Strange Visitors Part 5

W. M. THACKERAY.

_HIS POST MORTEM EXPERIENCE_.

Poor Will Thackeray, when a stripling, was fit to kneel in the street before his mistress, that bright luminary who shone to his boyish eyes like a star of the first magnitude! Alas, he discovered her to be one of the sixteenth, and by the time he had ceased to care for polished boots and stiff, broad collars, she had dwindled down to an ordinary piece of humanity!

He found his boon companions, like himself, liable to mistake an ant for a whale and think the King of England next in royalty to a G.o.d!

What a fool he made of himself in the eyes of those who were wiser than he, when he swore the crown of England was made of unalloyed gold! The water he drank was filled with animalculae, yet he swore it was pure as the G.o.ds' nectar. The best and freshest air he breathed contained poison, yet his boyish wisdom knew better than that.

Poor Thackeray! wiser men than he knew that youthful imagination was a cheat; that the mistress of his heart was not a G.o.ddess; and wiser beings than they all knew--angelic beings, living in the golden streets of Paradise, knew--that the conception of what the spirit after death would be able to do was as far from the truth as were his boyish dreams of the mistress of his heart!

Poor Thackeray! he has attained that superior wisdom now! He walks, himself a ghost, among the ghosts of the past; and these "airy nothings"

nod and smile, and shake hands, and say:

"Yes, we are ourselves."

He thrusts his hands into his trowsers pockets, and remembers the time when he thought it would be indecent to go naked in the New Jerusalem!

Trowsers, forsooth! Yes, here they are, pockets and all; and he dives his hands in deeper, jingling something which strongly resembles cash; and struts about and hobn.o.bs with Addison, Spencer, Sterne, old Dean Swift, and he asks himself, "are these the great men of my fancy?" On reflection he finds he had expected to meet these luminaries shining like actual stars in the firmament, attended by some undefined splendor.

Poor Will Thackeray! he finds the same dross in the gold, the same animalculae in the water, the same poison in the air, the same fact that men are not G.o.ds in that much-vaunted place called heaven, as on the much-abused earth. But he wipes his spectacles, and clears away the mist of speculation and fancy, which has bedimmed his eyes, and looks about him more hopefully and trustfully than in the days when he walked through Vanity Fair and saw how Mr. Timms, with not a penny in the bank, pinched himself to give a little dinner in imitation of a great lord who gave a great dinner, and had gold beyond his count; sn.o.bs, who wore paste jewels and cotton-backed velvet, who cursed a fellow and strutted about in imitation of n.o.ble lords, who wore real diamonds and silken velvets!

mimicking the follies of the great, but never their n.o.ble deeds and heroisms.

He is beyond sn.o.bs now. He is in the land of heroisms and heroes. Yet he feels he has been cheated by the fat parson who stole sovereigns from his pocket to keep him out of h----! His spiritual bones fairly ache with the leagues he has travelled, hunting up the throne of G.o.d! "Where the deuce," he mutters, "is the showman?" He can't find the lake of fire and brimstone without a guide.

Poor Thackeray! he again wipes his spectacles and feels he has been sold!

This life on the other side of Jordan he finds to be what his American cousins would call a "humbug," a downright swindle upon the sympathies and good taste of those who wear long streamers of c.r.a.pe, and groan and sob over his funeral rites! He feels in duty bound (out of consideration for those mourners who expect nothing else) to go scudding through the air in a loose white shroud, or to rest cosily housed away in the "bosom of his Maker," like a big, grown-up infant that he is, or else to be howling at the top of his lungs hallelujahs!--he that could never raise a note. And, if not so, certainly, out of compliment to the judgment of his boon companions, he should be engaged in the dread alternative of sitting astride a pair of balances and being "weighed and found wanting;" or having been sent by the relentless Judge into everlasting torment "where there is cursing and gnashing of teeth," he should be found there tormenting his fellow-imps!

But alas! to his mortification, nothing of the kind is occurring or seems likely to occur.

He has been as active as the next man since his arrival in ghostdom. He has peeped under the _chapeaux_ of every solemn pilgrim whom he has pa.s.sed, but failed to find the four-and-twenty elders who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb. What has he found? He really is ashamed to own up to the number of mountain sides and sloping hills he has inspected in the vain search for a place he used to call h---- (he thought it blasphemy to add the other three letters); but neither cloven foot, nor forked tail, nor horns, nor any kind of fearful person in black, has pounced upon him; nor has he been seized by any claimant for leaving the world unshriven, as he did.

Poor Will Thackeray! it has been a great disappointment to him! He expected some kind of sensational reception--thunder or lightning, or some big G.o.d whose towering front might vie with Chimborazo--to awe him into the consideration that he had become a spirit and was launched into the awful precincts of eternity! No wonder he feels dogged and put upon to find himself thus bamboozled! He undertook a long and venturesome journey to "see the elephant," but it wasn't there!

He can't complain against the citizens of this famous "undiscovered bourne"; they have done all that's fair and square by him; they have shown all that they have got; and he is too much of a gentleman to taunt them. He knows they feel ashamed that they haven't those curiosities that their Vicegerents on earth had vouched for their having; he can see it in their faces; but he considers himself in duty bound to prepare his fellow-citizens for what they are to expect.

ARCHBISHOP HUGHES.

_TWO NATURAL RELIGIONS_.

There are two great natural religions before the world, the Roman Catholic and the Spiritualistic; and both are adapted to the wants of the race.

Man naturally gives expression to his thoughts by external forms corresponding to his ideas.

The Roman Catholic religion is accused of being a system of forms and ceremonies, but therein lies its wonderful adaptation to humanity.

Thought ever seeks expression in form, even as a mother's love for her infant finds expression in her ardent embrace.

Love is the prevailing element of the Catholic religion, as shown by the love of the Son of G.o.d for poor, ignorant, sinful creatures.

We do not present this to the mind ideally. We call in the outcast and the beggar, and we expose to their view, in the great cathedrals, the Son of G.o.d, as he appeared in all his various experiences of human life.

The parent who can earn but a scanty pittance for his offspring, sees before him Jesus lying in the manger, equal in squalid poverty with the lowest of mankind.

The majesty and glory of the courts of Heaven are symbolized in the Roman Church. _There_ is gathered the wealth of the world! All that is yet attained in the representation of the grand, the beautiful, the majestic, the sublime, and the devotional, is collected in the Mother of Churches.

What earthly king, in his n.o.ble palace, with its costly architecture, its ornaments of silver and gold, its rare paintings and statuary, the wealth and acc.u.mulation of many sovereigns, would admit into its sacred precincts the poor and the lowly, the beggar and the thief, the Magdalen and the Lazarus to sully with their presence his royal abode?

But we erect palaces to the King of Heaven! regal in architecture, and adorned with beauty surpa.s.sing in magnificence earthly royalty, in which the lowliest may enter on an equality with the prince; his untutored mind, his uncultivated senses may listen to music of the highest order.

The pealing tones of the organ resound under the touch of the highest masters of art for his simple ear. Listening to those strains, his mind forms a conception of the harmony and beat.i.tude of Heaven!

Even death is not looked upon with horror by the Catholic. If he lose a friend in this life, unlike the Protestant, he does not abandon him in oblivion, but his sympathies still extend to him by offering ma.s.ses for his soul. And it is because it is so adapted to man's spiritual nature that the Catholic religion has withstood the shock and surge of ages!

The restless, heaving billows of time have washed against the seven-hilled Church in vain.

My soul rests in peace. It has taken its abode in Elysium. And in this world among the stars, seeing clearer and further than when I inhabited the lowly planet earth, I look down upon the struggling, dying race I have left behind, and feel still, that the _Roman Catholic religion is the religion for the ma.s.ses_.

A great majority of men are born into the world but little higher than the beasts that perish. Their spiritual natures, though feeble, need food that is adapted to their wants. That food we furnish.

Our priests, our sisters of charity, our holy fathers, our Benedictine monks, our nuns, are to be found in every quarter of the globe. On the mountains of everlasting snow, among the icebergs of the Polar Sea, and in the sandy deserts; on inhospitable sh.o.r.es, in the torrid zone, under the burning rays of the equatorial sun; with the savage and with the sage they are found ever ready to stimulate the spiritual nature, to give earthly advice, and supply material wants.

As a spirit I speak of what I think best adapted to the needs of man. I endeavor to throw aside the prejudices of education. I look upon the Protestant religion as unnatural; a monstrous belief which deforms man.

So far as I can see, its influence has been blighting. It takes youth, joy, and animation from the world. It grants no indulgence for sin, nor for the mistakes of ignorance. It is cruel and harsh, and men become narrow and self-elated under its teachings.

The Spiritualistic religion resembles the Catholic in its breadth and amplitude, and in its humanizing and equalizing influence. I expect the day will come when all minor beliefs will be swallowed up in these two great religions.

The Catholic Church in the spirit world is not so extensive as it is upon earth. Its usefulness is more especially adapted to earthly conditions.

There are some n.o.ble cathedrals in the spirit world. Ma.s.s is offered up every morning at the cathedral of the Five Virgins in my bishopric.

The sisterhood of the Five Wise Virgins, newly organized, inhabit beautiful and commodious edifices adjacent.

It is their business to escort from earth youthful souls who have been baptized in the Church, and who are friendless and vagrant, having inhabited while on earth such parts of New York City as the Five Points and Water street, and having neither kindred nor connection to claim them.

These are received into the beautiful home of the sisterhood. They bathe in the golden fountains of youth, and are instructed in various ways.

They are taught the uses of magnetism, mesmerism, and psychology, and return to earth to rap, write, and speak, through media, and to bring back the stray lambs to the fold.

EDGAR A. POE.