CAN WE SET ASIDE SUCH EVIDENCE? 331 he died or disappeared (I forget which L. said), and shortly afterward noises began to be heard in the house. The com mon legend was that he had been bricked up by his Italian ser vant, between the walls in some room or vault, and so left tc perish.* This disturbance was known familiarly in the family as "the ghost." The inconvenience of its reputation, the clergyman said to Captain Frazer, had been great; at times they had difficulty in getting servants to stay in the house. All allusion to the subject in general conversation was dropped by common consent. † Here let me beg, of any earnest reader of mine, a brief hearing. I ask him : Upon what rational plea can you set aside such evidence as this of ultramundane agency? I say nothing of the legend, and aver nothing as to the identity of any restless spirit causing disturbance. But the simple facts! under what tenable theory can you explain them away? The clergyman did not give his name: are you surprised at that? Are you sure you would have given it yourself, under similar circumstances, thirty years ago? Another clergyman, † who gave his name, opened, about that time, the "House of Mystery," in which he lived, to respectable investigators. His reward was to find his motives misinterpreted and his character maligned: that was not encouraging. Major Moor vouches for the unnamed clergyman as a gentleman highly and deservedly esteemed and of unimpeachable veracity; and the Major's nephew, Captain Frazer, during a visit of three days to the haunted mansion, finds all the statements made to be fully borne out by what he witnessed. If you reject as monstrous-and I think you will—the supposition that these three gentlemen, all of professional standing * Work cited, p. 129. The story is given in detail in Bealings Bells, pp. 112–133. 332 A MONSTROUS SUPPOSITION. and one of them Fellow of an eminent Society, should have combined to palm on the public, without conceivable motive, a tissue of lies, then what theory of mundane agency, as cause, have you left? That it was a trick?-that they were imposed upon? That is the explanation usually set up to explain such phenomena; and, on the material hypothesis, there seems to be no other. -A trick? You will find, if you look closely at the matter, that this supposition is more monstrous than the first. " Almost nightly," were the clergyman's words, and for twenty years. "Two nights out of three" Captain Frazer witnessed them; and their duration was about two hours at a time. Two nights out of three for twenty years is nearly five thousand nights. So some one, prompted by mischief-or by malignity if you will-is to prowl about the house, hours at a time, for the purpose of disturbing the family, four or five days a week throughout half a life time. And so ponderous are the blows he strikes that they may be heard outside the house! And he is to move about the house, thus pounding, without being dis covered for twenty years together. A servant to do this? No, they had all been often changed during the time. A member of the family? What! annoy themselves and frighten away their domestics, and raise every kind of unpleasant rumor throughout the neighborhood! An outsider? But why multiply absurdities? Yet here is but one instalment of the difficulties. Twenty years is the clergyman's time of residence only. Go twenty years farther back; and, according to the united testimony of aged residents, the same disturbances still! And the dwellers of that day had it from their ancestors that the haunting began a hundred years ago. Are there centenarious nightly-disturbers of the peace of private families? I pray you, earnest reader, to reflect on these things, and to ask yourself whether the theory of intermundane agency is so incredible that one ought to resort to unheard-of vagaries in order to escape it. At this stage of our book-voyage together, some reader may think that an observation should be taken, so as to determine what progress, up to this point, we have made. He may grant, perhaps, that we have sufficient proof of the occasional occurrence, through the medium of bells and otherwise, of noises which we cannot rationally ascribe except to an extramundane or spiritual cause; and yet he may ask what is gained by such proof" He may suggest further that evidence of a Hereafterspiritual revealings-should be intrinsically solemn and reverent; not, like tinklings of bells and rappings on walls, of trifling or whimsical character. I might reply, in a general way, that nothing in all the works. of Nature around us, how little soever appreciated by man, is trifling in the sight of Him who "Sees, with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall: And now a bubble burst, and now a world.” But, aside from this, great truth, is there anything very solemn or reverent, to the common mind, in the fall, from its parent tree, of an apple? An infant sees it and claps its tiny hands; an uncultured peasant notes it as evidence that his orchard-crop is ripening; but to a Newton it suggests the law which holds planets to their course and governs half the natural phenomena that occur throughout the world. As to what may be gained by proving such incidents as this chapter records, Southey, speaking, in his Life of Wesley, of analogous disturbances in Samuel Wesley's parsonage,* and of the good end such things may be supposed to answer, wisely suggests that it would be end sufficient if sometimes one of those unhappy sceptics who see nothing beyond the narrow sphere of mortal existence should, "from the well-established truth of one such story, trifling and objectless as it might other wise appear,” be led to believe in immortality. * Footfalls, pp. 224–239. 334 KNOCK AND IT SHALL Let us go a step farther. There is not habitual intercourse between the world which now is and that which is to come: it is only now and then that the denizens of the one perceive those of the other. We seem, probably, something like apparitions to the immortals, as they, when they revisit earth, to us. But no one who ever truly loved and who believes in another life, can doubt that, for a time, the better class of those who have left friends and kindred here still cling to and sympathize with them. We have abundant evidence, even in these pages, that they often earnestly desire to convince us, past possible denial, of their continued existence, of their well-being, and of their undying love. That evidence goes to show that they often diligently seek communion, sometimes from affection, sometimes from other motives, and that they have difficulties in reaching us: difficulties wisely interposed, no doubt; for if spiritual intercourse were as common as worldly communion, who would be willing to labor and to wait in this dim and checkered world of ours? They seek, from time to time, to visit us. But, coming from their world of spirits, invisible to ordinary sight, inaudible by ordinary speech, how are they to make their presence known? How are they to attract our attention? In what manner does a traveller, arriving under cloud of night, before a fast-closed mansion, seek to reach the indwellers -seek to announce his presence? Is it not BY KNOCKING OR RINGING? Are we sure that Scripture texts are not read in the next world, and do not find their application there? Are we sure that, to the earth-longings of love immortal, the words of Jesus never suggest themselves: "Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." The inhabitants of a mansion at which admission is sought, seeing no one in the darkness, may at first not heed the knock or the ring; and the pilgrim, for the time, may turn away, disappointed. So it has been, probably, in thousands of cases, before any one ventured to interrogate the sounds. Men BE OPENED UNTO YOU. 335 either doubted whether these came from a living intelligence ; or they feared to question that intelligence; or they despaired of any answer, having been taught that though there had been spirit-communion in ages past, it was impossible, or forbidden, to-day. * So it may have been in the cases related in this chapter. In many, possibly in all the cases cited, some spirit may have desired to communicate with earth, as did that of the "Repentant Housekeeper," whose story I have told on a preceding page. But if so, they were doomed to disappointment. In early days the witnesses of spiritual appeals were as that multitude on the Galilean shore to whom Jesus spoke, from the ship, in parables; and of whom he said, "Hearing they hear not, neither do they understand." The field was not yet white to harvest. The time had not come. I have a few more words to say, in the next chapter, touching the apparent triviality of some spiritual manifestations. * See preceding page 297. |