THE SANDEMANIANS
In this our day one of the expiring sects of Christendom is that of the Sandemanians. At no time have they been a very powerful denomination either from their numbers, their influence, or their wealth. They have never yet made their mark upon the world, nor are they likely to do so now. The late Professor Faraday was one of their elders, and for a time conferred on them a little of his world-wide reputation; but one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one great man confer greatness on a church. The eccentricity of men of genius is proverbial. Sharp, the engraver, believed in the lunatic Brothers and the impostor Joanna Southcote; Irving in the gift of tongues and the power of working miracles; Swedenborg in his faculty of piercing the veil which envelopes all sublunary affairs and realizing what we are taught to consider will only be revealed to us when the heavens and earth shall pass away as a scroll, and time shall be no more. Even our great emancipator Luther, the Moses who led forth – to borrow a figure from Cowley – our modern Israel from its house of bondage, and brought them into the promised land, testified to a visible appearance of the Prince of Darkness, to get rid of whom he had to dash his ink-bottle, a type, as it always seems to me, of the victory yet to be achieved by means of print over the devil and all his works. But Faraday is gone. No longer can the Sandemanians boast the possession of one of England’s greatest philosophers; and they have now little power of influencing or predominating in society. They seem to me a very plain and humble folk, aiming at keeping up in their own hearts Christian love, and in their own circle primitive practices, rather than in aggressive movements, without which no church or denomination can expect in this busy age long to live.
There is one Sandemanian church in London, up in Barnsbury, at the corner of one of the streets running out of the Roman Road. The original church was founded in the year 1760, in the Barbican. City improvements necessitated its removal to this site, where it has now been erected four or five years. It was in the old chapel that Professor Faraday used to take his turn in preaching. In the new chapel his widow is still one of the worshippers. As you pass the place you would not see anything very extraordinary. It is a neat, simple structure, of white brick, with no architectural pretensions of any kind. It only differs from other places of worship in having no board up announcing to what denomination it belongs, nor the name of the preacher, nor the hours of assembly, nor where applications for sittings are to be made, nor to whom subscriptions are to be paid. Indeed, the only reference at all to an outside world seems to consist in the putting up a caution intimating that the building is under the guardianship of the police, and persons evilly disposed had better mind what they are about. Thus, and thus only, is the recognition of an outer world lying in darkness and needing the true light of the Gospel in any way acknowledged. They have service twice on Sunday, in the morning and afternoon, and a week-day meeting on Wednesday evening. They have no Sunday or day-school, no tract distribution, no district visiting, no minister, and no other means of acting on the world or forming religious opinion. Indeed, I fancy they are averse to anything of the kind. “We are utterly,” I read in one of their publications, “against aiming to promote the cause we contend for either by creeping into private homes or by causing our voice to be heard in the streets, or by officiously obtruding our opinions upon others.” Even if you enter their place of worship there is no pew-opener to show you to a seat. They claim simply to obey the commands of the Bible implicitly, to be a church founded for mutual edification and love – nothing more. The stranger who for the first time attends will be struck with the absence of the pulpit, instead of which he will find two large desks, one above the other, in which are seated three or four elderly persons; the attention which is paid to the reading of the Bible; the illiterate way in which those who preach and pray do so; and the length and dulness of the service. The morning service, for instance, begins at eleven, and is never over till half-past one. No wonder the Sandemanians are not a vigorous sect. I believe they have but one place of worship in England, three or four in Scotland, and more, how many I know not, in America. The chapel in Barnsbury will seat, I imagine, from three to four hundred people, and it is always nearly full, and attended by people in respectable appearance. Of the really poor they seem to have none at all.
The Sandemanians originated in Scotland, in 1728, as a kind of reaction against Presbyterianism and Calvinism. Mr. John Glass, a minister of the Kirk, was deposed by the Presbyterian Church Courts because he taught that the Church could be subject to no league or covenant – that faith was simple belief – and that Christianity never was, nor ever could be the established religion of any nation without becoming the reverse of what it was when first instituted. Mr. Robert Sandeman, one of his elders, however, by his numerous writings, left on the new organization the impress of his name. In these days, when metaphysical speculation has little encouragement amongst Christians, the Sandemanians tell us they have no formal creed or confession of faith – that they simply follow Scripture practice, and that is all. For this purpose they meet together on the first day of the week, not only to read and hear the Word, but particularly to break bread or communicate together in the Lord’s Supper; to pray, which is done by several in turns; to listen to an exhortation from one of the elders. They are a Christian republic. At the conclusion of every prayer – whether pronounced by the elders or the brethren – the whole church say Amen, according to what is intimated in 1 Cor. xiv. 16. In the interval between the morning and the afternoon service they have their love-feast, of which every member partakes, when they salute each other with a holy kiss. The children are all baptized, on the plea that if one of the parents believes the children are not unclean but holy, and because it is written in Acts, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved and thy house.” They deem it unlawful to eat flesh with its blood; they wash each other’s feet; they hold all things in common so far as the claims of the poor and the Church are concerned; they forbid no amusements but those connected with the lot, such as cards or dice; their elders are chosen from amongst them on account of their piety and character, and are ordained by prayer and fasting, and laying on of hands. A deacon is elected in the same way, minus the fasting. Any one who appears to understand and believe the truth may be admitted into their fellowship. When a person is excommunicated the act takes place in the presence of the whole church. Two elders must be present at every act of discipline. It may be further stated that in every church transaction, whether it be receiving, censuring, or expelling members, or choosing officers, or in performing any other business, unanimity is deemed indispensable. If there is a dissenting brother, after the reasons of the dissent have been stated, and judged unscriptural by the church, he is expelled. The Sandemanians allow neither government by a majority nor a representation of minorities.
As an outsider I should say nothing was ever more uninteresting, nothing ever more calculated to alienate from religion intelligent young people, than the services conducted by the Sandemanians. The elders and deacons, excellent men undoubtedly, are singularly deficient in oratorical ability. I think the worst sermon I ever heard in my life was preached by one of them. They cannot even read the Bible in an impressive and edifying manner, nor is their psalmody much better. They have a literal version of the Psalms, and they sing them through, a couple of verses or so at a time. I give one specimen I heard, not the last time I attended there: —
“Moab I will My Wash-pot make,
O’er Edom cast my shoe;
Do thou, O land of Palestine,
Triumph, because of Me.”
The modern hymnology, of which all sections of the Church are justly proud, exists in vain for them. Their church seems utterly destitute of intellectual vigour; and when, as in these days, brains are beginning to rule, the piety that rejects or ignores them is in danger. There is a relation between the Bible and modern thought of which the good people who preach dull sermons and make dull prayers up in Barnsbury have no idea.
THE SOUTHCOTTIANS
Incredible as it may seem, there are, in these days of penny newspapers and universal enlightenment, Southcottians in London. They may be met with in the neighbourhood of Kennington Common, and in one of the forlornest spots in Islington, Elder Walk, Essex Road. Thence they issue documents worthy of Bedlam. I have now before me their “Midnight Cry, Behold the Bridegroom cometh.” And this august warning and bruising and inviting announcement is “to and for whomsoever it may concern of Mammon-crushed Israel.” One extract I fancy will suffice – one at any rate I must give, otherwise such religious lunacy will be held incredible.
“Oh, dutifully observe now, O all Israel, (namely) O Judah and Ephraim, that this Universal Marriage overture unto you, together with these Proxy Marriage lines and record, are made and offered you entirely because ‘I am’ and Jesus Christ is Life, Love, and Light everlasting, and because of His power and right to give, and the Son of Man’s to receive, and the worthy Woman to bring Him forth, and Israel’s to inherit, – viz., the promises unto Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, and all their seed, who were originally the void waters and dark-faced deep until God said, Let there be Light and there was Light. And from henceforth there shall be Light, and both Light and Love abundantly in Heaven, here below as in Heaven above, for in the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, and did, and is, and will finish on the sixth day the same and all the host of them.”
The main instrument in the above precious compilation is Whatmore, one of Joanna Southcott’s chosen apostles. The paper referred to is issued from No. 9, Elder Walk, Essex Road, Islington, London, of Britannia Zion. It states, as far as I can gather, that in August last year something of importance was to take place. “A month since and the gauntlet has been successfully run; therefore, Whatmore, now has Thy lowly instrument Watmore Whatmore, John, to submit of and by Thy worthiness, O Lord God. Oh, shall I submit a Song of Solomon, or a Lamentation of Thy Prophet Jeremiah, or a sermon of Thy immortalizing mount, unto Thy flock, O, O, O! Submit, love,” &c., &c. I gather that the mystery of God is to be finished speedily by unveiling His Bible word, and His codicil thereto by His spouse, “the wonderful Queen of prophets, Joanna Southcott, that thus sons and daughters by her womanhood may greatly replenish the earth, and that the poor now suffering from the murdering love of money in consequence of unjust stewardship may fare better in time to come.” This seems to be the only idea I can extract from the Southcottians. All mammon laws are to be abolished, money currency is to be destroyed, there is to be no more selling, martyring, and bartering of humanity and their requirements, “thus saith the Lord Jehovah, by J. Watmore Whatmore, and J. G. Grant, of Zion.”
As these prophets speak of the spouse of God, Eve the second, called Joanna Southcott, Queen of the prophets, who in 1802 opened her commission, and declared herself to be the woman spoken of in Revelation – “the Bride, the Lamb’s wife, and clothed with the sun” – let me briefly tell her story: —
Joanna was born at Gettisham, in Devonshire. Her parents were in the farming line, and members of the Established Church. She herself was in service or in industrious employment, “without,” writes her biographer, “any other symptom of a disordered intellect than that she was attached to the Methodists.” Nevertheless, it was Mr. Pomeroy, the clergyman whose church she attended at Exeter, who appears to have encouraged her to print her prophecies and to assume spiritual gifts. The books which she sent into the world were written partly in rhyme, all the verse and the greater part of the prose being delivered in the character of the Almighty. Her discourses were nothing else than a mere rhapsody of texts – vulgar dreams and vulgar interpretations. Her fame spread, and seven wise men from different parts of the country, the seven stars, came to believe in her. Among the early believers were three clergymen, one of them a man of fashion, fortune, and noble family. As her followers supplied her with money and treated her with great reverence, the more extravagant were her assertions and the loftier her claims. The scheme of redemption was completed in her. If the tree of knowledge was violated by Eve, the tree of life was reserved for Joanna. Her greatest triumph was a conflict with the devil, which lasted a week. According to her own account the devil had the worst of it. She gave him ten words for one, and allowed him no time to speak. Very ungallantly, at the termination of the dispute he remarked no man could tame a woman’s tongue; he said the sands of an hour-glass did not run faster. It was better to dispute with a thousand men than one woman. After this dispute Joanna is said – and her followers believed it – to have fasted forty days.
Shortly after commencing her mission, she published the following declaration: —
“I, Joanna Southcott, am clearly convinced that my calling is of God, and my writings are indited by His Spirit, as it is impossible that any spirit but an all-wise God that is wondrous in working, wondrous in wisdom, wondrous in power, wondrous in truth, could have brought round such mysteries so full of truth as in my writings; so I am clear in whom I believed, that all my writings came from the Spirit of the Most High God.
“Joanna Southcott.”
One of her means of making money and increasing her influence was the sealing of such as signed their names to a declaration intimating a desire for Christ’s kingdom to be established upon earth, and the destruction of that of the devil. Whoever signed his or her name received a sealed letter containing these words: – “The sealed of the Lord the elect. Precious man’s redemption to inherit the tree of life, to be made heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ.” To this document Joanna’s name was appended. In December, 1813, she declared her pregnancy, and prophesied that she should have a son that year by the power of the Most High. Her followers now increased rapidly, and chapels were opened for promulgating her doctrines. As the time drew nigh presents of all descriptions, it was said, came in unasked. There was a magnificent cot for the expected Messiah, manufactured by Seddons. All the articles used on such occasions – as laced caps, bibs, robes, papboats, caudle cups, &c., – were lavishly supplied; and when it appeared that the poor woman had died, asking pardon for her late blasphemous doctrines and past sins, the delusion was still kept up, and her followers believed that she would reappear. It was only after a post-mortem examination that the fiction of a miraculous conception was dispelled. Joanna was sixty years old at the time of her death, and was buried privately in Marylebone Upper Burying-ground, near Kilburn.
The present leader is John Whatmore, formerly a smith, but who has been led in a marvellous way, according to his own confession, to believe in Joanna. He is an open-air preacher, and may be met with in London Fields, Somers Town, and elsewhere pursuing his calling, which apparently is not very lucrative. He has two boards joined together, on which some unintelligible jargon is printed, which he calls his two sticks. These he holds up to view, at the same time calling out, “Britannia! Ephraim! Judah!” Then he commences his oration, a strange medley of Scripture and nonsense. According to him the world is in the worst possible way; and the devil has a fine time of it. The present commercial system of society by no means meets with Whatmore’s approval. The poor are rotting off, and woe to them to whom such a catastrophe is due. There are many disciples, he tells us; but fear of this world and a false sense of shame prevent them from declaring themselves. There must be some, otherwise the man could not get a living. His library seems to consist chiefly, if not exclusively, of the New Testament and his own absurd hand-bills, which a printer supplies him with on the chance of his selling them. In answer to my inquiry as to where he attended when not preaching himself, his reply was that he sometimes went to the Agricultural Hall; but they were not advanced enough for him, and so he falls back on himself, and goes about to do what he thinks is – or at any rate what he says he thinks is – the Lord’s work. There is no bounce about him. He is apparently a muddle-headed, well-meaning mystic; about as mad or sane as others of his way of thinking. That he is wretchedly poor, that he is ignorant, that his language to ordinary folks seems simply unintelligible, perhaps in certain quarters may be accepted as signs of his Divine commission. At any rate, he is a representative man. If he is ignorant and talks nonsense, what must be the ignorance and the nonsense existing in those who listen to him? How dense must be the ignorance, how crass the nonsense cherished in his hearers! It may be asked, and this is a question I put to the religious public, is not the manifestation of such religious folly a reproach to our age? If the Church had done its duty, would such a folly have been possible?
THE SPIRITUALISTS
Somehow or other the Spiritualists are under a cloud in this country, and their leader – Mr. Home – has been compelled, in consequence of the decision of a highly-prejudiced and extremely ignorant jury, to hand over to Mrs. Lyon a very handsome sum of money which she had conveyed to him in consequence of representations made by him to her that such was the desire of her deceased lord and master. Up to that time Spiritualism was making great way, and Mr. Home, as its high priest and apostle, was in request with the nobility, and was the friend of kings and emperors. He had married a Russian Countess; he wore a diamond ring on one hand, given by the Czar, and on the other hand another, the present of the Emperor of France. His speaking eye and melodramatic manner made him in society a really charming man; literary ladies were enthusiastic in his favour. A spiritual Athenæum was opened in Sloane Street, Chelsea, at which a very eminent man gave the inaugural discourse, and at which there were spirit drawings displayed, and spirit poems read – all suggestive of the fact that the spirits were very ordinary people, after all. But it was not so much there as at the houses of his friends that Mr. Home tried best to display his powers. At such times there was a wonderful parade of religion. Previous to his attending a séance, a friend of the author was asked whether he believed in the doctrine of the Trinity; “because,” said the fair questioner, “we find that the spirits do not like to appear before sceptics;” and the Bible was read, and prayer offered up in apparently the most reverent, and earnest, and occasionally the most tiresome manner. Then came a few childish tricks, such as a handkerchief conveyed by spirits under the table, the accordion played by spirits under the table, and other intimations of what was said to be spiritual agency, but all equally out of sight. A few marvellous things were said by Home – secrets occasionally – which the hearer thought no one knew but himself, but secrets of the most uninteresting and unimportant character. And then the unbeliever passed out, scarcely knowing whether to laugh or weep; whether he had assisted at a religious meeting or a farce; whether he had been in the company of a mortal fitted for a solemn mission to an idle and adulterous generation seeking after a sign, or whether all he had seen and heard was but the clever manœuvring of a clever professor of legerhave to take his stand with the Brothers Davenport and other doubtful mediums who have had their day.
The Spiritualists in this country set great store by Home. They have never been able in our cold climate to raise mediums worth talking about. The latter have been chiefly American importations. Mr. Harris came as a preacher of Spiritualism, and, after a few Sundays at Store Street, vanished like a spirit, and was heard of no more. A Spiritual Magazine was started. Mrs. Marshall and her niece, of 22, Red Lion Street, Holborn, were declared by that – we presume official authority – to be “Media.” Then came the solid testimony of a learned American judge, declaring “the first thing demonstrated to us is that we can commune with the spirits of the departed; that such communication is through the instrumentality of persons yet living; that the fact of mediumship is the result of physical organization; that the kind of communion is effected by moral causes; and that the power, like our other faculties, is possessed in different degrees, and is capable of improvement by cultivation.” But the sect did not prosper. Then came grotesque indications of spiritual presence. Not content with table-rapping, the spirits had recourse to all kinds of antics, and the subject of Spiritualism became more and more distasteful to the intelligent, and more and more popular with that large class of idle wealthy men and women who have no healthy occupation, and are always in search of excitement. The climax was reached when the Cornhill told how Mr. Home floated in the air, how heavy tables would leap from one end of the room to the other, how music was produced on accordions, “grand at times, at others pathetical, at others distant and long-drawn,” when those accordions were held by no mortal hands. “I can state,” wrote Dr. Gulley, of Malvern, “that the record made in the article ‘Stranger than Fiction’ is in every particular correct; that the phenomena therein related actually took place, and moreover that no trick-machinery, sleight of hand, or other artistic contrivance, produced what we heard and beheld. I am quite as convinced of this last as I am of the facts themselves.” Well might the Spiritualists crow; had not Robert Owen and Lord Lyndhurst also believed? Was it not uncharitable to say that they were in their dotage? The testimony of such men settled everything.
In America, Spiritualism is more prosperous than in England. In the “Plain Guide to Spiritualism” Mr. Clarke tells us there are in that country 500 public mediums who receive visitors; more than 50,000 private ones; 500 books and pamphlets on the subject have been published, and many of them immensely circulated; there are 500 public speakers and lecturers on it, and more than 1000 occasional ones. There are nearly 2000 places for public circles, conferences, or lectures, and in many places flourishing public schools. The decided believers are 2,000,000, the nominal ones nearly 5,000,000; on the globe itself it is calculated there are 20,000,000 supposed to recognise the fact of spiritual intercourse. In Paris and the different parts of France the manifestations have been almost of every kind, and of the most decisive and distinguished character. “Great numbers of persons have been cured by therapeutic mediums,” writes William Howitt, “of diseases and injuries incurable by all ordinary means. Some of these persons are well known to me, and are every day bearing their testimony in aristocratic society.” Writing thus, Mr. Howitt defines Spiritualism “as the great theologic and philosophic reformer of the age; the great requickener of religious life; the great consoler and establisher of hearts; the great herald to the wanderers of earth starved upon the husks of mere college dogmas.” “I believe,” says Mr. C. Hall, “that as it now exists, Spiritualism has mainly but one purpose – to confute and destroy Materialism, by supplying sure, and certain, and palpable evidence that to every human being God gives a soul, which He ordains shall not perish when the body dies.” This, as good old Isaak Walton says, in narrating Dr. Donne’s Vision, “this is a relation that will beget some wonder; and it well may, for most of our world are at present possessed with an opinion that miracles and visions are ceased.”
What is Spiritualism? Ask its opponents. They regard it as necromancy, a practice not only forbidden under the Old Testament, but which even in the New we find classed by St. Paul under the general denomination of witchcraft, with such works of the flesh as idolatry, murder, adultery, and drunkenness, concerning all of which the Apostle Paul adds the solemn declaration (Gal. v. 19–21), “That they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Such undoubtedly is the feeling entertained with regard to Spiritualism by the great majority of orthodox Christians, who are quite satisfied by Scripture testimony, who accept what they think God has revealed to them in His Book, and who seek or require nothing more. In a weak but well-meaning work just put into my hands (“Spiritualism and other Signs”) I read: “The whole system is essentially opposed to faith in, and walking with, Jesus Christ, and the Spiritualist knows it.” The writer quotes the well-known text: “Now the Spirit speaketh expressly that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron.” At the same time there are many in the Christian Church of undoubted piety and intelligence who are believers in Spiritualism. After all, however, they are the exception rather than the rule. Amongst all sects there is a condemnation of Spiritualism of a very sweeping character. In this one thing Wesleyans, Low Churchmen, and Congregationalists are agreed. The outer world, the Secularists and the Positivists, of course regard Spiritualism with the same scorn and unbelief with which they regard all religion, whether true or false, whether old as the hills or but yesterday’s creation.
“It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the Creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.” Such is a sentence I borrow from Dr. Johnson. It is as applicable to the present time as to that in which he lived.
In conclusion, let me add, as a distinct organization, hitherto Spiritualism has failed in this country. I hear nothing of the Spiritual Athenæum now, nothing of Mr. Harris, either as preacher or poet, very little even of Mr. Home. Strange that a man who could not write an ordinary note decently should have been a favourite medium of the spirits. I am aware, however, the Spiritualists will extract an argument out of that last remark of mine in favour of Spiritualism. A young Jewish convert it is said would go to Rome. His teacher, a priest, feared, knowing Rome too well. On his return he questioned his pupil as to what he saw in Rome. “Ah!” said he, “I am persuaded now your religion is of God, otherwise it would have perished of the wickedness of its professors.”