X. THE DISEMBODIED SPIRIT. (1868.) It cannot be that Death dissolves for ever. To give some secret aid amidst the strife Bereavement brings, when saddest thoughts are rife, Spring rescues nature from her wintry doom, WHEN the heathen poet wrote those prophetic words :- he referred to the intellectual part of his own nature which still lives in his poems as fresh as when Augustus patronised and Mecenas rewarded it. If a Christian were to express the same thought, he would say, "I shall not wholly die; the greater part of me will escape corruption." "Non omnis moriar" is a fitting epitaph for the tomb of everyone. My soul shall live, but whither will it go? are the two most natural feelings of humanity, and stand to each other in the relation of complement and supplement. "Whither do I go?" Enlisted as a soldier in the battle of life; fighting in a cause that I do not fully understand, in an enemy's country that I do not fully comprehend, the Great Commander calls me away, gives me another commission, entirely new weapons, and changes the scene-whether for one of conflict or of peace, I know not-but my vague thought now is, what shall I be? Whither shall I go? Shall I be degraded in the ranks, or promoted? Shall I be in the Elysian Fields of the good, or in the Tartarus of the bad, or in that middle sphere, that Hades, the most populous of all, where the occupants are neither happy nor miserable; where for a time they retain their interest in what they loved below, and occasionally hold some kind of intercourse with their friends left behind. Such is the old Pagan notion. The good in the Elysian Fields had no desire to revisit earth; the bad were not allowed to do so; but the more populous Hades, inhabited by the passively or negatively good, and the only moderately bad, had not so far dissolved their connection with earthly things, as to prevent them from occasionally visiting the scenes to which their affections still attached them. The Greek word Hades signifies "invisible," as does also the corresponding word in Hebrew (Scheôl), and it implies not a place, but a state of desiring, longing, asking, praying— words translated from the Septuagint into our Englishgrave—death—hell. But revelation tells us little on the subject. The possibility of a ghostly visitant is taken for granted in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus; while in St. Paul's writings the spiritual body is distinctly affirmed, and also various degrees of exaltation in the spiritual state; just as one star differs from another star in glory. And this is exactly what we should expect. The same harmonies and relations which, amid many disturbances, prevail in the physical world, we may also expect to meet with, possibly amid fewer disturbances, in the world of spirits, the Divine Will being the ruling power in both. But as it is not the purpose of Holy Scripture to gratify our curiosity respecting the laws of the spiritual, any more than of the physical world, we are left to the cultivation of our own intellectual powers to obtain light in both cases. The cultivation of natural science has enriched mankind with innumerable blessings, and as there can be no doubt but that the same Divine Lawgiver presides over the worlds of spirit as over the worlds of matter, and as we are permitted to study the latter, and much fruit has been gathered in from doing so, why should we not, so far as our very limited means allow, study the former, under the hope that at some future time, a Francis Bacon or an Isaac Newton may arise with a spiritual Novum Organum and a widely operating spiritual law of gravitation ? It is too much the practice in the present age to treat this subject in a jocular, or altogether sceptical vein. Ghosts are, by many, denounced as mere effects of superstition, of ignorance, childishness or nervous disease; while by some, a considerable class of phenomena, in the production of which fraud largely enters, has been dignified by the name of spiritualism, so that we may well be ashamed of the word so degraded from its original meaning. To the simple question, "Are spectral appearances or ghosts real or imaginary events ?" it is difficult to give a direct answer. Certainly, if we take the general feeling of mankind in all ages, based upon a belief in the immortality of the soul, it is admitted that the appearance of a soul or spirit after death is possible. However much the science and so-called intelligence of the age is above superstition, yet there is in most, if not in everyone, a lurking belief in the spiritual world and the possibility of receiving a visit from one of its inhabitants. There is, I suppose, scarcely a family in these islands that has not its ghost story. Everyone has something to relate, not often, indeed very seldom, at first hand; but still there is the fact that his father or mother, or uncle or aunt, saw a ghost in which was traced the likeness of a dear child or relative, then in some distant part of the world; and taking note of the time of the vision, the post in due course brought the news of the death of that person, which coincided with the time of the vision. A highly educated friend of mine, one of a large family, told me that his mother had seen the spirits of several of his brothers and sisters, who had died in distant parts of the world, weeks and months before the news of the deaths reached home in the usual way.* Now I will put it to every reader whether I am overstating the matter in thus appealing to general experience in favour of spectral appearances. Reason how you will, there is the belief, and although as Dr. Johnson remarked, all reason is against us, all tradition is for us, and universal tradition * NOTE ADDED IN 1887.-A few years ago, Dean Plumptre stated in the Spectator newspaper that a relative of his on her death-bed recognised the spirits of three of her deceased children standing about the bed, and addressed them by name-" Mary! Jane! Anne! all here-What! and Rebecca too?" Now it had happened, during this lady's illness, that her fourth daughter, Rebecca, had been taken ill and died, and she had not been informed of the event. Hence her surprise on recognising her spirit among the spirits of her sisters, Addison also could not generally has a foundation in truth. refuse the universal testimony in favour of the re-appearance of the dead, strengthened by that of many credible persons he was acquainted with. Isaac Taylor also in his "Physical Theory of another Life," has these remarkable words "The dead do sometimes break through the boundaries that hem in the ethereal crowds; and if so, so as if by trespass, may in single instances infringe upon the ground of common corporeal life." Such then being the general belief, the advocate is entitled, under the doctrine of probabilities, to a hearing; and the more so, as he is not dealing with one single case of spectral appearance, nor with a dozen, but with hundreds, if not thousands. He is dealing with a recurrent case; and according to La Place, "Every case, however apparently incredible, if it be a recurrent one, is as much entitled, under the laws of induction, to a fair valuation, as if it had been more probable beforehand." If I were to attempt to bring the subject of spiritual manifestations under a scientific formula, it would be the one that has been of such inestimable value in physical inquiries—“ Given the phenomena, to find the law." But the difficulty is to accept the phenomena, and you cannot reproduce them at will. The more narrowly one tries to reduce the phenomena to distinctness, the more vague they become. Observers are careless; they disagree not only about the hour, but the day of a given event. They do not always agree as to what was really seen. They cannot always distinguish between objective and subjective phenomena, or they are shy to relate what they have witnessed for fear of ridicule, or if they do relate it you must on no account publish their names as authorities for the occurrence. Hence the |