Channing.

— Several times we have reproduced in this Review spontaneous dictations from the Spirit Channing, which do not belie his superiority of character and intelligence. Surely our readers will be grateful for our giving them an idea of the opinions he professed in life, through the following fragment of one of his discourses, whose translation we owe to the kindness of one of our subscribers. As his name is little known in France, we shall preface it with a brief biographical notice.

William Ellery Channing was born in 1780, in Newport, Rhode Island, State of New York. His grandfather, William Ellery, signed the famous declaration of independence. Channing was educated at Harvard College, destined for the medical profession; but his tastes and aptitudes led him to the religious career, and in 1803 he became minister of the Unitarian chapel of Boston.

He always remained in that city, professing the doctrine of the Unitarians, a Protestant sect that counts numerous adherents in England and in America, in the highest classes. He distinguished himself by his broad and liberal views. By his remarkable eloquence, by his numerous works, and by the depth of his philosophy, he is counted among the most prominent men of the United States. A declared partisan of peace and progress, he preached without respite against slavery and made war upon that institution so obstinately that to many liberals such excess of zeal, harmful to his popularity, sometimes seemed inopportune. His name carried authority among the antislavery men. He died in Boston in 1842, at 62 years of age. Gannet succeeded him as head of the sect of the Unitarians. [William Channing Gannett.]

— “For the mass of men, heaven is almost always a world of fantasy: it lacks substance for them. The idea of a world in which there exist beings without gross bodies, pure Spirits or clothed in spiritual or ethereal bodies, seems to them pure fiction; that which can neither be seen nor touched does not seem real to them. This is sad, but it is not to be wondered at; indeed, how is it possible that men immersed in matter and in their interests, not cultivating the knowledge of the soul and of its spiritual faculties, can comprehend a higher spiritual life? The multitude regards as a visionary dreamer the one who speaks clearly and with joy of his future life and of the triumph of the Spirit over corporeal decomposition. This scepticism about spiritual and celestial things is as irrational and unphilosophical as it is degrading. “And how little rational it is to imagine that there are no other worlds besides this one, no other mode of existence higher than ours! Who is the man who, casting his eyes over this immense Creation, can doubt that there are beings superior to us, or see anything unreasonable in conceiving the Spirit in a state less circumscribed, less hampered than on Earth, in other words, that there is a spiritual world?

“Those who have left us for another world must take in this one an interest still more profound; their bonds with those they have left here are purified, but they are not dissolved. If the future state is an improvement upon the present state, if intelligence is to be strengthened and love enlarged, memory, a fundamental power of intelligence, must act upon the past with a greater energy, and all the benevolent affections that we preserve here must receive a new activity. To suppose the earthly life of the Spirit effaced would be to destroy its usefulness, to break the relation of the two worlds, and to subvert responsibility; otherwise, how would reward and punishment reach a forgotten existence? No; we must carry the present with us, whatever our future may be, happy or wretched. The good will form, it is true, new and holier bonds; but, under the expansive influence of that better world, the heart will have a capacity great enough to retain the old bonds as it forms new ones; it will remember with tenderness its birthplace, while it enjoys a more mature and happier existence. If I could imagine that those who have departed die to those who remain, I would honor and love them less. The man who, leaving them, forgets his own, seems devoid of the best sentiments of our nature; and if, in their new homeland, the just were to forget their parents on Earth, if, in drawing near to God, they were to cease to intercede for them, could we find that the change had been profitable to them? “One might ask whether those who are carried to heaven not only remember with interest those they have left on Earth, but, further, whether they have a present and immediate knowledge of them. I have no reason to believe that such knowledge does not exist. We are accustomed to regard heaven as remote from us, but nothing proves it. Heaven is the union, the society of superior spiritual beings. Can these beings not people the whole Universe, reproducing heaven everywhere? Like us, is it probable that such beings are circumscribed by material limits? Milton said:

“Millions of spiritual beings walk the earth Both when we make and when we sleep”

“Millions of spiritual beings walk the Earth As well when we wake as when we sleep.”

“A new sense, a new vision could show us that the spiritual world surrounds us on every side. But suppose even that heaven is remote; its inhabitants are not for that reason any the less present, and we visible to them; but what do we understand by presence? Am I not present to those among you whom my arm cannot reach, but whom I see distinctly? Is it not fully in accord with our knowledge of Nature to suppose that those who are in heaven, whatever the place of their residence, can have spiritual senses and organs, by means of which they can see what is distant, with the same ease with which we distinguish what is near? Our eyes perceive without effort planets millions of leagues away and, with the aid of Science, we can recognize even the irregularities of their surface. We can even imagine a visual organ sensitive enough or an instrument powerful enough to permit us to distinguish, from our globe, the inhabitants of those distant worlds. Why, then, could those who have entered into their higher phase of existence, who are clothed in spiritualized bodies, not contemplate our Earth as easily as in the time when it was their abode? “This may be true; but, if we accept it thus, let us not abuse it: one might abuse it. We do not think of the dead as if they contemplated us with a partial, earthly love. They love us more than ever, but with a purified spiritual affection. They have but one desire for us: that we become worthy of being reunited in their abode of beneficence and of piety. Their spiritual vision penetrates our souls; if we could hear their voice, it would not be a declaration of personal affection, but a vivifying appeal to greater efforts, to a firmer abnegation, to a broader charity, to a more humble patience, to a more filial obedience to the will of God. They breathe the atmosphere of divine benevolence, and their mission is now higher than it was here.

“You will ask me: if our dead know the ills that afflict us, will there be suffering in that blessed life? I answer that I can regard heaven only as a world of sympathies. It seems to me that nothing can better attract the gaze of its beneficent inhabitants than the sight of the misery of their brothers. But this sympathy, if it gives rise to sadness, is far from making unhappy those who feel it. In this lower world, disinterested compassion, allied to the power of soothing suffering, is a guarantee of peace, often affording the purest pleasures. Freed from our present infirmities and enlightened by the more expanded vision of the perfection of the divine governance, this sympathy will add more charm to the virtue of the blessed beings and, like any other source of perfection, will only increase their happiness. “Our friends, who leave us for that other world, do not find themselves in the midst of strangers; they do not have that desolate feeling of having exchanged their homeland for a foreign land. The tenderest words of human friendship do not approach the accents of felicitation that await them when they arrive in that abode. There the Spirit has surer means of revealing itself than here; the newcomer feels and sees himself surrounded by virtues and by goodness and, through that intimate vision of the sympathetic Spirits who surround them, bonds stronger than those cemented by years on Earth can be created in a moment. The most intimate affections on Earth are cold, compared to those of the Spirits. In what manner do they communicate? In what language and by means of what organs? We do not know, but we know that the Spirit, as it progresses, must acquire greater facility for transmitting its thought. “We would fall into error if we believed that the inhabitants of heaven limit themselves to the reciprocal communication of their ideas; on the contrary, those who reach that world enter into a new state of activity, of life, and of efforts. We are led to think that the future state is so happy that no one there needs help, that effort ceases, that the good have nothing to do but enjoy. The truth, however, is that all action on Earth, even the most intense, is but a childish game, compared to the activity, the energy displayed in that higher life. And it must be so, for there is no principle more active than intelligence, beneficence, the love of truth, the thirst for perfection, pity for sufferings, and devotion to the divine work, which are the expansive principles of the life beyond the tomb. It is then that the soul has consciousness of its faculties, that infinite truth manifests itself before us, that we feel that the Universe is a sphere without limits for discovery, for Science, for charity, and for adoration. These new objects of life, which reduce the present interests to nothing, manifest themselves constantly. We must not, then, imagine that heaven is composed of a stationary community. I conceive it as a world of plans and of prodigious efforts toward its own improvement. I regard it as a society passing through successive phases of development, of virtues, of knowledge, of power, through the energy of its own members. “The celestial genius is always active in exploring the great laws of Creation and the eternal principles of the spirit, in unveiling the beautiful in the order of the Universe, and in discovering the means of advancement for each soul. There, as here, there are intelligences of various degrees, and the more evolved Spirits find happiness and progress in educating the more backward ones. There the work of education, as on Earth, ever progresses, and a philosophy more divine than that taught among us reveals to the Spirit its own essence, stimulating it to joyful efforts toward its own perfection.

“Heaven is in relation with other worlds; its inhabitants are the messengers of God throughout all Creation; they have great missions to fulfill and, by the progress of their endless existence, God may entrust to them the care of other worlds.”

— This discourse was pronounced in 1834. At that time there was no question of manifestations of Spirits in America. Channing, therefore, did not know of them; otherwise he would have affirmed what on certain points he only admitted as a hypothesis. But is it not remarkable to see this man foresee with such precision that which was only to be revealed some years later? For, save for a few exceptions, his description of the future life agrees perfectly. Only reincarnation is missing; moreover, if we examine it well, we see that he approaches it, just as he comes close to the manifestations, about which he is silent, because he does not know of them. Indeed, he admits the invisible world that surrounds us, in our midst, full of solicitude for us, helping us to progress. From there, to direct communications there is but one step. He does not admit in the celestial world perpetual contemplation, but activity and progress; he accepts the plurality of corporeal worlds, more or less advanced. Had he said that the Spirits could accomplish their progress by passing through these different worlds, we would there have reincarnation. Without it, the idea of these progressive worlds is even irreconcilable with the creation of souls at the moment of the birth of bodies, unless one admits that the souls were created more or less perfect; in this case, it would be necessary to justify that preference. Is it not more logical to say that if the souls of one world are more advanced than those of another, it is because they have already lived in inferior worlds? The same may be said of the inhabitants of the Earth, compared among themselves, from the savage up to the civilized man. Be that as it may, we ask whether such a portrait of the life beyond the tomb, by its logical deductions, accessible to the most common intelligences and accepted by the most severe reason, is not a hundred times more suited to instill conviction and confidence in the future, than the horrible and inadmissible description of endless tortures, borrowed from the Tartarus of paganism? Those who preach these beliefs have not the least idea of the number of unbelievers they generate, nor of the recruits they marshal for the phalanx of the materialists. Let us note that Milton, cited in this discourse, expresses about the surrounding invisible world an opinion in all respects conformable to that of Channing, which is also that of the modern Spiritists. It is that Milton, like Channing and like so many other eminent men, were Spiritists by intuition. It is for this reason that we never cease to affirm that Spiritism is not a modern invention; it is of all times, because there have been souls in all times and in all times the mass of men have believed in the soul. Thus, traces of these ideas are found in a multitude of writers, ancient and modern, sacred and profane. This intuition of Spiritist ideas is so general that we see every day a number of persons who, hearing of them for the first time, are not in the least astonished: nothing was wanting but a systematization for their belief.