The Swedenborgian Spiritualists
THE SWEDENBORGIAN
SPIRITUALISTS
These queer and innocent manifestations did not spread outside the Shaker villages, and after a time the impulse to create them died away.
The brethren and sisters perhaps found other ways of amusing themselves, or grew tired of their peculiar gifts.
At any rate, the revival among the spirits in the invisible world did not last beyond 1844, and by the time that the Seer of Poughkeepsie arose, the Shakers had returned to their normal quietness, and were uninterested in his visions.
His movement was neither so short lived nor so unsuccessful as its predecessors, and in 1865, eighteen years after it had begun, a grand Convention of Spiritualists was held in Chicago.
It was claimed that the belief had three million adherents, and there were certainly innumerable flourishing newspapers and a vast literature as well as a swarm of practitioners.
'The old religion is dying out,' they claimed.
' We represent the new, born of the Union of the types of humanity in a cosmopolitan geography, the die of which was cast in the Forges of Divine Providence.'
Whatever this may mean, it hardly seems to have been a true claim ; for the old religion is still predominant in America.
Among the protagonists of the Spiritualism of the fifties and 'sixties were Robert Dale Owen and Frances
Wright.
These two, after the collapse of their colonies at New Harmony and Nashoba, collaborated in publishing a paper called the 'Free Enquirer', and in lecturing extensively over the country on free love, Abolition,
Spiritualism and female emancipation, Although they
RELIGIOUS
FANATICISM
made public speeches about free love, they gave no real cause for the scandals which everywhere accompanied them.
In spite of their principles they both married in the ordinary way, Frances Wright married a Frenchman, Phiquepal d'Arusmont, who had been at New Harmony, and Robert Dale Owen married Mary Robinson.
He wrote and published a book called 'Moral Physiology', which dealt with problems of population and birth control, and which was profoundly shocking at the time.
He remained convinced of the truth of his Spiritualist ideas, but did not succeed in founding any sort of a school, and in later life he became deeply immersed in politics in which he was very successful.
He was elected first to the State Legislature, and then to the Senate as a Democrat, and finally appointed Ambassador to Naples.
His daughter, Rosamund, followed his Spiritualistic faith, and we shall meet her again in another, though a similar, connexion.
We need not follow the course of Spiritualism beyond this point.
With the appearance of Mme. Blavatsky, the Purple Mother and the Theosophical Movement it became a different movement ; and it is to this day a living faith with adherents in all parts of the world.
It is worth nothing, however, that the early stages of American Spiritualism were closely connected with Faith Healing and Higher Thought.
Andrew Jackson Davis was 'a medical clairvoyant' before he became a prophet, and his disturbed and incoherent doctrines did much to encourage the atmosphere in which, a few
THE SWEDENBORGIAN
SPIRITUALISTS
years later, Mary Baker Eddy found her first adherents.
Christian Science, like Theosophy, is a living belief, and one which has built up a vast and powerful edifice in the modern world.
Its origin, however, lay among obscure and ignorant people in the confused decades of the middle of the nineteenth century ; and although it is not suitable to describe it here, it was clearly a religion parallel and comparable to those we are describing.