Both the infidel spiritualists and the orthodox Roman Catholics seem to have leagued themselves this year against the iconoclastic pretensions of materialism. Increase of skepticism has developed of late a like increase of credulity. The champions of the Bible “divine” miracles rival the panegyrist’s mediumistic phenomena, and the middle ages revive in the nineteenth century. Once more we see the Virgin Mary resume her epistolary correspondence with the faithful children of her church; and while the “angel friends” scribble messages to spiritualists through their mediums, the “mother of God” drops letters direct from heaven to earth. The shrine of Notre Dame de Lourdes has turned into a spiritualistic cabinet for “materializations,” while the cabinets of popular American mediums are transformed into sacred shrines, into which Mohammed, Bishop Polk, Joan of Arc and other aristocratic spirits from over the “dark river,” having descended, “materialize” in full light. And if the Virgin Mary is seen taking her daily walk in the woods about Lourdes in full human form, why not the Apostle of Islam, and the late Bishop of Louisiana? Either both “miracles” are possible, or both kinds of these manifestations, the “divine” as well as the “spiritual,” are arrant impostures. Time alone will prove which; but meanwhile, as science refuses the loan of her magic lamp to illuminate these mysteries, common people must go stumbling on whether they be mired or not.

The recent “miracles” at Lourdes having been unfavorably discussed in the London papers, Monsignor Capel communicates to the Times the views of the Roman Church in the following terms:

“As to the miraculous cures which are effected, I would refer your readers to the calm, judicious work, La Grotte de Lourdes, written by Dr. Dozous, an eminent resident practitioner, inspector of epidemic diseases for the district, and medical assistant of the Court of Justice. He prefaces a number of detailed cases of miraculous cures, which he says he has studied with great care and perseverance, with these words: ‘I declare that these cures effected at the Sanctuary of Lourdes by means of the water of the fountain, have established their supernatural character in the eyes of men of good faith. I ought to confess that without these cures, my mind, little prone to listen to miraculous explanations of any kind, would have had great difficulty in accepting even this fact (the apparition), remarkable as it is from so many points of view. But the cures, of which I have been so often an ocular witness, have given to my mind a light which does not permit me to ignore the importance of the visits of Bernadette to the Grotto, and the reality of the apparitions with which she was favored.’ The testimony of a distinguished medical man, who has carefully watched from the beginning Bernadette, and the miraculous cures at the Grotto, is at least worthy of respectful consideration. I may add, that the vast number of those who come to the Grotto do so to repent of their sins, to increase their piety, to pray for the regeneration of their country, to profess publicly their belief in the Son of God and his Immaculate Mother. Many come to be cured of bodily ailments; and on the testimony of eye-witnesses several return home freed from their sickness. To upbraid with non-belief, as does your article, those who use also the waters of the Pyrenees, is as reasonable as to charge with unbelief the magistrates who inflict punishment on the peculiar people for neglecting to have medical aid. Health obliged me to pass the winters of 1860 to 1867 at Pau. This gave me the opportunity of making the most minute inquiry into the apparition at Lourdes. After frequent and lengthened examinations of Bernadette and of some of the miracles effected, I am convinced that, if facts are to be received on human testimony, then has the apparition at Lourdes every claim to be received as an undeniable fact. It is, however, no part of the Catholic faith, and may be accepted or rejected by any Catholic without the least praise or condemnation.”

Let the reader observe the sentence we have italicized. This makes it clear that the Catholic Church, despite her infallibility and her liberal postage convention with the Kingdom of Heaven, is content to accept even the validity of divine miracles upon human testimony. Now when we turn to the report of Mr. Huxley’s recent New York lectures on evolution, we find him saying that it is upon “human historical evidence that we depend for the greater part of our knowledge for the doings of the past.” In a lecture on Biology, he has said “ ... every man who has the interest of truth at heart must earnestly desire that every well-founded and just criticism that can be made should be made; but it is essential ... that the critic should know what he is talking about.” An aphorism that its author should recall when he undertakes to pronounce upon psychological subjects. Add this to his views, as expressed above, and who could ask a better platform upon which to meet him?

Here we have a representative materialist, and a representative Catholic prelate, enunciating an identical view of the sufficiency of human testimony to prove facts that it suits the prejudices of each to believe. After this, what need for either the student of occultism, or even the spiritualist, to hunt about for endorsements of the argument they have so long and so persistently advanced, that the psychological phenomena of ancient and modern thaumaturgists being superabundantly proven upon human testimony must be accepted as facts? Church and College having appealed to the tribunal of human evidence, they cannot deny the rest of mankind an equal privilege. One of the fruits of the recent agitation in London of the subject of mediumistic phenomena, is the expression of some remarkably liberal views on the part of the secular press. “In any case, we are for admitting spiritualism to a place among tolerated beliefs, and letting it alone accordingly,” says the London Daily News, in 1876. “It has many votaries who are as intelligent as most of us, and to whom any obvious and palpable defect in the evidence meant to convince must have been obvious and palpable long ago. Some of the wisest men in the world believed in ghosts, and would have continued to do so even though half-a-dozen persons in succession had been convicted of frightening people with sham goblins.”

It is not for the first time in the history of the world, that the invisible world has to contend against the materialistic skepticism of soul-blind Sadducees. Plato deplores such an unbelief, and refers to this pernicious tendency more than once in his works.

From Kapila, the Hindu philosopher, who many centuries before Christ demurred to the claim of the mystic Yogins, that in ecstasy a man has the power of seeing Deity face to face and conversing with the “highest” beings, down to the Voltaireans of the eighteenth century, who laughed at everything that was held sacred by other people, each age had its unbelieving Thomases. Did they ever succeed in checking the progress of truth? No more than the ignorant bigots who sat in judgment over Galileo checked the progress of the earth’s rotation. No exposures whatever are able to vitally affect the stability or instability of a belief which humanity inherited from the first races of men, those, who—if we can believe in the evolution of spiritual man as in that of the physical one—had the great truth from the lips of their ancestors, the gods of their fathers, “that were on the other side of the flood.” The identity of the Bible with the legends of the Hindu sacred books and the cosmogonies of other nations, must be demonstrated at some future day. The fables of the mythopœic ages will be found to have but allegorized the greatest truths of geology and anthropology. It is in these ridiculously expressed fables that science will have to look for her “missing links.”

Otherwise, whence such strange “coincidences” in the respective histories of nations and peoples so widely thrown apart? Whence that identity of primitive conceptions which, fables and legends though they are termed now, contain in them nevertheless the kernel of historical facts, of a truth thickly overgrown with the husks of popular embellishment, but still a truth? Compare only this verse of Genesis vi.: “And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.... There were giants in the earth in those days,” etc., with this part of the Hindu cosmogony, in the Vedas, which speaks of the descent of the Brahmans. The first Brahman complains of being alone among all his brethren without a wife. Notwithstanding that the Eternal advises him to devote his days solely to the study of the Sacred Knowledge (Veda), the first-born of mankind insists. Provoked at such ingratitude, the eternal gave Brahman a wife of the race of the Daints, or giants, from whom all the Brahmans maternally descend. Thus the entire Hindu priesthood is descended, on the one hand, from the superior spirits (the sons of God), and from Daintany, a daughter of the earthly giants, the primitive men.[222] “And they bare children to them; the same became mighty men which were of old; men of renown.”[223]

The same is found in the Scandinavian cosmogonical fragment. In the Edda is given the description to Gangler by Har, one of the three informants (Har, Jafuhar, and Tredi) of the first man, called Bur, “the father of Bör, who took for wife Besla, a daughter of the giant Bölthara, of the race of the primitive giants.” The full and interesting narrative may be found in the Prose Edda, sects. 4-8, in Mallett’s Northern Antiquities.[224]

The same groundwork underlies the Grecian fables about the Titans; and may be found in the legend of the Mexicans—the four successive races of Popol-Vuh. It constitutes one of the many ends to be found in the entangled and seemingly inextricable skein of mankind, viewed as a psychological phenomenon. Belief in supernaturalism would be otherwise inexplicable. To say that it sprang up, and grew and developed throughout the countless ages, without either cause or the least firm basis to rest upon, but merely as an empty fancy, would be to utter as great an absurdity as the theological doctrine that the universe sprang into creation out of nothing.

It is too late now to kick against an evidence which manifests itself as in the full glare of noon. Liberal, as well as Christian papers, and the organs of the most advanced scientific authorities, begin to protest unanimously against the dogmatism and narrow prejudices of sciolism. The Christian World, a religious paper, adds its voice to that of the unbelieving London press. Following is a good specimen of its common sense:

“If a medium,” it says,[225] “can be shown ever so conclusively to be an impostor, we shall still object to the disposition manifested by persons of some authority in scientific matters, to pooh-pooh and knock on the head all careful inquiry into those subjects of which Mr. Barrett took note in his paper before the British Association. Because spiritualists have committed themselves to many absurdities, that is no reason why the phenomena to which they appeal should be scouted as unworthy of examination. They may be mesmeric, or clairvoyant, or something else. But let our wise men tell us what they are, and not snub us, as ignorant people too often snub inquiring youth, by the easy but unsatisfactory apothegm, “Little children should not ask questions.”

Thus the time has come when the scientists have lost all right to be addressed with the Miltonian verse, “O thou who, for the testimony of truth, hast borne universal reproach!” Sad degeneration, and one that recalls the exclamation of that “doctor of physic” mentioned one hundred and eighty years ago by Dr. Henry More, and who, upon hearing the story told of the drummer of Tedworth and of Ann Walker, “cryed out presently, If this be true, I have been in a wrong box all this time, and must begin my account anew.”[226]

But in our century, notwithstanding Huxley’s endorsement of the value of “human testimony,” even Dr. Henry More has become “an enthusiast and a visionary, both of which, united in the same person, constitute a canting madman.”[227]

What psychology has long lacked to make its mysterious laws better understood and applied to the ordinary as well as extraordinary affairs of life, is not facts. These it has had in abundance. The need has been for their recording and classification—for trained observers and competent analysts. From the scientific body these ought to have been supplied. If error has prevailed and superstition run riot these many centuries throughout Christendom, it is the misfortune of the common people, the reproach of science. The generations have come and gone, each furnishing its quota of martyrs to conscience and moral courage, and psychology is little better understood in our day than it was when the heavy hand of the Vatican sent those brave unfortunates to their untimely doom and branded their memories with the stigma of heresy and sorcery.