of female character: 'Shakspeare says nothing of woman that is to her credit or to his own;' and Milton's Eve has the fatal defect of following the Scripture story of the fall, the man's version, for which she substitutes her own:— 'In this new version of the Fall, Eve is not weak, but strong. She finds Adam in bonds, and she sets him free. He is bound by a bad law to live in a state of darkness and bondage, a mere animal life, without knowing good from evil. She breaks his fetters, and shows him the way to heaven. The consequences of her act are noble; and through her courage Man did not fall, but rise. She did "a great service to humanity," when she plucked the forbidden fruit. Yes: the 'In the details of the Fall, Eliza finds much comfort, when she can read them by her own inward light. Wisdom (in the form of a serpent) addressed the woman, not the man, who would have cared little for the tree of knowledge. The temptation offered to her was spiritual. She took the forbidden fruit, in the hope of becoming wiser and diviner than she had been. Man followed her. ascendancy of woman began in Paradise !'-vol. ii. p. 207. We only venture to lay this blasphemy before our readers from a sense of the necessity of showing how these visionaries are led on to deal with the sacred records, which in some sense they receive. We have often admired the perverse and blind inconsistency with which unbelievers draw arguments from the Bible against itself. Eliza's intuition must be a dull faculty not to see that, if the narrative in Genesis has any truth at all, it excludes the interpretation she puts upon it. We are disposed to feel more respect for the jester who has said that at all events 'Eve got the first half of the apple!' That superiority of organization, which fits woman to be a seer and a mediator, revealed as a broad principle to Eliza Farnham, has been discovered, in its practical application, by Anne Cridge and Elizabeth Denton, the sister and the wife of William Denton, a geologist of Boston. One Dr. Buchanan, of Cincinnati, had observed that certain persons felt the effect of a drug by merely holding it in their hands. This susceptibility was found to exist in Anne Cridge, who conceived that the power might have a wider and higher range. She first made the experiment on the unopened letters of her friends (!) by putting the sealed paper to her temples, when she read the contents by an immediate action upon the brain, without the aid of sight. So far we may seem only to repeat the stale tricks of clairvoyance, which have been thoroughly exposed by the effective process of breaking down the credit of the pretenders. But Anne had a gift peculiarly her The image carried to her sensorium was not simply that of the letters inscribed on the closed paper; she saw the perfect Vol. 122.-No. 244. own. 2 H picture picture of the man who had written them engaged in the very act of writing. Now came her scientific brother's turn to have his share in the great discovery; and his explanation is a fine specimen of what modern visionaries are prepared to accept as science. And no wonder ! Has not the ethereal faculty, which can transcend the bounds of matter and soar above the slow march of reason, an equal right to despise the laws of the one and the conclusions of the other? In this sublime science no lens is needed to form a picture without us, any more than the eye is necessary within; no sensitive plate or paper is wanted to retain it, any more than a retina to receive it. The astronomer and naturalist may smash their telescopes and microscopes; the photographer may spare his toilsome journeys and expensive apparatus; Piazzi Smyth had no need to climb the Peak of Teneriffe, in his true vocation, nor to burn magnesium wire in the heart of the Great Pyramid, to throw light on his new hobby. The sun works without a camera, all matter is a prepared plate. A discovery at once so fertile and so facile was not likely to be limited within the range of existing phenomena. Whether from jealousy of her sister-in-law, or from a nobler emulation, Elizabeth Denton informed her husband that she too had the still higher power of seeing into the very soul of things. A piece of limestone from Kansas, a crystal of quartz from Panama, enabled her to describe the locality from which they came and the process of their formation, though, it is true, in language more visionary than scientific. But what did old science matter to her husband, when he had the revelation of a new one which was to supersede all the old, and which he named Psychometry? But, alas for the limited powers of the weaker sex! Man can but keep the doors of Nature's temple, not minister at her altar: at best, he is but the Delphic priest, to record the inspired utterances of the Pythian priestess. Woman alone possesses the power to read these true records of creation, and to decipher the countless lines which must everywhere cross and recross, like a palimpsest written over and over ten thousand times. The condition to which our race is now hastening is thus summed up by this new science-Man has been played out and woman must have her turn.' It is a curious and most suggestive circumstance, that these wild theories and wilder revelations-and not only these, but the more fantastic and formidable organizations of which we have still to speak-have sprung up in New England, the ancient shrine of American religion, and confessedly the focus of her intellectual life. The reason of this we will not at present discuss; but we should be still more surprised to have found the descendants of the Puritans and the fellow-citizens of Channing contenting contenting themselves with an insight into 'the material world. Their forefathers were wont to see angelic visions, and to wrestle in person with the Evil One; they had glimpses of the fate of their enemies in the realms of darkness, and fellowship with the happy spirits of their departed friends and leaders. However wild and fantastic might be those visions, which in a few enthusiasts took the place of that calm sense of the nearness of an unseen world which all cherished as a first principle of life, they had at least the dignity of a genuine religious enthusiasm; and the God whom they professed to see was the God who is revealed in Scripture. It were long to trace the mazes of sectarian division, the hardening process of worldliness, the fierce party conflicts, the excitement of a life spent quickly in every way, and the downward process of religious declension, interrupted by the spasmodic energy of 'revivals,'—which have prepared so many of their descendants to burst the bonds of all creeds, and to seek refuge from all doubts in the renewal of a direct intercourse with angelic and disembodied spirits. They have found an escape from atheism in the supposed revelations which have come to them from the world of spirits, only to verify a sharp but too true saying, that they would believe anything, provided it is not in the Bible.' Their search for new spiritual light has for its very starting-point the rejection of all former revelations. They seem all to be agreed that the old religious gospels are exhausted, that the churches founded on them are dead, and that new revelations are required by man.' How unworthy are the revelations thus far made of their pretended origin, how ludicrously inconsistent are their methods with every idea we are accustomed to connect with spiritual beings, how utter has been the failure of every attempt to reveal facts the truth of which was capable of being tested, and how complete the detection of imposture in certain leading cases which have been subjected to crucial tests,-all these are points with which we may assume our readers to be familiar from recent and repeated experience in our own country. Doubtless, too, they are familiar with the fact, which adds a mournful interest to the subject, that names justly honoured in literature and science-too highly honoured to be needlessly specified-are associated with the delusion. But in America the Spiritualists form a vast organization, numbering, if we may believe one of their leaders, Warren Chase, three millions of men and women throughout the States. Mr. Dixon suggests-and we have reason from other sources to believe-that this is a greatly exaggerated estimate; but he expresses the opinion that a tenth 2 H 2 part part of the population in the New England States, and a fifteenth part of the population of New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, lie open, more or less, to impressions from what they call the spirit-world.' But be the body larger or smaller, "They have already their progressive lyceums, their catechisms, their newspapers; their male and female prophets, mediums, and clairvoyants; their Sunday services, their festivals, their pic-nic parties, their camp-meetings; their local societies, their state organizations, their general conferences; in short, all the machinery of our most active, most aggressive societies.'-Vol. ii. p. 156. 6 In 1864 they held their first national convention at the city of Chicago, whose rapid growth has been a wonder of the world; and, having voted what is called in the American dialect of English, a platform,' they issued in the following year, from Philadelphia, a great appeal to the public; and now Mr. Dixon gives us a vivid account of their third conference, held last August at Providence, in Rhode Island, where 'eighteen states and territories were represented on the platform by accredited members; more than half of them, it seems, by ladies.' But, in the faith of those convened, the mortal members of their assembly formed its least important part : For incorporeal spirits to smallest room Reduced their shapes immense, and were at large, of Pratt's hall in Broad-street. Many an orator, from Cicero to Robert Hall, has animated his hearers by an apostrophe to the spirits of departed worthies; but Mr. L. R. Joslin has probably been the first to welcome the shades of the dead into an assembly of the living: "But not unto you alone," he said with a solemn emphasis, "do we look for counsel, for inspiration, and the diviner harmonies. The congregation is greater than the seeming. There are others at the doors. Those of other ages, who were the morning lights to the world, fearless, true, and martyred in the earth-life for their devotion to the truth-the cherished wise and good of the long-ago, and the loved ones of the near past-they will manifest their interest in, and favour with their presence, the largest body of individuals on this continent who realise their actualised presence and power. And unto them, as unto you, we give the greeting." Loud applause, not hushed and reverent, I am told, responded to this welcome of the heavenly delegates.'Vol. ii. pp. 151-52. The solemn awe, which seems to have been so wanting in the assembly, comes over our minds as we go on to quote the words of John Pierpoint, of Washington, an aged preacher, and once a student student at the famous theological seminary of Yale Collegewords spoken just ten days before the old man's death : ""I am infidel to a great many forms of popular religion, because I do not believe in many of the points which are held by a majority of the Christians, nay, even of the Protestant Church." He went on to say, adds Mr. Dixon, "that, instead of putting his faith in creeds and canons, he put it in progress, liberty, and spirits."'-Vol. ii. p. 152. Within ten days of his funeral, the old man's spirit passed into a female disciple in a trance, to convey this revelation of its newfound knowledge: 'Brothers and sisters, the problem now is solved with me. And because I live, you shall live also; for the same divine father and mother that confers immortality upon one soul bestows the gift upon all.'-Vol. ii. p. 153. And is such the faith which finds acceptance, as we are told, with the pious and intellectual men and women of New England, and is gaining the like votaries in Old England? Has one come from the dead to repeat the first principles which, as the same school assure us, are already self-evident to the consciousness of the living, in words which blasphemously appropriate the sacred phrase of the Gospel-his unbelief in which he had boasted in proclaiming with his dying breath, and to announce for his only new revelation the germ of the grossest polytheism? This dualism of sex in the Divine essence seems to be about the only positive dogma of the spiritualistic creed. It offers to the female unbeliever something of the same satisfaction that Mariolatry provides for the female devotee in the Church of Rome, and it gives the pattern for the equality of the sexes upon earth. Another point, in which the extremes of infidelity and superstition meet, is the claim to miraculous powers; but that which the Romanist holds to be a gift left by Christ with His Church on earth is ascribed to the power of spirits, acting through mortal media, chiefly female. But the spiritualist wonder-worker enjoys the advantage of being able to discover by clairvoyance the diseases which he claims the power to heal. Parodying the example of the religion they reject, they claim to cure diseases by imposition of hands, just as the Mormons practise extreme unction; for both bodies hold medical science in utter contempt. Like the Mormons again, they have revived the gift of tongues in that clumsy perversion of the Apostolic practice, which was invented by Edward Irving, when his fine intellect was overclouded-the utterance, by one of the initiated, of an unintelligible gibberish, which another interprets. One tenet, which they hold in common with almost all the new sects, the |