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vol. title: Vol Four of The Theosophical Society of The Arya Samaj of Arya-wart vol. period: Sept 1878 – Sept 1879 pages in vol.: 350 |
Tramps and Loafers
To the Editor of the Albany Evening Times.
Sir: Speaking in a general way, everything we see, everything we possess is the child of the father. Father toil produces a child of beauty; father idleness begets idiotic offspring. Vicious society is the father of a vicious malevolent brood that, like a scorpion, will turn and sting it.
Labor is serious. If there be a smile in the grain that lifts its open sheaves to the sun, grateful for culture, light and heat, it soon bows to that universal death which broods over all that is (seemingly) living. Labor is serious. The great heart of toil throbs throughout the universe; the solemn pulsations of divine forces are imminent and pervading all the avenues and intricacies of material things. Idleness with the scenes and sports and plays it propagates, like the fabled vampire, sucks the life blood of generous deific industry. The games that now almost throttle every lofty aspiration of our youth, are ablaze with those quenchless fires (whose effects are never ending) which lie smouldering in all the sinks of sloth, bursting at intervals with a lurid glow upon our social atmosphere, leaving no scintillation of divine good, no aroma that a virtuous soul is willing to inhale, no sheen of patriotic sentiment the nation can adopt. Congregated idleness at the street corners and on the steps of dwellings which it will never earn for itself, bespeaks a state of society at variance with that high moral code, prevalent in all lands, which a Solon, a Buddha, a Christ has ennobled, and which even proclaims that we are to give an account for every idle word. Life is a solemn reality. No thread of levity runs through the warp which high emprise weaves and wraps its destiny in, during the few days alloted to its attainment. Were it otherwise, and in the present lay all there is of our being, we might round it with a horse-race (one of England’s plague spots) and a base-ball club, and fling our ashes into the great stream of death that rolls away to a lethean sea, to an ocean of oblivion; but the drapery of our couch when we lie down in our last mortal sleep and which eternity will take up and illumine, will be our thoughts and deeds, our charities and loves, our follies, our hates and lusts; and then, oh then, what? “There is nothing holy but the just,” says Socrates, and justice alone can clothe us aright. But if we have tramps and idlers in low life and bloated official thieves in the high, is not society at large to blame for it? Many, I doubt not, shelter themselves under the conviction that the cohort of clergy is responsible for all the morals of the community. But what has this body accomplished? “Show me a Christian,” says Col. Ingersoll. Echo answers, where? Will you trust your Christian neighbor with your money without a receipt, and believe, in dying, that your estate will be equitably administered? Do you believe that more than a tenth of our high officials are following Bible precepts? Our clergy are working at the wrong end. To preach in a costly church to chignons and laces, is shedding silvery sentiments on gold-encrusted hearts. A costly trifle may top up the sanctuary; a stained window may be won out of an overloaded purse, but a greater stain may rest upon the church, for the poor have not the gospel preached to them, (see Matthew xi. 5,) and the rich are generally impervious to it; Christ’s pearls roll over them like shining globules of mercury over polished steel. About a year ago there was a great attempt at a “revival”; I trust that some good was done, but has there been less crime, less people sent to the penitentiary, less drunkenness, vulgarity, vagabondage? I think not. I believe our clergy began again at the wrong end. They were hammering at old granite that had become petrified under their very apostolic preaching. I did not see any of them hunting up the little revellers that hang like a pestilence upon the suburbs of our city. I know that one of them grasped both hands of a pretty young widow and begged her to come to Jesus. Her heart may have been touched, but her head not, and she declined his invitation; but I apprehend that he was not seen grasping the hands of the dirty little urchins above referred to, urging them to come to the Saviour. At that very time there were daily congregated at the upper end of Colonie street from twenty to fifty boys of that type which would make the heathen, whom I have known in India, blush with shame. They were those brazen-faced little demons who screech defiance to decency, howl out hideous oaths, while the loathsome leprosy of their vulgarity beclouds all the sunshine of their sport. To be sure, to reach them it would have been necessary to climb a rail or board fence, and this could not have been done with that dignity which now has to sustain “the cloth.”
“People are implacable toward those who force them to see,” says Michelet. These homely truths are not palatable, I am aware, but they may serve to turn the attention of our estimable Albanians in the right direction—the education of every child without exception—for this is the only way that the future tramp can be suppressed; this is the sole, the simple way by which waste of time and the vices of low sports and all therein inhering can be avoided; thieving, drunkenness, loafing lessened; for, when through proper education children learn the value of hours and moments, have been taught how golden truth is, how priceless are habits of industry, how more than beautiful, how fascinating, how enriching to the mind are good books; when these little blaspheming renegades who run riot in our thoroughfares learn that time is money, that knowledge is power, that virtue is a passport to an abiding homestead in our Father’s kingdom, then and then only will the evils here enumerated become matters of history, the student’s lamp will burn for the eager eyes of him who now sits in darkness, and lounging will cease to offend the eye and the heart of the good citizen.
Now if all our church edifices could be turned into kindergarten schools, under noble minded progressive women, not Becky Hindermans, and the clergy could be turned out to preach and heal as Christ and his apostles did, and all our missionaries abroad could be recalled to teach our abundant heathen at home—using all the money that is expended on our towering temples and our missions—using it all to make bright by education those whom we can now but regard as clouds of devouring locusts that are to make desolate our fair land—using it thus, the glad horizon of no very distant day would bear no blemish of the almshouse and the gallows; our penitentiaries would be as a vanished nightmare; those who would become essentially tramps would turn to new fields of thought and be aglow with intelligence, and the little rascals who love to roll and revel in iniquity would be climbing the noble steep to fame and usefulness. That these fair bright days may come is the earnest prayer of one who seeks only the good of his fellow men.
Albany, Sept. 21.
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The Scientific Hypothesis Respecting Mediumistic Phenomena
An extraordinary circumstance has recently occurred in the domain of mediumship. For the first time a mediumistic phenomenon has happened in corroboration of a scientific hypothesis, has made it possible to explain not alone the one fact under notice, but a whole series of similar phenomenal occurrences. Thus that magical circle within which the rejected and abused mediums revolved, and from which they had no means of escape, because they testified to facts which, in the opinion of sceptics, were absurd, impossible, contrary to the laws of nature, is at last broken, and egress is possible. The first step towards the explanation of mediumistic phenomena is taken—and by Germany.
It is well known that America, England, France, and Russia have had their scientists who, on the strength of personal experience, have conceded the reality of phenomena in the presence of mediums. Germany alone has hitherto offered the exception, disdainfully sneering at the “infected;” but she, also, has at last fallen to the same “contagion;” through Professors Perty, Hofmann, and Fichte admitting the genuineness of mediumistic phenomena, and Professor Zöllner, of the Leipzig University, the astronomer and physicist, who has become our witness to the fact of mediumship, and not he alone, but many others whose names and testimony will soon become known. Full justice ought to be done to the German man of science; he had reached beforehand, and in a truly philosophical spirit of enquiry, the conviction of the possibility of a specific fact, and the accomplishment of this fact proved a veritable triumph of speculative science. All previous scientific investigators had considered mediumistic facts solely in the empirical manner; they had testified merely to that which they had seen, either sparing themselves the trouble to explain the manifestations, or accepting the popular hypothesis (that of spirits) which never had a strictly scientific character. But the German scientist, while developing his hypothesis, independent of any consideration of mediumship, and only showing that such phenomena would be in accordance with scientific formulas, though previously regarded as impossible, was suddenly impressed with the idea of applying his hypothesis to mediumship, and thenceforward patiently waited for a specified phenomenon, which he had himself chosen as an experiment, but which had never yet occurred in the presence of a medium. The phenomenon did take place.
The marvellous facts, attested by thousands of laymen and a few isolated scientists, had never awakened a responsible echo from other savants, for the simple reason that science has had as yet no theory to which such facts could be fitted; they palpably did violence to common sense, upset well-established natural laws, and so were brushed aside as either fraud or hallucination. But these facts have now acquired the right of citizenship; for only now a purely scientific hypothesis has been advanced, if not as a complete explanation, at least as a concession of their reality. I had hoped that the honor of demonstrating mediumistic phenomena on scientic grounds would have belonged to us Russians; but now this distinction has been wrenched from us by a German who knew how to make use of the very medium Slade, who had been invited to Russia by our late committee on spiritism.
But what is this hypothesis? An exhaustive treatise upon this part of Zöllner’s labours has been published by Professor Butlerof in the February number of the “Russian Vyestnik”; what follows is but a brief survey of it and the demonstration that followed.
Our dimensions of space are bounded, as all know, by three dimensions—length, breadth, and thickness. It was Kant who first surmised the possibility of not merely a fourth, but even of a greater number of ... <... continues on page 8-36 >
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