The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
I don't believe
it; had he been there on recent occasions he would have hit
sundry and various Baptists on the head with his tomahawk. If old
Tecum is trailing me around I want to give him a pointer right
here that as a guardian angel he's utterly no good in a clime
"Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime,"
and he had best cast his aegis over some Boston editor. It by no
means follows, however, that because many professional fakirs and
intellectual fuzziewuzzies have "gone in for Spiritualism," it is
all a fraud. If the morad floating in a sunbeam be
indestructible, existing in some shape from everlasting to
everlasting, it is inconceivable that mind, the lord of matter,
should perish utterly--should fade like an echo into the great
inane. That were a reversal of the law of the survival of the
fittest--casting away a priceless jewel while preserving its
tawdry setting. That the lesser should survive the greater; that
the case of Anaxarchus should continue and Anaxarchus' proud self
become nonexistent, were to leave matter without law and wreck
the universe, for law itself presupposes prescience. "Natural
law," so called, must either be an act of intelligence compelling
order, or a freak of nescience entailing chaos; hence if order be
eternal mind must necessarily be immortal, for it is an axiom of
science that "Nature wastes nothing." What becomes of the mighty
life-force of a Milton? If it be utterly extinguished; if it
becomes a forceless shade on Acheron's shore, or an "angel"
withdrawn from active influence in the universe, it is certainly
wasted, in so far as what we call nature is concerned. In his
lecture on "Evolution," Henry Ward Beecher said: "I believe there
is a universal and imminent constant influence flowing directly
from the bosom of God, and that is the inspiration of the human
race." Is God continually giving out this "influence," this
life-force, this vis vitalis, to the people of this planet, and
with each death withdrawing a portion thereof and either casting
it into the waste-basket of Perdition or cording it up, like
back- number newspapers, in the New Jerusalem, never to be again
employed? If it "flows directly from the bosom of God" is it not
God? And if Nature waste nothing can Nature's Prince be such a
prodigal? Is he not rather the great psychological heart of the
universe through which the same life-current, the same intellect
flows back and forth forever? But here! We are drifting into
metempsychosis--are in a fair way to get ourselves
excommunicated. Furthermore, we are actually predicating a
probability that the editor of the Chicago Inter-Ocean is a
reincarnation of Balaam's ass. I am not prepared to assert that
Spiritualism is all brazen charlantry or foolish self-deception.
It may be that the "inspiration" of which Beecher speaks as an
emanation from God himself, is but a higher wisdom taught the
longing heart by those it has loved and lost.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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