narrative, whatever its merits, was no fabrication, either of the Bishop's secretary or the editor of Sadducismus Triumphatus, who published it, appears from the fact that the same particulars were afterward related by the Countess of Donegal to Richard Baxter, with more minute particulars as to the nature of the wrong done to the boy, with the subsequent fact that a new lease was drawn in his favor, and sealed by the earl her husband. We learn from several of the books in which such narratives appear, that there were in those days persons who avowed their disbelief in apparitions, and held witchcraft and sorcery to be mere juggling and fraud, instead of a true commerce with the devil. We gather also that those who denied the possibility of communication with the unseen world, generally doubted its very existence; and, like the Sadducees of old, said that there no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit." Bishop Burnett characterizes this skepticism about witchcraft as "atheism, which was then beginning to gain ground, chiefly by reason of the hypocrisy of some, and the fantastical conceits of the more sincere enthusiasts." was Descending to the eighteenth century, we find the belief of the supernatural becoming fainter and fainter, but not wholly extinguished, or even without respectable patronage. Dr. Johnson used to say, that "all reason was against it, but all experience for it ;" and he puts this speech into the mouth of Imlac, the sage in Rasselas : pose the possibility of commune with evil spirits." Before that century closed, unsanctified ticism, and several of the leading men of philosophy had attained the acme of skepthe day proclaimed their belief that there was nothing real, except body, in the universe-neither God, nor devil, nor soul of man; and that all the functions that had been attributed to a spirit in man were but operations of his material organization. These views, however, were the vagaries of a few, carried away by metaphysical speculations. The men of science, properly so called, the students of physical nature-took a different course. They found that many things hitherto deemed preternatural were assignable to natural causes; that many of the wonders of sorcery (so called) were tricks of machinery, chemistry, or sleight-of-hand; and country fireside might be traced to optical that a great deal of the ghost-lore of the illusion, ventriloquism, and hallucination. They explored the mechanism of the universe, and, to some extent, traced the plan of its government; they found it to consist of a marvelous catenation of causes and effects; whereupon they judged that all natural phenomena must depend entific study implies a "postulate of conon natural causes; they decided that scistant sequences, with determinate conditions of occurrence ;"* and too many of them jumped to the conclusion that the idea of any superior agency is inconsistent with "the sense of the invariable course of nature, and the scientific explanation of phenomena." "This totality of finite things," says Strauss, "forms a vast circle, which, except that it owes its existence and laws to a superior power, suffers no intrusion from without. tion is so much a habit of thought with This convicthe modern world, that in actual life the belief in a supernatural manifestation, an immediate divine agency, is at once at That the dead are seen no more I will not undertake to maintain against the concurrent testimony of all ages and nations. There is no people, rude or unlearned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience could make credible. That it is doubted by single cavilers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it with their fears." In the same age Blackstone, in his Com-tributed to ignorance or imposture." On mentaries, says, concerning occult powers in connection with evil spirits: "To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testament; and the thing itself is a truth to which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony, either by examples seemingly well attested, or by prohibitory laws which at least sup this principle these savans have not only taught the present generation to spurn all belief in ghost-lore, witchcraft, and whatever else implies spiritual or supernat al agency, but they have, in as plain terms as they dare, discarded the Scripture records of miracles, prophecy, and other superhuman phenomena, representing these writings as the productions of a period when "poetry, religion, and history * Grote. |