Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/281

Rh we should expect that with the growth of intelligence they would disappear. But this process is very slow. The superstitions became the nucleus of organized religions, and are contained in a thousand theologies. Yet these beliefs at length lose their grosser forms; many of them are dissipated, others modified. They influence men's conduct less and less, and are finally held as mere empty traditional beliefs. Just in proportion to the increase of men's knowledge of nature, superstition has relaxed its stringency. As science grows, and the exploration and cultivation of this world become more absorbing, there is necessarily less attention given to the other world. This is deplored by many as a decline of faith. They raise loud lamentations over the decay of religion, the apathy of churches, the spread of materialism, and the extension and deepening of scientific influence. As a consequence, we now and then find men brooding over this state of things until the restraints of reason and common sense give way, and they announce themselves as divinely called upon to perform some great work that shall startle a faithless age, and kindle anew the old fervor of spiritualistic belief. Two such relapses into rank primeval superstition have recently occurred.

Charles F. Freeman, of Cape Cod, the other day piously sacrificed the life of his little daughter, in obedience to what he supposed to be a spiritual mandate from the other world. He was a Second Adventist, and full of intense belief in the miraculous coming of Christ to rescue the world from unbelief. Whether he attended the great Second Advent Convention that was held in New York last year we do not know, but he evidently laid to heart its inculcation of the duty of literally interpreting the Scriptures. He is reported as an assiduous Bible student, who quotes Scripture with great fluency, and is ready with an apposite text for every doctrine that he maintains. The old Hebrews indulged in the same sanguinary practices as other barbaric tribes. In their books there are records of one father sacrificing his daughter, and of another father preparing to immolate his only son. Freeman had, no doubt, often heard these transactions discussed in the pulpit, and Abraham applauded for the strength of his faith. If such a test was ever necessary, he thought it a thousand times more necessary in this faithless age than ever before; so he killed his child, at what he claims to be the peremptory requirement of the Deity he worshiped, that a miracle might be performed, and his faith displayed before an unbelieving generation. The whole ghastly affair is simply an instance of survival of one of the spiritual usages of savagery, when bloodthirsty devils were regular objects of worship.

Another case of falling back into the mental condition of barbarism has been recently afforded by the Superintendent of Schools of the City of New York, Mr. Henry Kiddle. Yielding to that morbid craving after the marvelous, which is a distinctive mark of undeveloped or retrograded natures, he had been exploiting mediums, and comes forward with what he calls a revelation from the spiritual sphere. Two members of his family have been for some time talking to him the most demented drivel, which he accepts as spiritual communications, or messages from the ghostly inhabitants of another world; all of which he has minutely written down and published in a book. Kiddle, like Freeman, as the newspapers avouch, is "very conscientious," "thoroughly sincere," "profoundly in earnest," etc., and there is no doubt of the genuineness of his credulity. We have looked over his book, and found it to consist of the merest rubbish. Mr. Kiddle says of these communications, in his preface, that he "knows they are not the offspring of imposture or delusion. They come from the world of spirits.