many incontestible proofs of the sacred character of the actors. in this sublime scene. With what heart, could any man, except under a most direful delusion, dash from him a picture so precious to a bereft heart, and so prolific of the noblest hopes, and say, "Begone, creation of the devil!" By what talisman shall a person ever be able to assure himself against such delusions-if delusions they are-and to ascertain that his thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, in their most earnest and vivid presentiments, are not false and traitorous? But Mr. Partridge, at a later date, gives us a history of Mr. Harris, and his successive spiritual metamorphoses, which may throw some light on this point. We have had yet only a sketch of five years of his life-Mr. Partridge gives us one of fifteen.

Mr. Harris at the close of the year 1859 had come over to England, and during the winter and spring of 1860 gave lectures at first in Store Street, and afterwards at the Marylebone Literary Institute. Mr. Harris came as a Spiritualist and was received with open arms by the Spiritualists here. For a time his lectures proceeded on those general grounds which all could accept, but anon he burst forth with the most vehement denunciations of séances and communication with individual spirits which have characterized his subsequent productions. The surprise of the Spiritualists here was great, and their remonstrances earnest if not effectual. An article appeared in the London Critic of January 1st, 1860, exulting in this attack of Mr. Harris on Spiritualism, and Mr. Charles Partridge, at that time editor and sole proprietor of the Spiritual Telegraph of New York, took occasion in that journal, in a remarkable article on the 18th of February, 1860, to let the London Spiritualists into the secret of Mr. Harris's escapade which had so much astonished them. This article is of such particular moment that we shall here make free quotation from it:

"If," says Mr. Partridge, "all persons who have heard, or may hear brother Harris, and if those who read the above article, and others of like character which may be published, knew the peculiarities of Mr. Harris, as well as do those who have been most intimate with him during the last fifteen years, it would be unnecessary to make any reply to his unsparing denunciations of all those who do not accept him as their oracle, and labour to help him to magnify his office. But those unfamiliar with him do not know his weaknesses; besides, he goes out from us to a foreign land under the insignia of a 'Reverend,' and to the brethren and friends of the same general cause denounces by wholesale the great body of Spiritualists in America as Pantheists,' rejecting alike the idea of the

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Scriptures as a Divine revelation, and the existence of a God, and as gross sensualists, and immoral in their conduct in all the relations of life.

"These are grave charges, and it is not to be supposed that a brother would prefer them in a foreign land without a cause. What, then, is the cause? If the charges were true, even, it is contrary to the genius of the new dispensation to magnify human delinquencies to the neighbour, and much more to do this in a foreign land, where there is little or no opportunity for the accused to be heard in defence; but the great body of Spiritualists in America deny severally and singularly the charges preferred against them by brother Harris. Each one claims for himself the same right to investigate and determine whether the Scriptures are plenary or partial revelations of Divine truth, which Mr. Harris has exercised for himself; but they do not recognize Mr. Harris's proclivities to dictate for their acceptance his peculiar views as Divine truth; and here is the rock of offence, and the sole ground of his charges. These accusations against Spiritualists are but a duplicate of those which the same brother has often preferred against the Universalist denomination, to which he is indebted for the insignia of 'Reverend,' which he cherishes, and even uses to sanction his denunciations of them."

Mr. Partridge now proceeds to give a biographical sketch of Mr. Harris from this period, which is very instructive :-"While brother Harris was settled over the Universal Society in Elizabeth Street, in this city, some fourteen years ago, more or less, he became infatuated with the revelations which were then being given through Andrew Jackson Davis; and when those revelations were published under the title of Nature's Divine Revelations, Mr. Harris asked leave of absence from his society to go to Europe for his health, which leave the society generously granted; but instead of going to Europe, Mr. Harris went to Ohio and other Western States, lecturing, not for the Divine revelations of the Bible, but for Nature's Divine Revelations, by Andrew Jackson Davis. The society continued their leave of absence, and subsequently settled Rev. E. H. Chapin. Brother Harris subsequently relinquished his ardour for Nature's Divine Revelations, and has since denounced it and Mr. Davis as cordially and fully as he has the Universalists and Spiritualists.

"Brother Harris subsequentiy tried to build up a society to sustain his preaching in this city. His meetings were held for some time in the Coliseum. He preached in the Socialists, and afterwards preached them out; and his erratic preaching caused a constant change of hearers, and the meetings there were not sustained. He subsequently commenced preaching in the Stuy

vesant Institute, and while labouring here he tried to acquaint himself with dynamics of mind and matter, and to shew the possibility of spirit-intercourse. During this time, one Dr. Scott, who had been a Baptist minister, discovered that singular phenomena occurred in the presence of Mrs. Benedict, then residing in Auburn, N.Y. In the presence of Mrs. Benedict, slight raps occurred, and St. Paul proposed to communicate. The idea that St. Paul could and would condescend to speak through a mortal, much excited Mr. Harris, and arrangements were made for Mrs. Benedict and Dr. Scott to come to Mr. Harris's boarding place, in Brooklyn, and deliver the oracles of St. Paul to twelve chosen persons, and if possible, that St. Paul should develope or remodel Mr. Harris so that he should be henceforth St. Paul's oracle to the world. Dr. Scott also became infatuated with the ambition of being a medium for some of the Apostles, and they fancied that St. John accepted this offer; and they supposed that St. Paul and St. John and other Apostles henceforth communicated through them.

"It would make this article too lengthy to give the minutia of the dramatic performances to which these men subjected themselves to secure these mediatorial offices. It is sufficient to say that they worked themselves into the persuasion that they had been chosen by God, Christ and the Apostles, as the medium for their oracles to mankind, and under the flattering unction of this persuasion, they set about gathering together the elect, and travelling westward to a land sufficiently pure for the influx and efflux of Divine wisdom. They induced a small company to take up their beds and follow them to Mountain Cove, Virginia, where they made purchases and settled. Here they established the "Mountain Cove Journal," and through its columns they gave, as they supposed, the supernal wisdom of God, Christ and the Apostles to the world; and it was very generally conceded that it might be supernal wisdom, since no mortal could comprehend it. In about two years, or less, we believe, this community broke up in great confusion, amid the criminations and recriminations which have generally attended the various changes of Mr. Harris's enterprises and views.

"Mr. Harris then returned to this city, and the Spiritualists received him as it becomes a father to receive a prodigal son, and invited him to lecture for them, and procured the Hall in the Medical College for that purpose. Here brother Harris delivered some of the most scorching discourses on the Scriptures as a Divine revelation, and the Christian Church generally, to which we ever listened. They were quite too strong for those whom he now denounces as rejecting the Scriptures as a Divine revelation. Nevertheless, we heard him gladly, not as an oracle,

and not for his censoriousness, but for his acknowledged eloquence and zeal in what he appeared to think was right and true.

"After a few months had elapsed and the mortifications from the failure of his apostolic enterprise to Mountain Cove had subsided, he seemed to come more and more to himself, and preached some excellent discourses to the Spiritualists at Dodworth's Academy. Finally, his prevailing ambition to have a church, began to pester him, and grew into an open demand, to which the Spiritualists did not accede, and the Mountain Cove persuasion again took control of him, and he concluded that the Divine love and wisdom of God and Christ were not permitted to penetrate the cloud of evil spirits and flow down, even through him, to the reprobate minds, as he alleged them to be, which congregated to hear him at that place. This he said to them in some of his last discourses in the plainest terms, and at the same time called on the few pure minds to go out and follow him and help to build up the Kingdom of God.

"Brother Harris and some others thus separated themselves from the main body of Spiritualists in this city, and they met afterwards in the Chapel of the University under the assumed insignia which the Swedenborgians had long enjoyed, namely, "The New Church;" and in his teachings he even out-Swedenborged Swedenborg himself, much to the annoyance of many of his disciples, who feigned to know something of the philosophy of the Swedish seer before. He continued to speak there to a small company of admirers until he became persuaded, and so said, that he had been developed above their plane of comprehension, and that the Lord had prepared a man to receive the mantle of that plane of teaching, and that he had been instructed to soar aloft and go to Europe and disseminate the supernal wisdom there.

"Subsequently to the time when he withdrew himself from Dodworth's Academy, he took the persuasion that the highest spirits were constantly around him warding off the evil ones, and that they were trying to develope him into a higher plane, and that to do so it was necessary that he should keep his bed, and he did so. He ate but little, and that little was brought to his bed, and in bed he wrote, or rather dictated to his amanuensis what appeared in his publications. He was persuaded that he acted in accordance with the dictates of the Apostles, Christ and the very God, and only got up when he thought they so impressed him, which was only on Sundays to preach."

We may interrupt the narrative a moment to say that he continued this practice of keeping his bed in the same manner during his sojourn in England in 1860, and we were much amused on one occasion by the naïve expression of an intelligent

boy who was sent on a message and admitted to the prophet's chamber. On being asked if he saw Mr. Harris, he replied, 'Yes, he was lying on his back in bed making mountains with his knees.'

"Thus," says Mr. Partridge, "we have with pain and sorrow, given a very brief history of Brother Harris during some fifteen years. We have not done this to injure him; far from it, but in the defence of truth, and as an illustration of a prevalent psychical phenomenon, which is often mistaken for spirit influence, and to call brother Harris's attention to the changes which have come over his mind, to the end that he may be less positive in his opinion as to the Divinity of his persuasion, and above all, to be less censorious of the brethren who are not able to follow him in his sudden changes and chimerical enterprises. If also this narrative shall suggest to his friends the injury they do him by falling into his pretensions, and thus binding him more strongly in psychical chains, we shall be thankful.

"Brother Harris is not be blamed for his unfortunate organization. He is impulsive, and often speaks without consideration. He has the virtue of thinking at the time that he is right, and that he does and says all in the service of God. In a self-consecrating spirit, brother Harris has, as it seems to us, sacrificed his manhood to a supposed Divine influx, and he is reaping the consequences of that error. It is a gross mistake of Mr. Harris to suppose that he is a living proof of the danger, mentally and physically, of cultivating the science of Spiritualism. On the contrary, he is a living proof of the danger of a too prevalent hothouse process of making mesmeric subjects, and of the abominable practice of women magnetizing men. We have been acquainted with several cases of this kind, and the uniform result shews the practice to be a disorderly one. By it the feminine qualities are engrafted into the masculine, which sooner or later unmans the man. It excites the sensor nerves at the surface, by which physical impressions are permanently fixed in the brain, deranging its normal functions, and ruling the whole man. Will and judgment are subjected to mere sensation, and the man becomes like a tender, sensitive plant, which expands or shrivels up at the approach of the slightest influences. Man is thus unfitted for ordinary duties; his mental and physical energies are overcome by these sensational influences, which often cause the unfortunate subject to become censorious, complaining, whining, and pining away as by some fell disease.

"What then is the answer to our question as to the cause of Mr. Harris's denunciation of Spiritualists in America? First: