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If Speak You Must, then Let Loose Your Own Wretched Spiritual Condition!
My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all night long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart.
We would like to believe that everything we think and say is right, but we cannot. That is because we do not have grace enough or sense enough. Of course, there is a wit in each of us, but even this is dimmed through negligence. What we really fail to notice is that we are losing our interior vision. How do you know?? When we act so daily, and the excuses we cook up are so abysmal! When we explode with passion and think, no I am not angry, I am just defending the faith. When we peck at the peccadillos of others, and our own whoppers we let pass unchallenged, as the Evangelist Matthew has pointed out (7.3)! When we ponder what we will put up with from others, but pay little attention to how much others will have to put up with from us! Is there a moral anywhere in this? Whoever wants one’s own actions to be tolerably received would do well not to judge the behaviour of others so intolerably. Whoever has an interior life should put the spiritual care of oneself before the care of others. You will never be internal and devout until you hold your tongue about others. If speak you must, then let loose your own wretched spiritual condition. If you focus entirely on your relationship to God, precious little of the hubbub of the World will be able to penetrate your recollection. When you have that vacant stare in your eye, you might well ask yourself, before someone else does, just where are you? When you have run through everything the World has to offer, why, if I may echo Matthew (16.26), do you seem to have advance to the real? The moral? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If you want True Peace and True Union, then you just have to postpone everything else and attend to your own case. If only you drag your torso away from every temporal festival, you will make spiritual progress. When you put a value on each temporal thing, you will lose spiritual ground. All of which means, you can keep nothing as your own nothing big, nothing small, nothing nice, nothing new; that is to say, nothing except God and everything that smacks of God. However, all hose lovely creaturely consolations that came your way, what about them? Forget about them! The soul that loves God loathes everything that is not God. God Eternal, God Immense, “fulling all the space,” as Jeremiah phrased it (23.24); the soul’s solace, the heart’s True Joy. Although already a thriving business—having sold over 100,000 lever-action repeaters by the early 1880s—Winchester was ready to expand its market with different-action firearms. The Hotchkiss, a bolt action designed by American inventor Benjamin B. Hotchkiss and produced in hopes of military sales, appeared in 1883. In the same year, Winchester bought the rights to the falling block single-shot rifle invented and patented by John M. Browning. Spawned by the Browning connection with Winchester, the single-shot appeared in the Winchester catalogue for 1885. The single-shot would not reach the market until 1885 and remained in product line until approximately 1920. There are so many variations in calibers, barrels, overall configurations, finishes, triggers, sights, and other feature that sportsmen, the military, and target shooters were all offered every variety of possible use for a single-shot rifle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The number of cartridge chamberings for this model exceeds that of any other firearm made by Winchester: approximately sixty-five. The single-shot was made at a time when target shooting was as popular as golf is today and a major match like the Creedmoor (on New York’s Long Island) was very much the Masters of its day. Not only were the single-shots beautifully constructed and of a solid, virtually unbreakable design, but they were phenomenally accurate, used in international matches which were shot at distances up to 1,000 yards, with exquisitely constructed open sights and finely built tubular scope sights. The champion target shooters were international celebrities, and elaborate trophies were designed and built by such silversmiths as Gorham and Tiffany. The Browning-Winchester single-shot rifles were also a favourite of sportsmen-hunters as the wide selection of chamberings meant that cartridges were available for every type of North American game animal. Then, as now, hunters preferred the simplicity and reliability of a single-shot mechanism, as well as the challenge of having only one shot available, without the rapid-repeating capability of magazine arms. Taking a grizzly bear with a nonrepeating rifle required cool nerves and a steady hand. When Oliver Winchester brought out a John Browning design, the company certainly got its money’s worth. The $8,000.00 ($231,230.64 inflation adjusted for 2021) went a long way with the single shot. The Winchester rifles were highly successful. In June of 1888, John and Matt Browning were issued a patent for a slide-action magazine rifle, which—as the Model 1890—became Winchester’s first rifle of that type. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The model 1890, in two basic grades only (Sporting Rifle and Fancy Sporting Rifle, all having 24-inch octagonal barrels and rifle-style steel buttplates), remained in production through 1932, with a total production of nearly 850,000. The 1890 was Winchester’s all-time sales leader in .22 rimfire, and many 1890s are still in use around the World today. As an economical version of the Model 1890, the factory brought out the 1906 pump-action. And the 1906 thereby also became the factory’s first rifle advertised and sold which accommodated the three cartridges interchangeably. A further sales factor was that all Model 1906s featured takedown capability. Serial numbering on the 1906 was in its own range, and, like the 1890, the 1906 achieved an extraordinary sales total—nearly 850,000 made—before being discontinued in 1932. Hundreds of thousand of Winchester rifles were produced and they were assembled in what is called the Winchester Complex, which is in New Haven, Connecticut USA. In 1862, William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, married Sarah Lockwood Pardee. (Oliver Fisher Winchester was a very wealthy and prominent man, not only the owner of Winchester Repeating Arms, but also Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.) Sarah and William’s life together was happy, and they moved in the best of New England society. However, in 1866, disaster struck when their infant daughter, Annie died of the then mysterious childhood disease marasmus. Mrs. Winchester fell into a deep sadness. Fifteen years later, her husband William Wirt Winchester who was at the time president of Winchester Repeating Arms Company suffered a premature death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Mrs. Winchester inherited 777 shares of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and $20,000,000.00 ($532,737,254.90 inflation adjusted for 2021). She was told she could rest assure that her life was not in danger and by building a house similar to the Winchester Complex, which was 3,250,000 square feet, would give her eternal life. Now, no one really knows how much the Winchester’s were worth. In 1915, for instance, they may a deal with the British government in the sum of $47,500,000.00 ($1,277,778,217.82 inflation adjusted for 2021), so Mrs. Winchester’s inheritance was just a fraction of their cumulative wealth. In the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley presented sweeping visas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished eighteen-room farm house just three miles west of San Jose—and over the next thirty-eight years she produced the sprawling complex we know today as the Winchester Mystery House. The death of the child cannot be explained on natural grounds except by suggesting that there was something wrong with it quite unrelated to the father’s experience. However, there is eloquent testimony about evidence of the power of witchcraft. There were known to witches in New Haven, Connecticut in 1646. A servant named Mary Johnson was accused of being a witch. Others were known to practice black magic. However, it did not occur to anyone to notice that the evidence suggested that the malignant power must also reside not only in the witch but in the charms hey use or in the Devil’s power that lay behind them, since they worked equally well whether they were manipulated by a confessed witch or by a Godly magistrate. I am a believer of words, I believe everything depends on who says them. What if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales of the Winchester, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the Earth’s history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the World, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet so far finished as to part from the invisible World that its mother, and which, on its part, had no then become quite invisible—was only almost such. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
When, as a credible consequence, strange shapes of those now invisible regions, of Eden and Hell, might be expected to gloom out occasionally from the awful Fauna of an ever-generating World upon that one which was being born of it. Hence, the life-periods of a World being long and slow, some of these huge, unformed bulks of half-created matter might, somehow, like the megatherium of later times, a baby creation to them, roll at age-long intervals, clothes in a might terror of shapelessness into the half-recognition of human beings, whose consternation at the uncertain vision were barrier enough to prevent all further know of its substance. Ever since I was born, I suppose the changes of a World are not to be measured by the changes of its generations. When one’s discrimination is no greater than to lump everything marvellous—demons, Angels, kelpies, ghosts, vampires, doppelgangers, witches, fairies, nightmares under the one head of ghost—it upsets the reappearing of the of the departed. It matters very little whether we believe in ghost, or not, provided that we are ghosts—that within this body, which so many people are ready to consider their own very selves, their lies a ghostly embryo, at least, which has an inner side to it God only can see, which says I concerning itself, and which will soon have to know whether or not it can appear to those whom it has left behind, and thus solve the question of ghosts for itself, at least. Is telling a person about a ghost, affording one the source of one’s conviction? It is the same as a ghost appearing to one? Not at all. The impression may be deeper and clearer on your mind than any fact of the next morning will make. Not everyone can feel it, but the person who does is convinced. It cannot be conveyed. It is something you have to experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the year 1825 Oliver Fisher Winchester fell in love. This was before he met and married his wife Jane Ellen Hope. Here are notes from his journal: Well, I was walking along Chapel Street, and feeling a little bewildered in consequence—for it was quite the dusk of the evening. There was a haze in the air, when, from the crossing that cuts off the corner in the direction of Crown Street, just as I was about to turn towards it, a lady stepped upon the kerbstone of the pavement, looked at me for a moment, and passed—an occurrence not very remarkable, certainly. However, the lady was remarkable and so was her dress. I am not good at observing, and I am still worse at describing dress, therefore I can only say that hers reminded me of an old picture—that is, I had never seen anything like it, except in old pictures. She had no bonne, and looked as if she had walked straight out of an ancient drawing-room in her evening attire. The next instant I met a man on the crossing, who stopped and addressed me. So betwixt was I that, although I recognized his voice as one I ought to know, I could not identify him until he got closer, which I did instinctively in the act of returning his greeting. At the same time, I glanced over my shoulder after the lady. She was nowhere to be seen. “What are you looking at?” asked Gary James. “I was looking after that lady,” I answered, “but I cannot see her.” “What lady?” said James, with just a touch of impatience. “You must have seen her,” I retuned. “You were not more than three yards behind her.” “Where is she then?” “She must have gone down one of the areas, I think. However, she looked a lady, though an old-fashioned one.” “Have you been dining?” asked James, in a tone of doubtful enquiry. “No,” I replied, not suspecting the insinuation; “I have only just come from the Museum.” “Then I advise you to call on your medical man before you go home.” “Medical man!” returned; “I have no medical man. What do you mean? I never was better in my life.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
“I mean that there was no lady. It was an illusion, and that indicates something wrong. Besides, you did not know me when I spoke to you. “That is nothing,” I returned. “I had just taken a moment to recall your name.” “How was it you saw the lady, then?” The affair was growing serious under by friend’s interrogation. I did not a all like the idea of his supposing me subject to hallucinations. So I answered, with a laugh, “Ah! to be sure, that explains it. I was just confused.” It was a drizzly afternoon in the beginning of the last week of October when I left the two of New Haven. I hard hardly left the town, and the twilight had only in a post-chaise to ride to East Haven, the property of my friend’s father. I had hardly left the town and the twilight had only begun to deepen, when, glancing from one of the windows of the chaise, I fancied I saw, between me and the hedge, the dim figure of a horse keeping pace with us. I thought, in the first interval of unreason, that it was a shadow from my own horse, but reminded myself the next moment that there could be no shadow where there was no light. When I looked again, I was at the first glance convinced that my eyes had deceived me. At the second, I believed once more that a shadowy something, with the movements of a horse in harness, was keeping pace with us. I turned away again with some discomfort, and not till we had reached an open moorland road, whence a little watery light was visible on the horizon, could I summon up courage enough to look out once more. Certainly then there was nothing o be seen, and I persuaded myself that it had been all a fancy. As we turned into the avenue that led up to East Haven, I found myself once more glancing nervously out the window. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The moment the trees were about me, there was, if not a shadowy horse out there by the side of the chaise, yet certainly more than half that conviction in here in my consciousness. When I saw my friend, however, standing on the doorstep, dark against the glow of the hall fire, I forgot all about it; and I need not add that I did not make it a subject of conversation when I entered, for I was well aware that it was essential to a man’s reputation that his senses should be accurate, though his heart might without prejudice swarm with shadows, and his judgment be a very stable of hobbies. I was kindly received. Mrs. James had been dead for some years, and Florence Ida, the eldest of the family, was at the head of the household. She had two sisters, little more than girls. The father was a burly, yet gentlemanlike Yorkshire squire, who ate well, drank well, looked radiant, and hunted twice a week. In this pastime his son joined him when in the humour, which happened scarcely so often. I, who had never crossed a horse in my life, took his apology for not being able to mount me very coolly, assuring him that I could rather loiter about with a book than be in at the death of the best-hunted werewolf or Hellhound in East Haven. I very soon found myself a home with the James’s; and very soon again I began to find myself no so much at home; for Miss James—Florence Ida as I soon ventured to call her—was fascinating. There was an empty place in my heart. Florence’s figure was graceful, and her face was beautiful. Order was a very idol with her. Hence the house was too tidy for any sense of comfort. If you left a book on the table, you would, on retuning to the room a moment after, find it put aside. What the furniture of the drawing-room was like, I never saw; for not even on Christmas Day, which was the last day I spent there, was in uncovered. Everything in it was kept in bibs and pinafores. Even the carpet was covered with a slippery sheet of brown holland. Mr. James never entered that room, and therein was wise. Gary remonstrated once. She answered him quite kindly even playfully, but no change followed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
What was worse, she made very wretched tea. Her father never took tea; neither did Gary. I was rather fond of it, but I soon gave it up. Everything her father partook of was first-rate. Everything else was somewhat poverty-stricken. My pleasure in Florence’s society prevented me from making practical deductions from such trifles. The first day of November was a very lovely day, quite one. I was sitting in a little arbour I had just discovered, with a book in my hand—not reading, however, but day-dreaming—when, lifting my eyes from the ground, I was startled to see, through a thin shrub in from of the arbour what seemed the form of an old lady seated, apparently reading from a book on her knee. The sight instantly recalled the lady from Chapel Street. I started to my feet, and then, clear of the intervening bush, saw only a great stone such as abounded on the moors in the neighbourhood, with a lump of quartz set on top of it. Some childish taste had put it there for ornament. Smiling at my own folly, I say down again, and reopened my book. After reading for a while, I glanced up again, and once more started to my feet, overcome by the fancy that there verily sat the lady reading. You will say it indicated an excited condition of the brain. Possibly; but I was, as far as I can recall, quite collected and reasonable. I was almost vexed this second time, and sat down once more to my book. Still, every time I looked up, I was startled afresh. I doubt, however, if the trifle is worth mentioning, or had any significance even in relation to what followed. I wondered if Florence practiced witchcraft. There were others who may or may not have practiced it—the evidence is insufficient—but who had clearly used their reputation for occult power to gain illegitimate personal ends. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Gary said that Florence had been dabbling in the occult for years; about five years ago he said she had borrowed a book on palmistry, containing rules on how to know the future. However, he told her it was an evil book and evil art. His charity was wasted, however, since Florence continued telling people’s futures, somethings through reading their faces as well as through reading their palms. Fortunetelling is often only white magic. However, it easily becomes black magic when it concerns itself with the time or manner of the subject’s death. After dinner I strolled out by myself, leaving father and son over their claret. I did not drink wine; and from the lawn I could see the windows of the library, whither Florence commonly retired from the dinner-table. It was a very lovely soft night. There was no moon, but the stars looked wider awake than usual. Dew was falling, but the grass was not yet wet, and I wandered about on it for half and hour. The stillness was somehow strange. It had a wonderful feeling it as if something were expected—as if the quietness were the mould in which some even or other was about to be cast. Even then I was a reader of certain sorts of recondite lore. Suddenly I remembered that this was the eve of All Souls. This is the night on which all the faithful departed, those baptized Christians who are believed to be in purgatory because they died with the guilt of less sin on their souls, came out of their graves to visit their old homes. “Poor dead!” I thought with myself; “have you any place to call a home now? If you have, surely you will not wander back here, where all you have called home has either vanished or given itself to others, to be their home now and yours no more! What an awful doom the old fancy has allotted you! To dwell in your graves all he year, and creep out, this one night, to enter at the midnight door, left open for welcome! A poor welcome truly!—just an open door, a clean-swept floor, and a fire to warm your rain-sodden limbs! The household asleep, and the houseplace swarming with the ghost of ancient times—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no walking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourself, to question you.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“Yet who can tell?” I went on to myself. “It may be your hell to return thus. It may be that only on this one night of the year you can show yourself to one who can see you, but that the place were wicked is the Hades to which you are doomed for ages.” I thought and thought till I began to feel the air alive about me, and was enveloped in the vapours that dim the eyes of those who strain them for one peep through the dull mica windows that will not open on the World of ghosts. At length I cast my fancies away, and feld from them to the library in hopes that no one would raise the Devil to kill or bewitch me. There were many books of fortune-telling and grimoires, of course, full of diagrams. The bodily presence of Florence made the World of ghosts appear shadowy indeed. “What a reality there is about a bodily presence.” I said to myself, as I took y chamber-candle in my hand. “But what is there more real in a body?” I said again, as I crossed the hall. “Surely nothing,” I went on, as I ascended the broad staircase to my room. “The body must vanish. If there be a spirit, that will remain. A body can but vanish. A ghost can appear.” I woke in the morning with a sense of such discomfort as made me spring out of bed at once. When I looked at my watch after I was dressed, I found I had risen an hour earlier than usual. I groped my way downstairs to spend the hour before breakfast in the library. No sooner was I seated with the book than I heard the voice of Florence scolding the butler, in no very gentle tones, for leaving the garden door open all night. The moment I heard this, the strange occurrences I am about to relate began to dawn upon my memory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The door had been open the night long between All Saints and All Souls. In the middle of the night I awoke suddenly. I knew it was not the morning by the sensations I had, for the night feels altogether different from the morning. It was quite dark. My heart was beating violently, and I either hardly could or hardly dared breathe. A nameless terror was upon me, and my sense of hearing was, apparently by the force of its expectation, unnaturally roused and keen. There it was—a slight noise in the room!—slight, but clear, and with an unknown significance about it! It was awful to think it would come again. I do believe it was only one of those creaks in the timers which announced the torpid, age-long, skin flow of every house back to the dust—a motion to which the flow of the glacier is as a torrent, but which is no less inevitable and sure. Day and night it ceases not; but only in the night, when house and heart are still, do we hear it. No wonder it should sound fearful! for we are we not the immortal dwellers in ever-crumbling clay? The clay is no near us, and yet not of us, that it is every movement starts a fresh dismay. For what will its final ruin disclose? When it falls from about us, where shall we find that we have existed all the time? My skin tingled with the bursting of the moister from its pores. Something was in the room besides me. Sometimes apparitions had the reputation for torture and the torture included choking. People should teach their children to fear God, should come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil. A confused, indescribable sense of utter loneliness, and yet awful presence, was upon me, its blood did cry for vengeance against me. Nobody seemed to have noticed that the specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. The Devil himself did no know so far. This presence was mingled with a dreary, hopeless desolation, as of burnt-out love and aimless life. All at once I found myself sitting up. The terror that a cold hand might be laid upon me, or a cold breath blow on me, or a corpselike face bend down through the darkness over me, had broken my bonds!—I would meet half-way whatever might be approaching. The moment that my will burst into action the terror began to ebb. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The room in which I slept was a large one, perfectly dreary with tidiness. I did not know till afterwards that it was Florence’s room, which she had given up to me rather than prepare another. The furniture, all but one article, was modern and commonplace. I could not help remarking to myself afterwards how utterly void the room was of the nameless charm of feminine occupancy. I had seen nothing to wake a suspicion of its being a lady’s room. The article I have excepted was an ancient bureau, elaborate and ornate, which stood on one side of the large bow window. They very morning before, I had seen a bunch of keys hanging from the upper part of it, and had peeped in. Finding, however, that the pigeon-holds were full of papers, I closed it at once. I should have been glad to use it, but clearly it was not for me. At that bureau the figure of a woman was now seated in the posture of one writing. A strange dim light was around her, but whence I proceeded I never thought of enquiring. As if I, too, had stepped over the bourne, and was a ghost myself, all fear was now gone. I got out of bed, and softly crossed the room to where she was seated. “If she should be beautiful!” I thought—for I had often dreamed of a beautiful ghost that was pleased with me. The figure did not move. She was looking at the faded brown paper. “Some old love-letter,” I thought, and stepped nearer. So cool was I now, that I actually peeped over her shoulder. With mingled surprise and dismay I found that the dim page over which she was bent was that of an old account-book. Ancient household records, in rusty ink, held up to the gliosis of the waning moon, which shone through the parting in the curtains, their entries of shillings and pence!—Of pounds there was not one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
No doubt pounds and fathers are much the same in the World of thought—the true spirit-World; but in the ghost-World this eagerness over shillings and pence must mean something awful! To think that coins which had since been worn smooth in other pockets and purses, which had gone back to the Mint, and been melted down, to come out again and yet again with the heads of new kings and queens—that diners, eaten by the worms—that polish for the floors inches of whose thickness had since been worn away—that the hundred nameless trifled of a life utterly vanished, should be perplexing, annoying, and worst of all, interesting the soul of a ghost who had been in Hades for centuries! The writing was very old-fashioned, and e words were contracted. I could read nothing but the moneys and one single entry—“Corinths Vs.” Currans for a Christmas puffing, most likely! Ah–, poor lady! the pudding and not the Christmas was her care; not the delight of the children over it, but the beggarly pence which it cost. And she cannot get it out of her head, although her brain was “powdered all as thin as flour” ages ago in the mortar of Death. “Alas, poor ghost!” It needs no treasure hoard left behind, no floor stained with the blood of the murdered child, no wickedly hidden parchment of landed rights. Was this a demonic conspiracy? Witches cannot send the Devil to torment people by making a covenant with the Devil. Some people in this town had a lot of evidence against them for trafficking in the occult. In fact, if you recall, during the Salem Witch Trials, renegade members of the clergy had played a large part in the history of witchcraft in fact and in fiction. It should be recalled that Morgan le Fey, King Arthur’s sister, was supposed to have learned her evil craft in the nunnery where she was educated, that Benvenuto Cellini’s sorcerer-friend was a priest, and that a renegade priest is supposed to be necessary to the performance of Black Mass. An old account-book is enough for the hell of the house-keeping gentlewoman! She never lifted her face, or seem to know that I stood behind her. I left her, and went into the bow window, where I could see her face. I was right there. It was the same lady I had met at Chapel Street, walking in front of Gary James. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Her withered lips went moving as if they would have uttered words she had the breath been commissioned thither; her brow was contracted over her thin nose; and once and again her shining forefinger wen up to her temple as if she were pondering some deep problem of humanity. How long I stood gazing at her I do not know, but at last I withdraw to my bed, and left her struggling to solve that which she could never solve thus. It was the symbolic problem of her own life, and she had failed to read it. I remember nothing more. She may be sitting there still, solving at the insolvable. I should have felt no inclination, with the broad sun of the squire’s face, the keen eyes of Gary James, and the beauty of Florence before me at the breakfast table, to say a word about what I had seen, even if I had not been afraid of the doubt concerning my sanity which the story would certainly awaken. What with the memories of the night, I passed a very dreary day, dreading the return of the night, for, cool as I had been in her presence, I could not regard the possible reappearance of those ghost with equanimity. I had a belly ache. Gary James said he would take a pipe of tobacco and light it. I told him that I thought it was not lawful. [The idea that this remedy was unlawful is probably a result of the use of tobacco in it. Tobacco was an “Indian Weed” and used in Indian ceremony and medicine. The Puritans, like other seventh-century Christians, thought the Indians to be Devil worshippers and thought of their medicine men as magicians.] He said it was lawful for man or beast. However, when the night did come, I slept soundly to the morning. The next day, not being able to read with comfort, I went wandering about the place, and at length began to fit the outside and inside of the house together. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The house was a large and rambling edifice, parts of it very old, parts comparatively modern. I first found a beautiful stained-glass window, which looked out back. It was kind of a countercharm and verged on black magic because it was supposed not only to break the witch’s spell but to injure the witch or compel her presence. Below this window, on one side, there was a door. I wondered whiter it led, but found it locked. At the moment Gary James approached from the stables. “Where does this door lead?” I asked him. “I will get the key,” he answered. “It is rather a queer old place. We used to like it when we were children.” “There is a stair, you see,” he said, as he threw the door open. “It leads up over the kitchen.” I followed him up the stair. “There is a door into your room,” he said, “but it is always locked now. And here is Grannie’s room, as they call it, though why, I have not the least idea,” he added, as he pushed open the door of an old-fashioned parlour, smelling very musty. A few old books lay on a side table. A china bowl stood besides them, with some shrivelled, scented rose-leaves in the bottom of it. The cloth that covered the table was riddled by moths, and the spider-legged chairs were covered with dust. A conviction seized me that the old bureau must have belonged to this room, and I soon found the place where I judged it must have stood. However, the same moment I caught sight of a portrait on the wall above the spot I had fixed upon. “Good Lord!” I caried, involuntarily, “that is the very lady I met at Chapel Street!” “Nonsense!” said Gary James. “Old-fashioned ladies are like babies—they all look the same. That is a very old portrait.” “So I see,” I answered. “It is like a Zucchero.” “I don’t know whose it is,” he answered hurriedly, and I thought he looked a little queer.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“Is she one of the family?” I asked. “They say so; but who or what she is, I don’t know. You must ask Jean,” he answered. “The more I looked at it,” I said, “the more I am convinced it is the same lady.” “Well,” he returned with a laugh, “my old nurse used to say she was rather restless. But it’s all nonsense.” “That bureau in my room looks about the same date as this furniture.” I remarked. “It used to stand just there,” he answered, pointing to the space under the picture. “Well, I remember with what awe we used to regard it; for they said the old lady kept her accounts at it still. We never dared touch the bundles of yellow papers in the pigeon-holes. I remember thinking Jean a very heroine once when she touched one of them with the tip of her forefinger. She had got yet more courageous by the time she had it moved into her own room.” “hen that is your sister’s room I am occupying?” I said. “Yes.” “I am ashamed of keeping her out of it.” “Oh! she’’ do well enough.” “If I were she though,” I added, “I would send that bureau back to its own place.” “What do you mean, Oliver? Do you believe ever old wife’s tale that ever was told?” “She may get a fright some day—that’s all! I replied. He smiled with such an evident mixture of pity and contempt that for the moment I almost disliked him; and feeling certain that Florence would receive any such hint in a somewhat similar manner, I did not feel inclined to offer her any advice with regard to the bureau. Little occurred during the rest of my visit worthy of remark. Somehow or other I did not make much progress with Florence. I believe I had begun to see into her character a little more, and therefore did not get deeper in love as the days went on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
I know I became less absorbed in her society, although I was still anxious to make myself agreeable to her—or perhaps, more properly, to give her a favourable impression of me. I do not know whether she perceived any difference in my behaviour, but I remember that I began again to remark the pinched look of her nose, and to be a little annoyed with her for always putting aside my book. At the same time, I daresay I was provoking, for I never was given to tidiness myself. At length Christmas Day arrived. After breakfast, the squire Mr. James, and the two girls arranged to talk to church. Florence was not in the room at the moment. I excused myself on the ground of a headache, for I had had a bad night. When they left, I went up to my room, threw myself on the bed, and was soon fast asleep. How long I slept I do not know, but I work again with that indescribable yet well-known sense of not being alone. The feeling was scarcely less terrible in the daylight than it had been in the darkness. With the same sudden effort as before, I sat up in the bed. There was the figure at the open bureau, in precisely the same position as on the former occasion. However, I could not see it so distinctly. I rose as gently as I could, and approached it, after the first physical terror. I am not a coward. Just as I got near enough to see the account book open on the folding cover of the bureau, she started up, and, turning, revealed the face of Florence. She blushed crimson. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Winchester,” she said, in great confusion; “I thought you had gone to church with the rest.” “I had lain down with a headache, and gone to sleep,” I replied. “But forgive me, Miss James,” I added, for my mind was full of the dreadful coincidence, “don’t you think you have been better at church than balancing your accounts on Christmas Day?” “The better day the better deed,” she said, with a somewhat offended air, and turned to walk from the room. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Excuse me, Florence,” I resumed, very seriously, “but I want to tell you something.” She looked conscious. It never crossed me, that perhaps she fancied I was going to make a confession. Far other things were then in my mind. For I thought how awful it was, if she too, like the ancestral ghost, should have to do an age-long penance of haunting that bureau and those horrid figures, and I had suddenly resolved to tell her the whole story. She listened with varying complexion and face half turned aside. When I had ended, which I fear I did with something of a personal appeal, she lifted her head and looked me in the face, with just a slight curl on her thin lip, and answered me. “If I had wanted a sermon, Mr. Winchester, I should have gone to church for it. As for the ghost, I am sorry for you.” So saying she walked out of the room. The rest of the day I did not find very merry I pleaded my headache as an excuse for going to be early. How I hated the room now! Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I took my leave of East Haven. If I lost a wife at all, it was a stingy one. I should have been ashamed of her all my life long. However, extravagant runs the rich, and the stingy robs the poor. I have kept up my friendship with her brother. All he knows about the matter is, that either we had a quarrel, or she refused me—he is not sure which. I must say for Florence, that she was no tattler. Well, here is a letter I had from Gary James this very morning, I will read I to you. My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all nigh long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Some people thought the ghost had come to tell that she had hidden away money in some secret place in the old bureau, one would see why she was permitted to come back. And of course, those wretched accounts were not over and done with, you see. That is the misery of it. Good night. Then I walked out into the wind. We who have lost our sense and our senses—our touch, our small, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our Earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the Earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things to communion. We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet; for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctified Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who halowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people America and accept their prayer. Please restore America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and please receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
Things are looking up for a tour through the Winchester Mystery House. Will you be visiting us today? he Explore More Tour is officially open! Tour areas of the iconic mansion that had never been accessible to the public before. This is a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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Of Course, We All Need Friends, or there is No Way We Can Survive!
From the time our earliest ancestors looked to the stars, they have wondered what secrets the Heavens held. But, will we be ready when these secrets are disclosed? The Celestial Kingdom is the highest of the three degrees of Kingdoms of glory in Heaven. Those who inherit this Kingdom dwell in the presence of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. In the scriptures, the glory of the Celestial Kingdom is compared to the glory of the Sun. “And many of them that sleep in the dust of Earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever,” report Daniel 12.2-3. “The Kingdom of God is within,” said the Lord,” reports Luke 17.21. Therefore, turn your back on the wretched ways some people in this World. Grab hold of your heart and stand facing the Lord. Do that, wrote Evangelist Matthew 11.29, and your soul will find peace. The outside World? You know where that is at already. However, as to the whereabouts of the inside World, do you have a clue? No matter. The Kingdom of God will find you. How? The “Peace and Joy in the Holy Spirit,” as Paul wrote to the Romans (14.17), comes only to the pious; that is to say, only to those who invite Him. Clear out the rubbish within, then, and prepare a cool, bare place. Christ will come and take up residence. He will furnish it with “all of His glory,” as the Psalmist has song in the Latin Bible (45.14), and make it a warm, chatsworthy spot. Visit Him whenever you like. Feel at home there. It is your own True Home at last. Who would have believed it? #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
O Faithful Soul, prepare your heart for this committed Friend of yours. Make it a worthwhile retreat so that He will come visit and visit again. How? By keeping His word, as the Evangelist John put it (14.23). Do that, and He will establish quite a respectable presence under your very roof. Give Christ some space, therefore, and bar the door to the rest of your crowd. Why? When you have Christ, you have everything, as Paul phrased it in First Corinthians (1.5). He will take care of your needs; you will never want for a thing. The rest of Humankind? Forget about that reckless rabble! They are deflatable, defatigable. Christ, however, speaking in John (12.35), remains a friend, firm and fast forever. Even if you need people to do for your or jus to be friends with, do not put any great confidence in them; they try, of course, but eventually they trip up. Which is another way of saying, if they behave badly in public, do not shed a tear. One day they are slapping you on the back, and the next, they are stabbing you in the back. Rudderless, their skiffs are battered to smithereens on the gusty Nordsee. Of course, we all need friends, or there is no way we can survive. However, invest your friendship in God, as the Proverb has it (3.5). Let Him be your friend in good times and bad. He will respond in your behalf when the going gets rough; when things smooth out, He will look to your best interests. Why is this so? Because He knows, and He will teach you to know, that on this Earth you do not have “a city that lasts,” as the Letter to the Hebrews described it (13.14). Yet trudge you must. The beds are hard; the pillows, rocks; so Paul warned the Hebrews (11.13). No rest for the weary. No, no comfort until you have made room for Christ in your life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Why do you look for a comfortable rendezvous on this Earth when your heart’s True Home is not really here? “Heaven ought to be your home,” read Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians (5.2). Earth, therefore, ought to be viewed as a hostile hostelry, as the Wisdom of Solomon had it (5.9). What I mean to say is, all things pass away, and you with them. See, then, that you do not hand around too long. Why? The danger is that you will be sucked under and die. Let your rumination to rise to the Most High, as Paul wrote to the First Thessalonians (5.17). Let your meditation seek Christ. However, if your gaze rises too high for your nose and it begins to bleed, then lower your gaze and let your eyes rest on the Passion of Christ and His Holy Wounds. Flee to Jesus and let your eyes tend to His welts and wounds. When the World is falling apart, you will feel great comfort there; there you will recover the reputation your rivals stole from you; you will bear up under the blizzard of verbal abuse. When Christ walked among us, He suffered because of us. The neglect reached its climax at the time of the Great Necessity. The friends and acquaintances with whom He enjoyed euphoria left Him behind alone to suffer opprobria. Which raises some reasonable questions. Christ was willing to be assaulted and despised, and yet you have the nerve to moan and to wail just because something untoward happened to you? Christ had accusers and detractors, and yet you want to have only friends and benefactors? If it has never been crushed by adversity, how can your patience be crowned with prosperity? #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
If you are going to cry out every time you stub your toe, how will you ever be a friend of Christ’s. What is the answer? Face up to it. If you want to rule with Christ, then, as Paul put it to Timothy (2.12), you are going to have to suck it in and wade through the same muck as Christ. If you ever have the chance to visit the heart of Jesus, you will feel the love glowing in His hearth. No longer would you care about such petty things as conveniences or inconvenience. Instead, you would rejoice over the woeful opprobria that were laid on Him. Truth to tell, Jesus could and does get mad, but oftentimes He does not. He just allows Humankind to make a fool of itself. What is the moral? Whoever loves Jesus and Truth—that is to say, the truly internal soul who has disciplined one’s rumbustious affections—can turn to God whenever one wants, rise above oneself in spirit, and refresh oneself at one’s leisure. The person who trusts one’s own taste at the banquet of life, and not the finicky palates of the theological gourmets—one is the individual who is truly wise; that is how the prophet Isaiah would describe one (54.13). One’s knowledge comes more from God than humans. The Devout who knows from within how to walk and from without how to think does not require much space. Now does one expect scheduled times to do one’s devotions. The internal human can recollect oneself as quickly as need be. That is because one has not filled one’s shelves with baubles and bibelots. External labour does not maim a self-actualized, nor does an occupation that is deemed necessary for one’s community. No, one does an occupation that is deemed necessary for one’s community. No, one does not hesitate to make adjustments from time to time when survival is the issue. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Whoever is well disposed and well ordered within does not cause the wonderful or horrible things that Humankind does. As the details of the transaction tend to absorb one’s attention, one must be on guard lest they appear in prayer as impediments and distractions. If you would have disciplined yourself right from the start, as Paul wrote to the Romans (8.28), everything would have turned out all right, at least with regard to your own spiritual progress. However, apparently you did not. How do I know? So many things still displease you, drive you to distraction, sadden, even madden you. Why? You are not completely dead to yourself; that is to say, you have not really drawn the line between yourself and all the trinkets and trifles of this World. After all, nothing so soils or embroils the human heart as a reckless love of created things. What is the moral? Stand up to it! Put your foot down! Refuse all Worldly consolations! Only then can you get a clear vision of Heaven. Only then can you celebrate what little spiritual progress you have made to date. The push into the depths of the sea provides us with a mirror image of the drive into outer space, and lays the basis for the third cluster of industries likely to form a major part of the new Technosphere. The first historic wave of social change on Earth came when our ancestors ceased to rely on foraging and hunting, and began instead to domesticate animals and cultivate the soil. We are now at precisely this stage in our relationship to the seas. In a hungry World, the ocean can help break the back of the food problem. Properly farmed and ranched, it offers us a virtually endless supply of desperately needed protein. Present-day commercial fishing, which is highly industrialized—factory-ships sweeping the seas—results in ruthless overkill and threatens the total extinction of many forms of marine life. Already 93 percent of mega fish have been wiped out. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
By contrast, intelligent “aquaculture”—fish farming and herding, along with plant harvesting—could make a major dent in the global food crisis without damaging the fragile biosphere upon which all our lives depend. The rush to offshore oil drilling, meanwhile, has obscured the possibility of “growing oi” in the sea. Dr. Lawrence Raymond at the Battelle Memorial Institute has demonstrated that it is possible to produce algae with a high oil content, and efforts are under way to make the process economically effective. Th oceans also offer an overwhelming array of minerals, from copper, zinc, and tin, to sliver, gold, platinum and, even more important, phosphate ores from which to produce fertilizer for land-based agriculture. Mining companies are eyeing the hot waters of the Red Sea which hold an estimated $3.4 billion worth of zinc, silver, copper, lead, and gold. About 100 companies, including some of the World’s largest, are now preparing to mine potato-shaped manganese nodules from the sea bed. (These nodules are a renewable resource, forming at the rate of six to ten million tons per year in a single well-identified belt just south of Hawaii.) Today four truly international consortia are gearing up to start ocean mining on a multibillion scale, and this is expected to revolutionize World mining activities for selected minerals. In addition, Hoffmann-La Roche, the pharmaceutical company, has been quietly sourcing the seas for new drugs, such as anti-fungal agents and pain-killers or diagnostic assistant drugs that stop bleeding. As these technologies develop, we are likely to witness the construction of semi- or even wholly submerged “aquavillages” and floating factories. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The combination of zero real estate costs (at east at present) plus cheap energy produced on the spot from ocean sources (wind, thermal currents, or tides) can make this kind of construction competitive with that on the land. The technical journal Marine Policy concludes that “Ocean floating platform technology appears to be inexpensive enough and simple enough to be within the reach of most nations of the World, as well as numerous companies and private groups. At present, it seems likely that the first floating cities will be built by crowded industrial societies for the purpose of offshore housing…Multinational corporations may see them as mobile terminals for trade activities, or as factory ships. Food companies may build floating cities to carry out mariculture operations. Corporations seeking tax havens and adventurers seeking new lifestyles may build floating cities and declare them to be new states. Floating cities may achieve formal diplomatic recognition or become a vehicle for marginalized populations to achieve their independence.” Technological progress associated with the construction of thousands of offshore oil rigs, some anchored to the bottom but many positioned dynamically with propellers, ballast, and buoyancy controls, are developing very rapidly and laying the basis for floating city and enormous new supporting industries. Overall, the commercial reasons for moving into the sea are multiplying so swiftly that, according to economist D. M. Leipziger, many large corporations today, “like homesteaders in the Old West, are queuing up waiting for the starter’s pistol to stake out large areas on the ocean floor.” This also explains why the non-industrial countries are fighting to guarantee that the resources of the oceans become the common heritage of the human race rather than of the rich nations alone. However, even these examples are small in comparison with the techno-quake now rumbling in our molecular biology laboratories. Biological industry will form the fourth cluster of industries in tomorrow’s economy, and may have the heaviest impact of all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
We will eventually be able to “pre-design” the human body, “grow machines,” chemically program the brain, make identical carbon copies of ourselves through cloning, and create wholly new and dangerous life-forms. Who shall control research into these field? How shall new findings be applied? Might we not unleash horrors for which humans are totally unprepared? Some people thought the forecast is farfetched. That, however, was before 1973 and the discovery of the recombinant DNA process. Today the same anguished questions are being asked by citizen protestors, congressional committees, and by scientists themselves as the biological revolution gains runway speed. Furthermore, there are a few types of residential suburbs that deserve special notation. A new of these variations follow. High-income suburbs are not new to the urban scene. As noted on romantic suburbs, the nineteenth century saw many examples of exclusive suburbs designed as refuges for the wealth. Then as now upper-status suburbs usually feature large, imposing homes built on extensive properties that are screened off from casual external observation by shrubbery and trees. Generally, such suburbs have been located at the outer suburban edges, but there are some clear exceptions, such as centrally located Grosse Points, bordered by Detroit, and Beverly Hills, surrounded by Los Angeles. Beverly Hills is now undergoing a real estate boom which, since the community has no open land, means that older mansions are being torn down so newer mansions can be constructed on the same sites. However, what gives most upper-status suburbs their character is not so much their housing style as the style of life and patterns of social interaction among the residents. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Demographically, high-income suburbs tend to have an older median age population and a low proportion of women employed in the labour force. Population turnover, except by death, is low. Particularly in the east and Midwest, the older elite suburbs were, and in many cases still are, socially closed WASP communities. Social life in earlier decades traditionally centered heavily around a few mainline churches. In more recent decades it has been more likely to focus on membership in an exclusive country club. Older elite suburbs have never been believers in multiculturalism. Wealth is required for entry, but nouveau riche outsiders are not considered suitable for membership either in the clubs or the community. Many ethnic groups are sparsely welcomed, as are some Whites from non-traditional backgrounds and certain religious groups. When the Kennedy family bought a large home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, several neighbours moved out on the ground that they felt the community was going downhill. Opposition remained even after John Kennedy became President of the United States of America. Similarly, the richest suburb in the country, Kenilworth, on Chicago’s North Shore, had, until fairly recently, a reputation for discouraging certain religions. Homes simply would not be sold to those who did no have the proper Anglo Saxon Protestant heritage. Those religions that were excluded found their own exclusive suburbs and country clubs. For example, some Jewish people responded by no being welcomed in North Shore suburbs, by developing Glencoe and Highland Park as wealthy suburbs. Yet, there is a tendency to equate the high costs of housing in an area with the affluence of the residents. This generally is the case, but it can be misleading insofar as it might suggest that counties with high housing costs, such as those in southern California, necessarily also have the highest percentages of affluent householders. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
In fact, recent census indicates that the East Coast dominates the list of counties where residents have the highest median household incomes. There are 38 counties with median household incomes above $100,000. Of the top 15 counties, six were located in Virginia or Maryland, just outside the nation’s capital, while four were located not far from New York City and three were in the San Francisco Bay Area. The top five riches counties in America are Loudon County, Virginia with a median household income of $142,299; Fall Church city, Virginia with a median household income of $127,610; Fairfax County, Virginia with a median household income of $124,831; Santa Clara County, California with a median household income of $124,055; San Mateo County, California with a median household income of $122,641. Before representative signs of wealth had been invented, it could hardly have consisted of anything but lands and livestock, the only real goods humans can possess. Now when inheritances had grown in number and size to the point of covering the entire landscape and of all bordering on one another, some could no longer be enlarged except at the expense of others; and the supernumeraries, whom weakness or indolence had prevented from acquiring an inheritance in their turn, became poor without having lost anything, because while everything changed around them, they alone had not changed at all. Thus they were forced to receive or steal their subsistence from the hands of the rich. And from that there began to arise, according to the diverse character of the rich and the poor, domination and servitude, or violence and theft. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
For their part, the wealthy had no sooner known the pleasure of domination, than before long they disdained all others, and using their old slaves to subdue new ones, they thought of nothing but the subjugation and enslavement of their neighbors, like those ravenous wolves which, on having once tasted human flesh, reject all other food and desire to devour only humans. Thus, when both the most powerful or the most miserable made their strength of their needs a sort of right to another’s goods, equivalent, according to them, to the right of property, the destruction of equality was followed by the most frightful disorder. Thus the usurpations of the rich, the acts of brigandage by the poor, the unbridled passions of all, stifling natural pity and the still weak voice of justice, made humans greedy, ambitious and wicked. There arose between the right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant a perpetual conflict that ended only in fights and murders. Emerging society gave way to the most horrible state of war; since the human race, vilified and desolated, was no longer able to retrace its steps or give up the unfortunate acquisitions it had made, and since it laboured only toward its shame by abusing the faculties that honour it, it brough itself to the brink of ruin. Horrified by the newness of the ill, both the poor human and the rich human hope o flee from wealth, hating what they once had prayed for. In is not possible that humans should not have eventually reflected upon so miserable a situation and upon the calamities that overwhelm them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
The rich in particular must have soon felt how disadvantageous to them it was to have a perpetual war in which they alone paid all the costs, and in which the risk of losing one’s life was common to all and the risk of losing one’s goods was personal. Moreover, regardless of the light in which they tried to place their usurpations, they knew fully well that they were established on nothing but a precarious and abusive right, and that having been acquired merely by force, force might take them away from them without their having any reason to complain. Even those enriched exclusively by industry could hardly base their property on better claims. They could very well say: “I am the one who built that wall; I have earned this land with my labour.” In response to them it could be said: “Who gave you the boundary lines? By what right do you claim to exact payment at our expense for labour we did not impose upon you? Are you unaware that multitude of your brothers perish or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you needed explicit and unanimous consent from the human race for you to help yourself to anything from the common subsistence that went beyond your own?” Bereft of valid reasons to justify oneself and sufficient forces to defend oneself; easily crushing a private individua, but oneself crushed by troops of bandits; alone against all and unable on account of mutual jealousies to unite with his equals against enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich, pressed by necessity, finally conceived the most thought-out project that ever entered the human mind. It was to use in his favour the very strength of those who attacked one, to turn one’s adversaries into one’s defenders, to instill in them other maxims, and to give them other institutions which were as favourable to one as natural right was unfavourable to one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
With this end in mind, after having shown one’s neighbours the horror of a situation which armed them all against each other and made their possessions as burdensome as their needs, and in which no one could find safety in either poverty or wealth, one easily invented specious reasons to lead them to one’s goal. “Let us unite,” one says to them, “in order to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitions, and assure everyone of possessing what belongs to one. Let us institute rules of justice and peace to which all will be obliged to conform, which will make special exceptions for no one, and which will in some way compensate for the caprices of fortune by subjecting the strong and the weak to mutual obligations. In short, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us gather them into one supreme power that governs us according to wise laws, that protects and defends all the members of the association, repulses common enemies, and maintains us in an eternal concord.” Considerably less than the equivalent of this discourse was needed to convince crude, easily seduced humans who also had too many disputes to settle among themselves to be able to get along without arbiters, and too much greed and ambition to be able to get along without masters for long. They all ran to chain themselves, in the belief that they secured their liberty, for although they had enough sense to realize the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers. Those most capable of anticipating the abuses were precisely those who counted on profiting from them; and even the wise saw the need to be resolved to sacrifice one part of their liberty to preserve the other, just as a wounded human has one’s arm amputated to save the rest of one’s body. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Such was, or should have been, the origin of society and laws, which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established forever the law of property and of inequality, changed adroit usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious humans henceforth subjected the entire human race to labour, servitude and misery. It is readily apparent how the establishment of a single society rendered indispensable that of all the others, and how, to stand head-to-head against the united forces, it was necessary to unite in turn. Societies, multiplying or spreading rapidly, soon covered the entire surface of the Earth; and it was no longer possible to find a single corner in the Universe where someone could free oneself from the yoke and withdraw one’s head from the often ill-guided sword which everyone saw perpetually hanging over one’s own head. With civil right thus having become the common rule of citizens, the law of nature no longer was operative except between the various societies, when, under the name of the law of nations, it was tempered by some tacit conventions in order to make intercourse possible and to serve as a substitute for natural compassion which, losing between one society and another nearly all the force it had between one human and another, no longer resides anywhere but in a few great cosmopolitan souls, who overcome the example of the sovereign being who has created them, embrace the entire human race in their benevolence. Gandhi denounced surgical techniques as unnatural and urged his followers to have nothing to do with them. Yet he lived to modify his view, for when he was stricken by appendicitis, he accepted the help of those very techniques. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The operation was successful. The medieval Church placed a ban upon those who performed any operation upon the human body that was accompanied by the shedding of blood. The modern Church has removed the ban and, in its hospitals, permits the extensive practice of surgery. Thus the erroneous theory of Gandhi and the erroneous superstition of the Church were corrected by time which brought the facts of experience into play. I have always associated hospitals with gloom, with drabness, with ugliness, and with despondency. The association was once falsified in California and again in Denmark. However, not till I was taken through the hospital founded by Padre Pio at San Giovanni Rotondo did I associate such intensively beneficial values as cheerfulness, beauty, hopefulness, and the last word in modernity with such an institution. Iconoclastic science came into the World and in a few short centuries turned most of us into sceptic. It may therefore surprise the scientists to be told that within two or three decades their own further experiments and their own new instruments will enable them to penetrate into, and prove the existence of, a superphysical World. However, the best worth of these eventual discoveries will be in their beneficial demonstration the reality of a moral law pervading human’s life—the law that we shall reap after death what we have sown before it, and the law that our own diseased thoughts have created many of our own bodily diseases. There are diseases of the mind quite apart from those of the body, yet too often neither the sufferer nor those in one’s surroundings will recognize the morbid symptoms. One considered oneself, and they consider one, normal. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The moderns refuse to split up Mind into Consciousness and its Consciousness and Contents and they will not believe that Consciousness per se has its pure, unalloyed existence. Hence the utter confusion of modern psychology. Ye it is the light of this Consciousness which enables their own busy intellects to function and their bodies to believe themselves to be conscious entities. Everything in Nature works by Its reflected light. The inner nature that is rent by unresolved conflicts and unhappy divisions needs healing just as much as the outer body that is afflicted by pain-bringing disease. If they are to fulfil their own best possibilities, psychoanalysis and psychiatry have to deepen themselves. If the existence of the higher Self is denied or ignored, the emotional vacillations and mental perturbations of the lower self must be studied and understood. The psychoanalysts, who are so body pointing out the complexes of other people, have themselves one supreme complex that dominates and obsesses. It is psychoanalysis itself! The mistake of the analysts is to treat lightly what ought to be taken seriously, to regard as parental fixation or repression of pleasures of the flesh what is really deep spiritual malady of our times—emptiness of soul. “A Spirit and a Vision,” said Blake, “are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing. They are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.” He is speaking only of how to draw pictures of apparitions which may well have been illusory, but his words suggest a truth on the metaphysical level also. God is basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
At all costs therefore God must not be thought of as a featureless generality. If He exists at all, He is the most concrete thing there is, the most individual, “organized and minutely articulated.” God is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language. The words incorporeal and impersonal are misleading, because they suggest that God lacks some reality which we possess. It would be safer to call His trans–corporeal, trans–personal. Body and personality as we know them are the real negatives—they are what is left of positive being when it is sufficiently diluted to appear in temporal of finite forms. Even our intimate desires should be regarded as the transposition into a minor key of that creative joy which in Him is unceasing and irresistible. Grammatically the things we say are of Him are “”metaphorical”: but in a deeper sense it is our physical and psychic energies that are mere “metaphours” of the real Life which is God. Divine Sonship is, so to speak, the solid of which biological sonship is merely a diagrammatic representation on the flat. And here the subject of imagery, which crossed our path can be seen in a new light. For it is just the recognition of God’s positive and concrete reality which the religious imagery preserves. The crudest Old Testament picture of Jahweh thundering and lightening out of dense smoke, making mountains ship like rams, threatening, promising, pleading, even changing His mind, transmits that sense of living Deity which evaporates in abstract thought. Even sub-Christian images gets in something which mere “religion” in our own days has left out. We rightly reject it, for by itself it would encourage the most blackguardly of superstitions, the adoration of mere power. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Perhaps we may rightly reject much of the Old Testament imagery. However, we must be clear why we are doing so: not because the images are too strong but because they are too weak. The ultimate spiritual reality is not vaguer, more inert, ore transparent than the images, but more positive, more dynamic, more opaque. Confusion between spirit and soul (or “ghost”) has here done much harm. Ghost must be pictured, if we are to picture them at all, as shadowy and tenuous, for ghosts are half-men, one element abstracted from a creature that ought to have flesh. However, Spirit, if pictured at all, must be pictured in the very opposite way. Neither God nor even the gods are “shadowy” in traditional imagination: even the human dead, when glorified in Christ, cease to be “ghosts” and become “saints.” The differences of atmosphere which even now surrounds the words “I saw a ghost” and the words “I saw a saint”—all the pallor and insubstantiality of the one, all the gold and blue of the other—contains more wisdom than whole libraries of “religion.” If we must have a mental picture to symbolize Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter. There will be a precise moment when one knows with a certitude totally and unequivocally unwavering, but until then it will more likely be unplanned, uncertain explorations. This may surprise some persons but it is still true hat the wind bloweth where it listeth. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. Or the Spirit enlightens who it chooseth. Of course the human element of seeking and trying must be there, but in the end it is the divine element which wins out. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Out of visible light which rapidly increases in intensity and drew nearer, the face and form of Jesus appeared in this twentieth century of ours to two mystics, Sundar Singh in India and Martinus in Denmark. They saw him plainly, heard him speak clearly. In both cases they were already familiar with his name and story. Out of a not very dissimilar light, Jesus appeared to Saul on the Damascus Road. He too was familiar with them. A part of the source of these visions is to be traced back to the suggestive power of the thought-form already implanted in the mind; but the other part, the sudden and dramatic and total change of heart and shift of outlook, has still to be accounted for. What is the secret? It is contact with the Overself, Grace. The divine moment happens. It is the gift of grace. Its arrival is unbidden. Yet the previous longing and working for it have not been futile. The significant flash of night may come at any moment, the sacred presence of the Overself may be felt when it is not being sought, and the noble peace of reality may even visit one who has never practised any technique at all. For as the New Testament has warned one, “The wind bloweth where is listeth,” and as the Katha Upanishad has informed him, “Whomsoever the Divine chooses, by one alone is It reached.” The Glimpse is sometimes given to one and sometimes created by one. Sometimes the connection between one’s effort and its appearance may not be visible. Only by the Divine lovingly possessing three can this transcendental knowledge be got. The glimpses are not directly caused by one’s own endeavours. They are experiences of the working of Grace, gifts from the Overelf, echoes from former lives on Earth, or belated responses to one’s knocking on the door. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
It is essentially a grace-given experience. One day there will be a response to the search of one’s mind for its creative inspirational source. One’s “I,” hemmed in by its ignorance and limitations, is a small affair compared with the “I” which is drawing one onward and upward through the quest and which one must one day become. One’s personal self, controlled and purified, kept in its place, humbly prostrating itself before the Overself, can gratefully receive even now glimpses of that day, momentary revelations that bless the mind and put intense peace in the heart. Whoever does not feel that these affirmations apply to one but who is yet able to believe in their truth, will be befriended by grace at the time of death. The good karma or God allows one this glimpse of a loftier World in which one could live and thus put one’s personal turmoil to flight. If with the purpose of seeking to disidentify oneself with the ego a human practices the necessary self-denial, makes the requisite sacrifices, and trains one’s thoughts and feelings, after a certain time and at a certain point of one’s path the forces of Heaven will come to one to complete the work which one has started. One should be profoundly grateful for even a single glimpse. It is a grant of grace. Many beings on this Earth which have lived in the society of humans can sense their intent enough to fear death when one is taken to the slaughterhouse. It is are nature to fear a darkness in what we do not understand, but true evil may lie more in ignorance that what we do not understand. Is the peaceable human to reduce or stop violent aggression against one fellow beings but to continue it against other fellow creatures? We are not entitled to destroy life without an adequately necessary and morally justifiable purpose. Therefore it is well to enquire from the wise and good into the character of such purposes, be guided by their counsel rather than by environmental customs. For the latter has led us, through its utter ignorance and total unawareness of the higher laws, into a situation where blow after blow falls heavily upon the human race. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Why should we be so astonished that peace is so hard to obtain, that all too often flaming violence of war and death and mutilation is carried across the land despite our prayers to God and our plans to the contrary? So long as millions of innocent people are bred only to be sent to the slaughterhouses, so long will Life pay us in like coin. The lower characteristics are taken into the body, the blood, the nerves, and the brain. They become part of us. The mind’s response to higher ideals is dulled. The passions which make for strife and thence for war meet with less opposition from conscience and reason. The fear, suspicion, fright, and desire for self-protection which contribute toward war, being impregnated into the blood of our body during the moments we watch doom and gloom and violence and hopelessness on the TV screen news media. It is not helping anyone. No one is learning how to stay alive nor anything educational. They are feeding you fear, and little by little this fear is brought into us through the glands, the nervous system, and the brain, as our own blood feeds them in turn. It would be desirable, although admittedly difficult, gradually to adopt a diet without news as a help to secure both the individual’s development and the World’s peace. Everything is polarized, whether in the visible Universe, or in the invisible forces of life itself. This is what the Hindus called the pairs of opposites and the Chinese call the Yin and Yang. All things are complementary and compensatory, yet at the same time antagonistic. If Yang gives us energy, Yin gives us calm. Both are necessary. Likewise, we should seek balance in diet as study. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Lord, please make this World to last as long as possible. Who took the dream of the land, who staked down “private property” through the soul of the deer? Who diverted streams, cleared forests, burned fields? I seek to know my own name. I seek to know why after all that I have done to hurt her, does the Mother Earth continue to embrace me. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for His nae alone is exalted. His glory is above the Earth and Heaven. He hath given glory unto His people, praise to all His faithful ones, to all the children of America, a people near unto Him. Hallelujah. When the Ark rested, Moses said: Mayest Thou, O Lord, dwell among the myriads of the families of America. Arise, O Lord, unto Thy sanctuary, Thou and they Ark of Thy strength. Let Thy priests be clothed with salvation, and Thy faithful ones exult. For the sake of David, Thy servant, reject not Thine anointed. I have given you good teachings; forsake not My Scripture. It is a Tree of Life to them that hold fast to it, and everyone that upholds it is happy. Its ways were ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace. Turn us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall return; renew our days as of old. Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His Kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed forever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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When Once that Peace, Christ’s Peace, is Got into the Heart, Storms Cannot Hurt as Much!
Be vigilant and diligent in the service of God. Ask yourself frequently, Why did I leave the World behind and come to the monastery? To live for God, that is why. Next step? To pray to God. So hit the road in hot pursuit of spiritual progress. It will not take long before you see the reward of your labours. The fear and pain that has held you in its grip for so long will begin to ease up. All of which means, labour for a bit now, and you will find great rest, even perpetual joy, in the end. Remain faithful and fervent along the way, and without a doubt God will be faithful and generous to you when the time comes. That is how Jesus son of Sirach put it in his book of Wisdom (51.30). Do not ever doubt that you will reach the palm of victory; but do not think you can take Confidence a prisoner along the way; that would be a tactical blunder; you would be tempted to think you could sail around the World without a sail. When someone is nervous, one is fearful one day, hopeful the next. In a moment of great spiritual pain, or so the story goes, one such Devout fled to a church, where he flopped in front of an altar. “If only I could have known then what I know now,” he prayed, “I would have saved myself a lot of grief!” He knew his prayer would be answered, but he did not know when. “If you did know, what would you do?” came the Divine Response immediately. “That is what you should do now. Once you start down this pathway, you will begin to feel better about the long-term future.” Consoled and comforted, he committed himself to the Divine Will and rose from the cold stone floor. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As the day passed, his nervousness did indeed begin to disappear. However, more than that had changed. He no longer was trying to satisfy his curiosity about the future. Rather, as Paul urged the Romans (12.1), he spent his time trying to figure out how to turn the present to his spiritual advantage. “Hope in the Lord, and do good things,” sang the Psalmist: “plough the fields, and they will feed you wealthily,” (37.3). what makes us shrink from spiritual progress and fervent change? One thing only. The horrific difficulty of keeping the pressure on. Which is another way of saying that, over time, the good person can be subject to battle fatigue. Even if you may not believe it, every word in this story is true. It was autumn, and we were at the Winchester Estate. Chadwick Kempis had been employed by Mrs. Winchester as a sort of overlooker on the estate. He had died the previous winter; leaving nothing behind him except some debts; for he was not provident; and his handsome son Ken. Ken Kempis, who was rather superior as far as education went, disliked work: he would make a show of helping his father, but it came to little. Chadwick had not put him to any particular trade or occupation, and Ken, who was as proud as Lucifer, would not turn to it himself. He liked to be a gentleman. All he did now was to work the Victorian garden, and feed the fowls, ducks, rabbit, and pigeons, of which he kept a great quantity, selling them to the houses around and sending them to the market. However, as every one said, poultry would not maintain him. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Ken was engaged to be married to a lady named Bianca Toffler. Ken was scoring a big success with Bianca’s mother Cordelia Toffler. She regarded him as a stable and steady person, someone with whom it is really a pleasure to associate, not like some of the stylish young dandies. However, as every one said, poultry would not maintain him. People began to whisper a query as to how Ken got his corn for the poultry: he was not known to buy much: and he would have to go out his house at Christmas, for its owner, Mrs. Winchester, had given him notice. Mrs. Toffler, anxious about Bianca’s prospects, asked Ken what he intended to do then, and he answered, “Make his fortune: he should begin to do it as soon as he could turn himself round.” However, the time was going on, and the turning round seemed to be as far off as ever. After Midsummer, a nice of the schoolmistress’s, Miss Osborn, had to the school to stay: her name was Natalie Rose. The father, Chace Rose, was half-brother to Miss Osborn. He had married a Frenchwoman, and lived more in France than in England until his death. Natalie was a showy, free-mannered, good-looking girl, and made speedy acquaintance with Ken Kempis; or he with her. They improved upon it so rapidly that Bianca Toffler grew jealous, and the people of Llanda Villa began to say he cared for Natalie more than for Bianca. When got home at the latter end of October, to spend Merriam’s birthday, things were in this state. Alvin Updike, he bailiff who had been taken on by the Squire in Chadwick Kempis’s place (but a far inferior man to Kempis; not much better, in fact, than a common workman), gave Mrs. Winchester an account of matters in general. Ken Kempis had been drinking lately, Updike added, and his head was not strong enough to stand it; and he was also beginning to look as if he had some care upon him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Natalie Rose was in all probability a practicing witch. She had a long-standing reputation for witchcraft; it was rumored that she had bewitched her first boyfriend to death. In 1898, during her second relationship, she had been brought before the Court of Assistants for witchcraft. The records of that trial do not survive, but it is probable that a major factor in her release at the time was the good opinion of Father Jose de Jesus Vallejo. But Father Vallejo changed his mind by 1900, and accused her of witchcraft; two women testified that “the Devil did come bodily unto her, and the she was familiar with the Devil, and that she sat up all the night long with the Devil.” Natalie was well aware of her reputation. But there was much more against Natalie Rose than her reputation and her malice. Two men testified that being employed by Mrs. Winchester to help take down the cellar wall of the estate, they found hoes in the old wall belonging to he said cellar, found several puppets made of rags and hogs’ bristles with headless pint to then with points outward and Natalie’s diary. The doll with pins in it is the classic charm of black magic, and burying it in a wall is still a technique of witches; such charms have been found in the walls of rural English cottages in the twenty-first century. To be sure, the evidence was circumstantial—nobody had seen Natalie Rose stick the pins in the dolls of bury them in the walls. “A nice lot, he, for them two women to be fighting for,” cried Mrs. Winchester, who was no friend of Ken. “There will be mischief between ‘em if they don’t draw in a bit. It’s something like the Bible story of Leah and Rachel, young gents, Ken Kempis likes the one, and he’s bound by promise too the t’other. As to the French jade,” concluded Mrs. Winchester. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
It was all very well for surely Mrs. Winchester to call Ken Kempis a “nice lot,” but he was the best-looking fellow in church on Sunday morning—well-dressed too. However, his colour seemed brighter; and his hands shook as they were raised, often, to push back his hair, that the sun shone upon through the south-window, turning it to gold. He scarcely looked up, not even at Natalie Rose, with her hazel eyes roving everywhere, and her streaming pink ribbons. Cordelia Toffler was pale, quiet, and nice, as usual; she had no beauty, but her face was sensible, and her deep grey eyes had a strange and curious earnestness. The new parson preached, a young man just appointed to the Mission San Jose. He went in for great observances of Saints’ says, and told his congregation that he should expect to see them at church on the morrow, which would be the Feast of All Saints. Ken Kempis walked home with Mrs. Toffler and Bianca after service and was invited to dinner. Natalie Rose passed, her pink ribbons and her modest gay silk dress gleaming in the sunlight. She stared at Ken, and he stared back again. And now, the explanation of matters being over, the real story begins. The tea-things waited on Mrs. Toffler’s table in the afternoon; waited for Ken Kempis. He had left the shortly before to go and attend to his poultry. Nothing had been said about his coming back for tea: that he would do so had been looked upon as a matter of course. However, he did not make his appearance, and the tea was taken without him. A half-past five the Winchester Estate’s bell rang out for an evening séance. And Bianca put on her things. Mrs. Toffler did not go out at night. “You are starting early, Bianca. You will be at the Winchester estate before other people.” “That will not matter, mother.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A jealous suspicion lay on Cordelia—that the secret of Ken Kempis’s absence was his having fallen in with Natalie Rose: perhaps had gone of his own accord to seek her. She walked slowly along. The gloom of dusk, and a deep dusk, had stolen over the evening, but the moon would be up later. As Bianca approached the Winchester mansion, a dark shadow came over it. When she knocked on the door, a rare thing happened. Mrs. Winchester answered the door and asked with energy, “Did you ever see a ghost?” Bianca said, “The spirit of the dead come abroad in the night. The dead are allowed to revisit the World after dark and they hover in the air, waiting to appear to any of their living relatives, who may venture out, lest they should forget to pray for the rest of their some.” “Well, I never!” cried Mrs. Winchester, staring excessively. Twelve o’ clock at night at the Winchester Mansion, most people were in bed. However, Bianca kept waiting for Ken. She wanted to have it out with him. What ill fate brought her looking for him up this late?—perhaps because she had fruitlessly searched in every other spot. At the back of the east wing, there were some steps, and an unused door. Unused partly because it was not required, the principal entrance being in front; partly because the key of it had been for a long time missing. Stealing out at this door, a bag of corn upon his shoulders, had come Ken Kempis in a smock-frock. Bianca saw him, and stood back in the shade. She watched him lock the door and put the key in his pocket; she watched him give ghe heavy bag a jerk as he turned to come down the steps. Then she burst out. Her loud reproaches petrified him, and he stood there as one suddenly turned to stone. It was that moment that Mrs. Winchester reappeared. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Mrs. Winchester understood it all soon; it needed not Bianca’s words to enlighten her. Ken Kempis possessed the lost key and could come in and out at will in the midnight hours when the World was sleeping, and help himself to the corn. No wonder his poultry throve; no wonder there had been grumblings at the mansion about the mysterious disappearance of good grain. Bianca Toffler was mad in those few first moments. Stealing is looked upon in an honest valley as an awful thing; a disgrace, a crime; and there was the night’s earlier misery besides. Ken Kempis was a thief! Ken Kempis was false to her! A storm of words and reproaches poured forth from her in confusion, none of it very distinct. “Living upon thief! Convicted felon! Transportation for life! Mrs. Winchester’s corn! Fattening poultry on stolen goods! No wonder your chickens are as fat as butter, and as strong as an ox! Buying gold chains with the profits for that bold, flaunting French girl, Natalie Rose! Taking his stealthy walks with her!” Ken Kempis came down the steps; he had remained there still as a statue, immovable; and turned his white face to Mrs. Winchester said: the blow had crushed him; he was a proud man (if anyone can understand that), and to be discovered in this ill-doing was worse than death to him. “Don’t think of me more hardly than you can help, Mistress Sarah,” he said in a quiet tone. “I have been almost tired of my life this long while.” Putting down the bag of corn near the steps, he took the key from his pocket and handed it to Mrs. Winchester. The poor dead thought vengeful spirits were stealing her corn. The man’s aspect had so changed; there was something so grievously subdued and sad about him altogether, that Mrs. Winchester felt as sorry for him as if he had not been guilty. Bianca Toffler went on in her fiery passion. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“You be more tired tomorrow when the police are taking you to San Quentin. Mrs. Winchester will not spare you, though your father was her many-years bailiff. She could not, you know, if she wished.” “Let me have the key again for a minute, Mistress,” Ken said, as quietly as though he had not heard a word. And Mrs. Winchester gave it to him. She was not sure but she should have given it to him. He swung the bag on his shoulders, unlocked the granary door, and put the bag beside the other sacks. The bag was his own, as we found afterwards, but he left it there. Locking the door again, he gave Mrs. Winchester the key, and went away with a weary step. “Goodbye, Mistress Sarah.” Mrs. Winchester answered back goodnight civilly, though he had been stealing. When he was out of sight, Bianca Toffler, her passion full upon her still dashed off towards her mother’s cottage, a strange cry of despair breaking from her lips. The next day, Natalie came to the Winchester Estate. “Is Ken home?” She asked, going to see Ken the first thing before breakfast. She meant to tell him that is he would keep right, she would keep counsel. “He went out at dawn, Natalie,” answered Mrs. Winchester, who did for him, and sold his poultry at the market. “He will be in presently: he have had no breakfast yet.” “Then please tell him when he comes, to wait in, and see me: please tell him it’s all right. Can you remember, Mrs. Winchester?” “I will remember, safe enough, Natalie.” Natalie went to church, and she was one of ten people sitting in the pews, with her pink ribbons, the twisted gold chain showing outside a short-cut velvet jacket. After church, strolling by the Winchester mansion: a certain reminiscence I suppose took her there, for it was not a frequented spot: Natalie saw Bianca Toffler coming along. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Well, it was a change! The passionate woman of the previous night had subsided into a poor, wild-looking, sorrow-stricken thing, ready to die of remorse. Excessive passion had wrought its usual consequences; a reaction: a reaction in favour of Ken Kempis. She same up to him, clasping Natalie clasping her hands in agony—beseeching that, she would spare her; that she would not tell of her; that she would give her a chance for the future: and her lips quivered and trembled, and there were dark circles round her hollow eyes. Many would have said she had been bewitched. In fact, a physician was apt to attribute everything he could not explain organically to witchcraft, just as the twentieth-century physician is apt to call whatever he or she cannot understand psychosomatic. However, Bianca’s symptoms were identifiably hysterical, and therefore may well have been due to a frightening experience at the Winchester mansion. Mrs. Winchester said, “The girl seemed demented: She has been going in and out ever since daylight like a dog in a fair.” “Is Ken here,” asked Natalie. “No,” Bianca said, looking more wild, worn, haggard than before; “that’s what I have been to ask. I am just going out of my sense. He has gone for certain. Gone!” “I have just seen him,” the butler said. “Here; not a minute ago. I saw him twice. He is angry, very, and will not let me speak to him; both times he got away before I could reach him. He is close by somewhere.” Natalie looked round, naturally; but Ken was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to conceal him expect the water tower, and that was locked up. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Natalie’s face grew puzzled again. Unable to rest, she wandered over to the water tower again, and saw Ken standing at the corner of the water tower, looking very hard at her. She thought he was waiting for her to come up, but before she got close to him he had disappeared, and she did not see which way. She hastened past the front of the water tower, ran round to the back, and there he was. He stood atop the seven-story tower looking out for her; waiting for her, as it again seemed; and was gazing at her with the same fixed stare. But again she missed him before she could get quite up; and it was at that moment that Mrs. Winchester arrived on scene. She went all round the water tower, and up to the seven-story town, but could see nothing of Ken. It was an extraordinary thing where he could have got to. Inside the water tower he could not be: it was securely locked; and there was no appearance of him in the mansion or in the open gardens. It was, so to say, broad daylight yet, or at least not far short of it; the red light was still in the west. Beyond the field at the back of the water tower, was a grove of trees in the form of a triangle. The Winchester mansion had the reputation of being haunted; for Soren Lewis had an experience fourteen years before, when he was staying at the mansion and saw a woman standing between the cradle in the room and the beside and [she] seemed to look upon him. So he did rise up in his bed and it vanished. Then he went to the door and found it locked. And unlocking and opening the door he went to the entry door and looked out, and then did see the same woman he had a little before seen in the room, and in the same garb she was in before. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Then he said to her, “In the name of God, what do you come for” Then she vanished away. So he locked the door again and went to bed. And between sleeping and waking he felt something come to his mouth or lips, cold, and thereupon started and looked up, and again did she the same woman with something between both her hands, holding [it] before his mouth. Upon which she moved, and the child in the cradle gave a great screech out, as if it was greatly hurt, and she disappeared. And taking this child up [he] could not quiet it in some hours. From which time the child, that before was a very likely thriving child, did pine away and was never well (although it lived some months after, yet in a said condition) and so died. Some time after, within a week or less, he did see the same woman in the same garb or clothes that appeared to him as aforesaid, although he knew not her nor her name before. Yet both by her garb and countenance doth testify that it was the same woman that they called Natalie Rose. The death of the child cannot be explained on natural grounds except by suggesting that there was something wrong with it quite unrelated to its father’s experience. Nor can one account for Lewis’s having hallucinations of Natalie Rose before he knew her or knew her name except by suggesting that he was mistaken. The Winchester mansion was a lively spot altogether for those who liked mystery. So, they asked the butler again, “Are you sure you saw Ken?” “Sure!” he returned in surprise. “You do not think I could mistake him, do you? He wore that seal-skin winter-cap of his tied over his ears, and his thick grey coat. The coat was buttoned closely round him. I have not seen him wear either since last winter.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Mrs. Winchester wondered how people had had premonitions about Natalie Rose, years before she arrived? Why was her journal and witchcraft dolls in the mansion, and what had happened to Ken Kempis? “That Ken must have gone into hiding somewhere seems quite evident; and yet there is nothing but ground to receive him,” said Mrs. Winchester. Natalie said she had lost sight of him the last time in a moment; both times in fact; and it was absolutely impossible that he could have made off to the triangle or elsewhere, as she must have seen him cross the open land. On the whole, not two minutes had elapsed since Mrs. Winchester came up, though it seems to have been longer in telling it; when, before the crew could look further, voices were heard approaching from the direction of the orchard; and Bianca, not caring to be seen, went away quickly. Mrs. Winchester was stilled puzzling about Ken’s hiding-place, when they reached her—the maid, and two or three men. The made came slowly up, her face dark and grave. “I say, Mrs. Winchester, what a shocking thing this is!” “What is a shocking thing?” said Mrs. Winchester to the maid. “You have not heard of it?—But I don’t see how you could hear it, said the maid.” “I have heard nothing. I do not know what there is to hear,” Mrs. Winchester said to the Natalie Rose in a whisper. “Ken Kempis is dead, Mistress.” “What?” “He has destroyed himself.” Not more than half-an-hour ago. Hung himself in the orchard.” Mrs. Winchester turned sick, taking one thing with another, comparing this recollection with that. RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Ken Kempis was indeed dead. He had been hiding all day in the three-cornered grove: perhaps waiting for night to get away—perhaps only waiting for night to go home again. Who can tell? #About half-past two John Hansen, a man who worked for Mrs. Winchester, happening to go through the grove, saw him there, and talked with him. The same man, passing back a little before sunset, found him hanging from a tree, dead. Hansen ran with the news to the maid, and they were now flocking to the scene. When facts came to be examined there appeared only too much reason to think that the unfortunate appearance of the galloping policeman had terrified Ken into the act; perhaps—they all hoped!—had scared his senses quite away. Look at it as they would, it was dreaful. However, what of the appearances of him throughout the estate? At the time, Ken had been dead at least half-an hor. Was is reality or delusion? That is, did her eyes see a real, spectral Ken Kempis; or were they deceived by some imagination of the brain? Opinions were divided. Nothing can shake one’s own steadfast belief in its reality; to her it remains an awful certainty, true and sure as Heaven. But there is no stumbling-block differ to be got over. Ken, when found, was wearing the seal-cap tied over the ears and the thick grey coat buttoned up round him, just as described by witnesses who saw him around the estate while he was also supposedly hanging from the tree; and he had never worn hem since the precious winter, or taken them out of the chest where they were kept. When Mrs. Winchester was told that he died in these things, she protested that they were in the chest, and ran up to look for them. But the things were gone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Did you know we ring the bell 13 times on the 13th hour of every Friday the 13th? Come join us for a frightfully fun night of Flashlight Tours on August 13th. Tickets available now!
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No One Lives on this Earth without Tribulation–Life is Lived Forwards, but Understood Backwards!
Are lives are defined by our choices. Paths taken and worlds explored. But once we commit, we can never go back, or can we? Bondage of the will is an essential foundation for the doctrine of grace. By ourselves, we are unable to act righteously, to have faith, or to contribute to our own salvation. All credit belongs to God. What then is left to free will? “Nothing! In truth!” insisted Marlin Luther. John Calvin was just as forceful: because the term free will “cannot be retained without great peril, it will…be a great boon for the church if it is abolished.” The divine determinism assumed by the doctrines of God’s foreknowledge, sovereignty, and grace is not identical to naturalistic cause-effect determinism. Yet biblical faith assumes that God works through the created order. Thomas Aquinas argued (in the words of Michael Novak) that “grace operates (except in the rarest cases) through the ordinary contingencies and processes of nature…The whole environment, the whole ‘schedule of contingencies’ that constitutes history is graced.” Believing in God opens one to the possibility of miracles; yet if we accept that all nature is from moment to moment sustained, ordered, and upheld by God, then we no longer need miracles in order to “make room for God.” Whatever their differences, the concepts of absolute determinism and absolute divine sovereignty converge in affirming our dependence on forces beyond our conscious knowledge. Thus they share the problem of how to accommodate ultimate more responsibility. If a superhypnotist were to plant an irresistible suggestion that you should commit a crime, which you then did with a sense of having chosen to do it, surely no one who knew the hidden cases of your behaviour would hold you responsible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Likewise, if we understand the conditions that triggered someone’s acting desirably, we tend to credit the conditions rather than the person. It is only when we are surprised by a person’s heroism—when we do not expect people to behave o nobly under such circumstances—that we give special credit and honour to the hero. In a deterministic World we can judge any behaviour as worthy of praise or blame, but it becomes more difficult to hold the person as ultimately responsible. One is therefore tempted to create a gap in the schemes of natural and divine determination—to open the door to just a dash of ultimate free will, however much is needed to restore our accountability before God and before our human judicial system. God’s sovereignty, we may tell ourselves, does not extend all the way down to the little things, such as what I ate for breakfast this morning. God is concerned only with big events, the ultimate ends. However, as Jonathan Edwards and the other theological masterminds recognized, this assumption of agent causation creates as many problems as it solves. A God who is detached from what you ate for breakfast (or whether you ate breakfast) is not a God who is continuously involved with all events of the creation. And consider: How are the big ends in life achieved apart from the little means? Looking back on our lives, we see our path winding through countless little event and chance encounters, from our initial conception right up to the present. At any decision point we feel free, but looking back, we see causation. “What I so proudly call ‘myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never stared and which I cannot stop,” suggested C.S. Lewis. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Or as Soren Kierkegaard noted, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” Thus the apostle Paul could sense, “I yet not I, but the grace of God.” So both the absolute determinist and the one who believes in God’s utter sovereignty (perhaps the same person) are left baffled. To limit natural and divine powers makes little sense and only opens that door for pride in self and a judgmental attitude toward others. Yet somehow human accountability must be affirmed. Faced with this paradox of faith, we can take comfort in remembering that we cannot expect to comprehend fully this wisdom and justice of a being whose cognitive stage is infinitely beyond our own. Our situation is like that of someone stranded in a deep well with two ropes dangling down. If we grab either one alone, we sink still deeper into the well. Only when we hold both ropes at once can we climb out, because at the top, beyond where we can see, they come together around a pulley. Grabbing only the rope of determinism or the rope of human responsibility plunges us to the bottom of a well. So instead we grab both ropes, without yet understanding how they come together. In doing so, we may also be comforted that in science as in religion, a confused acceptance of irreconcilable principles is sometimes more hones than a tidy oversimplified theory that ignores evidence. (Remember that advocates of agent causation have no trouble explaining our responsibility, but do face a different mystery—how God could accomplish divine purposes while granting us freedom to do as we choose.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
We also do well to remember both ropes in our everyday attitudes—by viewing ourselves as free and responsible agents and others as influenced by their biology, their past experience, and their current situation. Such a view has the effect of cultivating within us the practical fruits of self-discipline and self-initiative, while being more understanding of the forces that constrain others. Scripture, too, tends to adopt the perspective of self as free and other as caused. When the Bible addresses us directly, it emphasizes our responsibility for our failings. When talking to us about others, especially the poor and disadvantaged, it frequently advocates the complementary perspective: do not judge; act with compassion toward the oppressed; take the beam out of your own eye before worrying about the motes in others; let judgment begin with the house of the Lord. Are we determined or free? Christian psychologists who assume absolute determinism struggle to rationalize human responsibility; those who assume self-causation have solved the problem of human responsibility butt struggle to accommodate natural causation and divine sovereignty in human affairs. Nevertheless, on this much both camps agree: in the fabric of contemporary psychology and Christian doctrine, natural order and human responsibility are the interwoven threads. The new enlightenment which resulted from this development increased human superiority over others terrestrial beings by making them aware that they are from a divine being and created in His image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground,’” reports Genesis 1.26. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
And because humans learned they were superior to animals, they trained themselves to set traps for them; they tricked them in a thousand different ways. And although several surpassed them or hurt them, humans became the master of the former and the scourge of the latter. Thus the first glance they directed upon themselves produced within them the first string of pride; thus, as yet hardly knowing how to distinguish the ranks, and contemplating themselves in the first rank by virtue of their species, they prepared themselves from afar to lay claim to it in virtue of their individuality. Although their fellow humans were not for one what they are for us, and although they had hardly anything more to do with them than with other animals, they were not forgotten in their observations. The conformities that tie could make one perceive among the, their female, and oneself, made the human beings judge of those they did not perceive. And seeing that they all acted as one would have done under similar circumstances, one concluded that their way of thinking and feeling was in complete conformity with their own. And this important truth, well established in their mind, made them follow, by a presentiment as sure as dialectic and more prompt, the best rules of conduct that it was appropriate to observe toward them for their advantage and safety. Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole motive of human actions, one found oneself in a position to distinguish the rare occasions when common interest should make one count on the assistance of their fellow humans, and those even rarer occasions when competition ought to make one distrust them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
In the first case, humans untied with them in a herd, or at most in some sort of free association, that obligated no one and that lasted only as long as the passing need that hard formed it. In the second case, if one believed that one could, everyone sought to obtain one’s own advantage, either by overt force. Of it one felt oneself to be weaker, one sought to obtain advantage by cleverness and cunning. This is how humans could imperceptibly acquire some crude idea of mutual commitments and of the advantages to be had in fulfilling them, but only insofar as present and perceptible interests could require it, since foresight meant nothing to them, and far from concerning themselves about a distant future, they did not even give a thought to the next day. Were it a matter of catching a deer, everyone was quite aware that one must faithfully keep to one’s post in order to achieve this purpose; but if a hare happened to pass within reach of one of them, no doubt one would have pursued it without giving it a second thought, and that, having obtained one’s prey, one cared very little about causing one’s companions to miss theirs. It is easy to understand that such intercourse did not require a language much more refined than that of crows or monkeys, which flock together in practically the same way. Inarticulate cries, many gestures, and some imitative noises must for a long time have made up the universal language. By joining to this in each country a few articulate and conventional sounds, whose institution, as I have already said, is not too easy to explain, there were individual languages, but crude and imperfect ones, quite similar to those still spoken by carious savage nations today. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
Constrained by the passing of time, the abundance of things I have to say, and the practically imperceptible progress of the beginnings, I am flying like an arrow over the multitudes of centuries. For the slower events were in succeeding one another, the quicker they can be described. These first advantages enabled humans to make more rapid ones. The more the mind was enlightened, the more industry was perfected. Soon they ceased to fall asleep under the first tree or to retreat into caves, and found various types of hatches made of hard, sharp stones, which served to cut wood, dig up the soil, and make huts from branches they later found it useful to cover with clay and mud. This was the period of a first revolution which formed the establishment of the distinction among families and which introduced a kind of property, whence perhaps there already arose many quarrels and fights. However, since the strongest were probably the first to make themselves lodgings they felt capable of defending, presumably the weak found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to try to dislodge them; and as for those who already had huts, each of them must have rarely sought to appropriate that of one’s neighbour, less because it did not belong to one than because it was of no use to one, and because one could not seize it without exposing oneself to a fierce battle with the family that occupied it. The first development of the heart were the effect of a new situation that united the husbands and wives, fathers and children in one common habitation. The habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to humans: conjugal love and parental love. “God blessed them and said to them ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it,’” reports Genesis 1.28. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Each family became a little society all the better united because mutual attachment and liberty were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the lifestyle of the two genders, which until then had had only one. Women because more sedentary and grew accustomed to watch over the hut and the children, while the man went to seek their common subsistence. With their slightly softer life the two genders also began to lose something of their ferocity and vigour. However, while each one separately became less suited combat savage beasts, on the other hand it was easier to assemble in order to jointly to resist them. In this new state, with simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had invented to provide for them, since humans enjoyed a great deal of leisure time, they used it to procure for themselves many types of conveniences unknown their fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without realizing it, and the first source of evils they prepared for their descendants. For in addition to their continuing thus to soften body and mind (those conveniences having through habit lost almost all their pleasures, and being at the same time degenerated into true needs), being deprived of them because much more cruel than possessing hem was sweet; and they were unhappy about losing them without being happy about possessing them. At this point we can see a little better how the use of speech was established or imperceptibly perfected itself in the bosom of each family; and one can further conjecture how various particular causes could have extended the language and accelerated its progress by making it more necessary. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Great floods or earthquakes surrounded the inhabited areas with water or precipices. Upheavals of the globe detached parts of the mainland and broke them up into islands. Clearly among humans thus brought together and forced to live together, a common idiom must have been formed sooner than among those who wandered freely about the forests of the mainland. Thus it is quite possible that after their first attempts at navigation, the islanders brought the use of speech to us; and it is at least quite probable that society and languages came into being on islands and were perfected there before they were known on the mainland. Everything begins to take on a new appearance. Having previously wandered about the forest and having assumed a more fixed situation, humans slowly came together and united into different bands, eventually forming in each country a particular nation, united by mores and characteristic features, not by regulations and laws, but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of the climate. Eventually a permanent proximity cannot fail to engender some intercourse among different families. Young people of difference genders live in neighbouring huts; the passing intercourse demanded by nature soon leads to another, through frequent contact with one another, no less sweet and more permanent. People became accustomed to consider different objects and to make comparison. Imperceptibly they acquire the ideas of merit and beauty which produce feelings of preference. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer get along without seeing one another again. A sweet and tender feeling insinuates itself into the soul and at the least opposition becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy awakens with love’ discord triumphs, and the sweetest passion receives sacrificed of human blood. In proportion as ideas and sentiments succeed one another and as the mind and heart are trained, the human race continues to be tamed, relationships spread and bonds are tightened. People grew accustomed to gather in front of their huts or around a large tree; song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle humans who had flocked together. Each one began to look at the others and to wan to be looked at oneself, and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly regarded. And this was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other. And the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence. On 8 August 1960, a West Virginia-born chemical engineer named Monroe Rathbone, sitting in his office high over Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York United States of America, made a decision that future historians might someday choose to symbolize the end of the Second Wave era. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Few paid any attention when Mr. Rathbone, chief executive of the giant Exxon Corporation, took steps to cut back on the taxes Exxon paid to the oil-producing countries. His decision, though ignored by the Western press, struck like a thunderbolt at the governments of these countries, since virtually all their revenues derived from oil company payments. Within a few days the other major oil companies had followed Exxon’s lead. And one month later, on 9 September, in the fabled city of Baghdad, delegates of the hardest-hit countries met in emergency council. Backed to the wall, they formed themselves into a committee of oil-exporting governments. For fully thirteen years the activities of this committee, and even its name, were ignored outside the pages of a few petroleum industry journals. Until 1973, that is, when the Yom Kippur War broke out and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) suddenly stepped out of the shadows. Chocking off the World’s supply of crude oil, it sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shuddering down-spin. What OPEC did, apart from quadrupling its oil revenues, was to accelerate a revolution that was already brewing in the Second Wave techno-sphere. In the earsplitting clamour over the energy crisis that has since followed, so many plans, proposals, arguments, and counterarguments have been hurled at us that it is difficult to make sensible choices. Governments are just as confused as the proverbial human in the streets. One way to cut through the murk is to look beyond the individual technologies and policies to the principles underlying them. Once we do, we find that certain proposals are designed to maintain or extend the Second Wave energy base as we have known it, while others rest on new principles. The result is a radical clarification of the entire energy issue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The Second Wave energy base, we saw earlier, was premised on non-renewability; it drew from highly concentrated, exhaustible deposits; it relied on expansive, heavily centralized technologies; and it was nondiversified, resting on a relatively few sources and methods. These were the main features of the energy base in all Second Wave nations throughout the industrial era. Bearing these in mind, if we now look at the various plans and proposals generated by the oil crisis we can quickly tell which ones are mere extensions of the old and which are forerunners of something fundamentally new. And the basic question becomes not whether oil should sell at forty dollars (2021 inflation adjusted $363.78) per barrel or whether a nuclear reactor should rise at Seabrook or Grohnde. The larger question is whether any energy base deigned for industrial society and premised on these Second Wave principles can survive. Once asked in this form, the answer is inescapable. Through the past half-century, fully two thirds of the entire World’s energy supply has come from oil and gas. Most observers today, from the most fanatic conservationists to the deposed Shah of Iran, from solar freaks and Saudi sheikhs to the button-down, brief-case-carrying experts of many governments, agree that this dependency on fossil fuel cannot continue indefinitely, no matter how many new oil fields are discovered. Statistic vary. Disputes rage over how long World has before the ultimate crunch. The forecasting complexities are enormous and many past predications now look silly. Yet one thing is clear: no one is pumping gas oil back to replenish the supply. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Whether the end comes in some climatic gurgle or, more likely, in a succession of dizzyingly destabilizing shortages, temporary gluts, and deeper shortages, the oil epoch is ending. Iranians know this. Kuwaitis and Nigerians and Venezuelans know it. Saudi Arabians know it—which is why they are racing to build an economy based on something other than oil revenues. And although we are having issues supplying electricity to major cities in America, and an element used to create batteries in electric cars is expected to run out in the near future, this is why leaders are pushing to increase the demand of electric cars. Petroleum companies know it—which is why they are scrambling to diversify out of oil. (One president of a petroleum company told me at a dinner in Tokyo not long ago that, in his opinion, the oil giants would become industrial dinosaurs, as the railroads have. His time frame for this was breathtakingly short—years, not decades. Perhaps in the next ten years.) However, the debate over physical depletion is almost beside the point. For in today’s World it is price, not physical supply, that has the most immediate and significant impact. And here, if anything, the facts point even more strongly to the same conclusion. The suburban ideology fits somewhat uncomfortably into the urban dichotomy. Suburbs are neither one nor the other. Proponents of suburban living historically have resolved this by emphasizing how suburbs ideally combine the best features of urban and rural living. Opponents stress that they contain the worse of both Worlds. The argument that suburbs have best of both is not new. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
An 1873 promotional tract pushing development of the North Shore of Chicago proclaims, “The controversy which is sometimes brought, as to which offers the greater advantage, the country of the city, finds a happy answer in the suburban ideal which says both—the combination of the two—the city brought to the country. This is a practical and valuable reply. The city has its advantages and conveniences, the country its charm and health; the union of the two (a modern result of the railway), gives to humans all they could ask in this respect.” As the earlier section on romantic suburbs indicates, the suburb was to allow the nineteenth-century city man of business to have it both ways. One would make one’s fortune during the day in the dynamic and vita industrial city and then retire by commuter railroad to the health and domestic tranquility of the picturesque suburb. Although homes in turn-of-the-century streetcar suburbs were far less grand and often occupied minimal size lots, the imagery of suburbs being at least surrounded by country persisted. Sometimes the open spaces lasted only until all the planned housing was constructed. Automobile suburbs built prior to the second World War, if anything, accentuated and sharpened the image of suburbs as being distinct from the city. Real estate developers and realtors found it was good for business to foster the image of both spatial and social distance from the central city. The mass suburbanization during the postwar years may have changed the reality, not the ideology, of suburban exclusivity. Builders and developers continued to advertise based upon the image of suburbia as an exclusive enclave where one’s fellow suburbanites would all be upwardly mobile and community involved. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Advertisements spoke less about square footage than about “moving up” and the “quality of life.” Nonetheless, the reality was that suburbia was now open to virtually all. Exclusively had come down to the basics of being employed and European American. Some of the postwar criticisms by cultural elites of the new suburbs were, in fact, a recognition of his change. Literary and cultural criticisms of standardized subdivision housing as an aesthetic wasteland, and the attacks on the middle-brow values of those inhabiting such housing, were in part an elitist response to rapid social change. This “there goes the neighbourhood” response, combined with a glorification of the past, was clearly evident in the comments of influential intellectuals such as Lewis Mumford. One can feel the disdain when he described postwar suburbia as “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at unform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group…conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.” To many of the urban critics of the 1950s and 1960s, the major crime of the new suburbs was that they were common. Unlike the affluent and exclusive suburbs of earlier decades, the new suburbs, and suburbanites, were seen as lacking the true urbanite’s sense of good taste. Underlying the criticisms is the assumption that the new suburbanites went to the wrong schools, read the wrong books, and even bought the wrong furniture. It was as if former workers and service help had aspired to rise above their true station in life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
There is a World of other people and things—the point of individuation. At this point, there may be either a more home-loving or a more space-loving orientation, but either way, if all goes well, a person will emerge with an integrated personality. However, all may not go well. A person may be struck by a trauma, after which development will be fundamentally influenced by the method which that person invented to cope with the trauma. The Basic Fault is at the point at which people begin to have to “cope.” Use of the English “coping” refers to ego-function! It gives recognition to our ability to survive and to deal with people and things in order to survive, not necessarily with much regard to the moral dimension. “Coping” has two independent and equally relevant root, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: A. Form the Old French coper, Modern French couper, to strike (a blow), to cut. From this root we get our meanings (1) to strike; to come to blows; encounter; engage; (2) to be or prove oneself a match for, content successfully with; (3) to have to do with; (4) to meet, to come in contact (hostile and friendly) with; (5) to match a thing with another equivalent. B. From Middle English Kopen – to buy (cf. cheap). From this root we get (1) to buy; (2) to exchange, barter; (3) to make an exchange, bargain. There is even a third root, from cope meaning cape: to cover with a cope, to hang over like a coping. All very appropriate. To return to our theme after this linguistic digression, trauma is not necessarily a single even. Trauma is more likely to be caused by a long-standing situation in which there was some painful misunderstanding—a lack of fit—between the child and the adults around it. #RandolphHarrs 16 of 25
True, despite the general lack of fit, in some cases some adult may be on the child’s side, but much more often, immature and weak individuals have to cope on their own with traumatic situations: either no help is available, or the only help is of a kind that is hardly more than a continuation of the misunderstand, and thus useless. For lack of the right support, the individual is forced to find its own method of coping, a method hit upon a time of despair or thrown at it by some un-understanding adult who may be a well-wisher, or just indifferent, or negligent, or even careless or hostile. This method will be incorporated in the individual’s personality, and thereafter anything beyond or contrary to this method will strike the person as a frightening and more or less impossible proposition. The individual’s further development will then be prescribed or at least limited by this method which, although helpful in some respects, is often costly, and above all, alien. Most patients cannot tell us what causes their resentment, lifelessness, dependence, what the fault or the defect in them is…some can express it by phantasies about perfect partners, perfect harmony, untroubled contentment….Over and over they repeat that they feel let down, that nothing in the World can ever be worth while unless something hey were deprived of is restored to them. Sophisticated patients may express this something irretrievably lost or gone wrong as the male organ or the breast, usually felt to have magical qualities, and speak of male organ or breast, or castration fear. However, in nearly all cases this is coupled with an unquenchable and incontestable feeling that if the loss cannot be made good, the patient oneself will remain no go. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
It is always a dry season until you give way to the sorrowing of the heart. Only then will the drops of devotion come. Heart-felt sorrow opens many a door. Deep-down compulsion slams the door in your face every time. We may stumble onto happiness, but, remember, we are exiles and the World is alive with peril. You laugh at the defects of the World, but your own spiritual defects you shrug off. Yet hey bedevil your soul, and what do you do about it? You laugh. Nobody laughs in public these days, expect you. You laugh uproariously, but the joke is on you. It is the other way around. Your peccadillos are laughing at you when you should be weeping uncontrollably where no one can see. What is missing is the fear of God and a working conscious. If we do not feel the pain of reformation in our souls, Joy or Liberty cannot be true and good. Happy the self-actualized who can scatter one’s distractions and collect oneself into holy sorrowing of the heart! Happy is the self-actualized who can shield one’s snow-white conscience from bilious gray pigeons! That is to say, from the dropping of one’s own inordinate affections. Face it! When it comes to power, it takes a good habit to whip a bad habit. If you do not care a fig for the World, the World will not care a farthing for you. Do not inundate yourself with the affairs of the low and unlovely, and do not insinuate yourself into the affairs of the high and mighty. Remember, you are a member of a holy company dedicated to spiritual progress. Hence, keep a steely eye on yourself. When necessary, unbraid yourself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
If you cast a knowing wink at the World and the World does not return the wink, do not tear up, do not waste a single tear of your own. Give serious thought to this possibility. You may not have the right stuff to be a servant of God and live the devout life. After all, we do not have many consolations in this sort of life; at least as Flesh counts them. That is what our experience tells us. And rarer still, at least as the Soul counts them, are the Divine Consolations. There has go to be a reason, and it is sin. We just do not seek the sorrowing of the heart hard enough. The least we could is throw our vanities to the wind. Are you worth Divine Consolation? Face it, all you are worth is a bundle of snakes! When you are contrite to the point of perfection, the face your present to the World is never cheerful, always chary. The good person has more than enough to be sorrowful for, to weep for. No matter how you look at it—and your neighbour will confirm it—no one lives on this Earth without tribulation. The more you eye the condition of your own soul, the more openly you weep. The causes of just sorrow and internal contrition are our sins and the vice that lead to our sins. And is it not true that we spend so much time on Earthly grapplings that we have almost no time to give to celestial contemplations? Death is approaching more quickly than life is unfolding. Think about that now, and put more shoulder into your reformation of life. We are on the near side of death now, but on the far side await he pains of Hell or Purgatory. Weigh that in your heart, and maybe now you will be willing to undertake the laborious program of reform, readying yourself for the Final Rigour. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
Why is it that considerations like these do no hit the target? Why are we as blind to the blandishments banded about us? Are we as lazy and loutish as that? What spirit is left in that wretched body of yours? A whistle? A whimper? A whisper? Pray, therefore, humbly to the Lord that He give your spirit of contrition. Say as the Psalmist said (80.5), “With the bread of tears satisfy my hunger, Lord, and with a measure of tears satisfy my thirst.” The number of the predestined is certain, and can neither be increased nor diminished. The number of predestine is certain. Some have said that it was formally, but not materially certain; as if we were to say that it was certain that a hundred or a thousand would be saved; not however these or those individuals. However, this destroys the certainty of predestination; of which we spoke of above. Therefore we must say that to God the number of predestined is certain, not only formally, but also materially. It must, however, be observed that the number of the predestined is said to be certain to God, not by reason of His knowledge, because, that is to say, He knows how many will be saved (for in this way the number drops of rain and the sands of the sea are certain to God); but by reason of His deliberate choice and determination. For the further evidence of which we must remember that every agent intends to make something finite, as is clear from what has been said above when we treated of the infinite. Now whosoever intends some definite measure in one’s effect thinks out some definite number in the essential parts, which are by their very nature required for the perfection of the whole. For of those things which are required not principally, but only account of something else, one does not select any definite number “per se”; but one accepts and uses the in such numbers as are necessary on account of that other thing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
For instance, a builder thinks out the definite measurements of a house, and also the definite number of rooms which one wishes to make in the house; and definite measurements of the walls and roof; one does not, however, select a definite number of stones, but accepts and uses just so many as are sufficient for the required measurements of the wall. So also must we consider concerning God in regard to the whole Universe, which is His effect. For He pre-ordained the measurements of the whole of the Universe, and what number would befit the essential parts of that Universe—that is to say, which have in some way been ordained in perpetuity; how many spheres, how many stars, how many elements, and how many species. Individuals, however, which undergo corruption, are no ordained as I were chiefly for the good of the Universe, but in a secondary way, inasmuch as the good of the species is preserved through them. Whence, although God knows the total number of individuals, the number of oxen, flies and such like, is not pre-ordained by God “per se”; but divine providence produces just so many as are sufficient for the preservation of the species. Now of all creatures the rational creature is chiefly ordained for the good of the Universe, being as much incorruptible; more especially those who attain to eternal happiness, since they more immediately reach the ultimate end. Whence the number of the predestination is certain to God; not only by way of knowledge, but also by way of a principal pre-ordination. It is not exactly the same thing in the cause of the number of the reprobate, who would seem o be pre-ordained by God for the good of the elect, in whose regard “all things work unto good” Romans 8.28. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Concerning the number of all the predestined, some say that so many human will be saved as Angels fell; some so many as there were Angels left; others, as many as the number of Angels created by God. It is, however, better to say that, “to God alone is known the number for whom is reserved eternal happiness [From the ‘secret’ prayer of the missal, “pro vivis et defunctis.’]” These words of Deuteronomy must be taken as applied to those who are marked out by God beforehand in respect to present righteousness. For there is increased and diminished, but not the number of the predestined. The reason of the quantity of any one part must be judged from the proportion of that part of the whole. Thus in God the reason why He has made so many stars, or so many species of things, or predestined so many, according to the proportion of the principal parts to the good of the whole Universe. The good that is proportionate to the common state of nature is to be found in the majority, and is wanting in the majority. Thus is clear that is the majority of humans have a sufficient knowledge for the guidance of life; and those who have not this knowledge are sad to be half-witted or foolish; but they who attain to a profound knowledge of things intelligible are a very small minority in respect to the rest. Since their eternal happiness, consisting in the vision of God, exceeds the common state of nature, and especially in so far as this is deprived of grace through the corruption of original sin, those who are saved are in the minority. In this especially, however, appears the mercy of God, that He has chosen some for that salvation, from which very many in accordance with the common course and tendency of nature fall short. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
All thinking keeps one’s awareness out of the Overself. That is why even thinking about the Overself merely produced another thought. Only in the case of the self-actualized, who has established oneself in the Overself, is thinking no barrier at all. In this case, thinking may coexist with the larger awareness. So it is not enough to be a good thinker; one also has to learn how to be a good non-thinker. Of course, the way to do this is through the practice of deep and meaningful prayer. Appetite has really become an artificial and abnormal thing, having taken the place of true hunger, which alone is natural. The one is a sign of bondage but the other, of freedom. It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life uncecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of one’s ethical standard. If the body is intolerant of particular treatments and allergic to particular foods, it should not be forced to accept them. When either faith healing or naturopathic treatment is too passive, when it refrains from timely co-operation with nature by the use of positive means, by they nontoxic medicines or essential operations, it becomes guilty of sacrificing the patient to its own narrowness. No healer’s treatment is always successful nor is the cure always permanent. Failures are many and relapses are common. Those who shout and splutter from evangelistic public platforms exhibit the ego’s arrogance, not the Overself’s quiet humility. They hold the view which conforms with their presuppositions, their inborn tendencies and governing prejudices, in short, with their little ego, not their impersonal higher Self. This is why there are so many contesting theories, why the body’s ill health may cause the mind to be governed by negative thoughts, why this conflict of authorities shows their worthlessness. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
All these cults and groups which acknowledge the power of mind over body but which leave out the acknowledgment of the body’s power over the mind, are out of balance and so out of truth to that extent. This statement may be a matter of arguable theory partisan adherents of either side, but it is a mater of tested fact with creative leaders who consciously exercise both powers. If mental and spiritual healing agents are also joined in, the physical cure will surely be accelerated and the physical therapy will surely be helped. In this way the individual limitations of the method of treatment being used will be overcome and each healing agent will contribute to bringing about a complete and successful result. It is foolish to believe that there is any particular healing method which has only to be applied for it to be universally and equally successful or that there is any particular human healer who has only to be visited for one to be cure. If we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, something will have gone out of us as people; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the World, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural World and competent to belong in it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
And a redeemer shall come to America and to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, saith the Lord. And as for Me, this is My covenant with them, saith the Lord: My spirit that is upon you, and My words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart out of your mouth, nor out of the mouth of your children nor your children’s children henceforth and forever. Thou art holy, O Thou that art enthroned upon the praises of America. And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. [And they receive sanction one from the other, and say: Holy upon Earth, the works of His mighty power; Holy forever and to all eternity is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of the radiance of His glory.] And a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me a mighty chorus proclaiming: Blessed be the glory of the Lord everywhere. [Then a wind lifted me up, and I heard behind me the mighty moving sound of those who uttered praises and said: Blessed be the glory of the Lord from the place of His abode.] The Lord shall reign for ever and ever. [Then Kingdom of the Lord is established forever and to all eternity.] The time has come to arouse the conscience of all those who sincerely the Good and the Right to their duty in the matter of harming innocent terrestrial beings and the environment and vehicles, a conscience which, if it could speak unperverted by racial habits, would emphatically repeat the Mosaic commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” These are cruelties practiced on objects to gain wealth and pleasures for others, sometimes clothes, entertainment and medicinal drugs. The human claim of necessity as a justification is a mistake one. Whether forged of metal or born of flesh, every form of life has one unquenchable thirst, the urge for freedom. Christianity is not something to be endured, but something to be treasured. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Next to Life and Liberty, We Consider Education the Greatest Blessing!
We had a sense of importance that would have led us to risk our lives for our rhetoric. The precondition of any civilization, old or new, is energy. First Wave societies drew their energy from “living batteries”—human and animal muscle-power—or from sun, wind, and water Forests were cut for cooking and heating. Waterwheels, some of them using tidal power, turned milestones. Windmills creaked in the fields. Animals pulled the plow. As late as the French Revolution, it has been estimated, Europe drew energy from an estimated 14 million horses and 24 million oxen. All First Wave societies thus exploited energy sources that were renewable. Nature could eventually replenish the forests they cut, the wind that filled their sails, the rivers that turned their paddle wheels. Even animals and people were replaceable “energy slaves.” All Second Wave societies, by contrast, began to draw their energy from coal, gas, and oil—from irreplaceable fossil fuels. This revolutionary shift, coming after Newcomen invented a workable steam engine in 1712, meant that for the first time a civilization was eating into nature’s capital rather than merely living off the interest it provided. This dipping into the Earth’s energy reserves provided a hidden subsidy for industrial civilization, vastly accelerating its economic growth. And from that day to this, wherever the Second Wave passed, nations built towering technological and economic structures on the assumptions that cheap fossil fuels would be endlessly available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In capitalist and communist industrial societies alike, in East and West, this same shift has been apparent—from dispersed to concentrated energy, from renewable to non-renewable, from many different sources and fuels to a few. Fossil fuels formed the energy base of all Second Wave societies. The leap to a new energy system was paralleled by a gigantic advance in technology. First Wave societies had relied on what Vitruvius, two thousand years ago, called “necessary inventions.” However, these early winches and wedges, catapults, winepresses, levers, and hoists were chiefly used to amplify human or animal muscles. The Second Wave pushed technology to a totally new level. It spawned gigantic electromechnical machines, moving parts, belts, hoses, bearings, and bolts—all clattering and ratcheting along. And these new machines did more than augment raw muscle. Industrial civilization gave technology sensory organs, creating machines that could hear, see, and touch with greater accuracy and precision than human beings. It gave technology a womb, by inventing machines designed to give birth to new machines in infinite progression—id est, machine tools. More important, it brought machines together in interconnected systems under a single roof, to create the factory and ultimately the assembly line within the factory. On this technological base a host of industries sprang up to give Second Wave civilization its defining stamp. At first there were coal, textiles, and railroads, then steel, auto manufacture, aluminum, chemicals, and appliances. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Huge factory cities leaped into existence: Lille and Manchester for textiles, Detroit for automobiles, Essen and—later—Magnitogorsk for steel, and a hundred others as well. From these industrial centers poured million upon endless millions of identical products—shirts, shoes, automobiles, watches, toys, soap, shampoo, camera, machine guns, and electric motors. The new technology powered by the new energy system opened the door to mass production. Mass production, however, was meaningless without parallel changes in the distribution system. In First Wave societies, goods were normally made by handcraft methods. Products were created one at a time on a custom basis. The same was largely true of distribution. It is true that large, sophisticated trading companies had been built up by merchants in the widening crack of the old feudal order in the West. These companies opened trade routes around the World, organized convoys of ships, and camel caravans. They sold glass, paper, silk, nutmeg, tea, wine and wool, indigo and mace. Most of these products, however, reached consumers through tiny stores or on the backs of wagons of peddlers who fanned out into the countryside. Wretched communications and primitive transport drastically circumscribed the market. These small-scale shopkeepers and itinerant vendours could offer only the slenderest of inventories, and often they were out of this or that item for months, even years, at a time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The Second Wave wrought changes in this creaking, overburdened distribution system that were as radical, in their ways, as the more publicized advances made in production. Railroads, highways, and canals opened up the hinterlands, and with industrialism came “palace of trade”—the first department stores. Complex networks of jobbers, wholesalers, commission agents, and manufacturers’ representatives sprang up, and in 1871 George Huntington Hartford, whose first store in New York was painted vermilion and had a cashier’s cage sharped like a Chinses pagoda, did for distribution what Henry Ford later did for the factory. He advanced it to an entirely new stage by creating the World’s first mammoth chain-store system—The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Customer distribution gave way to the mass distribution and mass merchandising that became as familiar and central a component of all industrial societies as the machine itself. What we see, therefore, if we take these changes together, is a transformation of what might be called the “techno-sphere.” All societies—primitive, agricultural, or industrial—use energy; they make things; they distribute things. In all societies energy system, the production system, and the distribution system are interrelated parts of something larger. This larger system is the technosphere, and it has a characteristic form at each stage of social development. As the Second Wave swept across the planet, the agricultural techno-sphere was replaced by an industrial techno-sphere: non-renewable energies were directly plugged into mass production systems which, in turn, spewed goods into a highly developed mass distribution system. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
This Second Wave techno-sphere, however, needed an equally revolutionary “socio-sphere” to accommodate it. It needed radically new forms of social organization. Before the industrial revolution, for example, family forms varied from place to place. However, wherever agriculture held sway, people tended to live in large, multigenerational households, with uncles, aunts, in-laws, grandparents, or cousins all living under the same roof, all working together as an economic production unit—from the “joint family” in India to the “zadruga” in the Balkans and the “extended family” in Weser Europe. And the family was immobile—rooted to the soil. This is why the Victorian homes were so large, often three and four stories, with an average of 5,000 square feet, and several acres of land; so the families could live at home, have their own space without overcrowding the house, and farm to grow their food and meat. As we are now experiencing a global pandemic in 2021, houses are getting larger again, more people are living in multigenerational households, and even growing their own food. As the Second Wave began to move across First Wave societies, family felt the stress of change. Within each household the collision of wave fronts took the form of conflict, attacks on patriarchal authority, altered relationship between children and parents, new notions of propriety. As economic production shifted from the field to the factory, the family no longer worked together as a unit. To the free workers for factory labour, key functions of the family were parceled out to new, specialized institutions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Education of the child was turned over to schools. Care of the aged was turned over to poorhouses or old-age homes or nursing homes. Above all, the new society required mobility. It needed workers who would follow jobs from place to place. Burdened with elderly relatives, the sick, the disabled, and a large brood of children, the extended family was anything but mobile. Gradually and painfully, therefore, family structure began to change. Torn apart by the migration to the cities, battered by economic storms, families stripped themselves of unwanted relatives, grew smaller, more mobile, and more suited to the needs of the new techno-sphere. The so-called nuclear family-father, mother, and a few children, with no encumbering relatives—became the standard, socially approved, “modern” model in all industrial societies, whether capitalist or socialist. Even in Japan, where ancestor worship gave the elderly an exceptionally important role, the large, close-knit, multigenerational household began to break down as the Second Wave advanced. More and more nuclear unis appeared. In short, the nuclear family became an indentifable feature of all Second Wave societies, marking them off from First Wave societies just as surely as fossil fuels, steel mills, or chain stores. As work shifted out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine, mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was “nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.” #RandolpHarris 6 of 21
If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later of on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies: mass education. Built in the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the “overt curriculum.” However, beneath it lay an invisible or “covert curriculum” that was far more basic. It consisted—and till does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labour demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations. Thus from the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Second Wave cut across country after country, one found a relentless educational progression: children started school at a younger and younger age, the school year became longer and longer (in the United States of America it climbed 35 percent between 1878 and 1956), and the number of years of compulsory schooling irresistibly increased. Mass pubic education was clearly a humanizing step forward. As a group of mechanic and workingmen in New York City declared in 1829, “Next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Nevertheless, Second Wave schools machined generation after generation of young people into a pliable, regimented work force of the type required by electromechanical technology and the assembly line. Taken together, the nuclear family and the factory-style school formed part of a single integrated system for the preparation of young people for roles in industrial society. In this respect, too, Second Wave societies, capitalist or communist, North or South, were all alike. For many decades the ecological model was “the” model of urban growth. However, during recent decades it has increasingly come under attack by the scholars favouring neo-Marxian or political economy models. These models challenge the mainstream urban ecology perspective by emphasizing that urban patterns are not the result of “hidden hand” economic forces, but rather that urban patterns are deliberately shaped for private profit by elites in business and government. Thus, unlike ecological approaches, which explain suburbanization as occurring as a consequence of technological factors such as street-car or automobile, political economy, or neo-Marxian, views stress the role played by corporate and real estate interests in manipulating land usage and markets. Suburbia is not a consequence of individuals homeowner choice, but a consequence of a deliberate decision by elites to disinvest in the cities. These elites are composed of “the industrial executives, developers, bankers, and their political allies. This approach is sometimes also identified as the “new urban sociology.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The new urban sociology is usually based on assumptions of neo-Marxism and conflict theory. The term “new urban sociology” is a bit of a misnomer, since advocates of this approach or paradigm often are geographers, urban planners, or political scientists rather than sociologists. Although these perspectives differ in specifics, they all stress that urban development is a consequence of capitalist modes of production, capital accumulation, exploitation of he powerless, and conflictual class relations. Societies are specified according to their mode of production. In the United States of America and Western Europe as well as elsewhere societal development is dominated by the capital accumulation process. A central role in the process of accumulation is assigned to labour power—its use, management, and reproduction. Social spatial relationships, particularly the relationship between capitalistic processes and space, are an intrinsic part of social development. Methodological individualism is overcome through specification of structure and its relationship to the agency, although the articulation of this relationship varies among the new urbanists. Real-estate and its supporting infrastructure constitute a “second circuit” of capital. Certain assumptions are common to the new critical urbanists. These are: Societal interaction is dominated by antagonistic social relationships. Consequently society is not a unified biotic community that experiences change from the outside, but a stratified and highly differentiated form of organization characterized by its own fissures, contradictions, and patterns of uneven development—features that flow from the (for example, the capitalistic) mode of production itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Social development is unstable in societies with antagonistic owner relationships. Contradictions of development and inequalities of growth fuel antagonism and define the nature of political activities. Power inequality is a basic element in societal relationships and the exercise of power can be a factor in societal development. No society can be adequately analyzed without reference to either its long-term history or its global context. Urban sociology has become captive of its own comfortable assumptions and resonates strongly with younger academics. Some also believe strongly that the social inequality, social conflict, and social problems in many American cities is the predictable consequences of capitalist political economy determining real estate and land usage because certain groups of people had their homes red tagged (scheduled for demolition) as cities were planning to redevelop them. This led to many years of generational wealth being lost for certain groups of people are these homes appreciated to become worth millions just 40 to 40 years later. However, capitalists tend to be republican, but some of these policies that led to certain groups of people being displaced from the homes they owned and robbed of future equity, for example, were policies created by the governors Pat Brown and his son Jerry Brown, who are both democrats. Even today as California brags about having a nearly $40 billion budget surplus, there is a major homeless crisis that is being overlooked by democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and the TV news media, but they can conjure up sports complexes and have them operational in two years, but no move being made on the construction and management of affordable housing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
However, there is a conflict about affordable housing because many of their buildings tend to rent to people and do not manage them and there is a lot of violence, crime, rule breaking, and noise, so people do not want income based, or low-income properties in their community because rules are not enforced and it makes the community unlivable for people who pay market rate and often well above market rate prices for their homes. Yet, the answer is not to leave people on the streets to endure unhygienic and unsafe conditions. Well have to acknowledge and deal with gentrification, displacement, and neighbourhood revitalization. We also have to acknowledge the opposite of gentrification is happening: middle- and upper-income residents are moving out, and lower-income residents moving in. Urban space (as well as space at other scales) is the specific effect of the kind of society in which this urban space is developed and the capitalist city is developed according to a logic that is internal to capital itself. The trend of the affluent moving out of their communities has implications for millions of Americans who own a home or are thinking of buying one. In a neighbourhood that is losing its more affluent residents, home prices are likely to underperform, just as they tend to outperform in areas that are gentrifying, as incomes rise. As a buyer, you may value new construction and/or home prices that appreciate above all, and thus be attracted only to rising-income areas where the lawns are all manicured, houses are nice and well-maintained, and not too many cars on the street and in the driveway. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
As a systematic statement of how non-Marxian new sociology political economy approach can be used to study how property markets work as social phenomena is done by understanding that place is valued in two ways: first, as an object of exchange to be bought and sold, and second, when it is used to do business in or live in. In the latter case place has a sentimental and symbolic value associated with jobs, neighbourhood, hometown, and community. However, the urban growth machine of corporate political elites is interested in land strictly as an investment and commodity to be bought and sold. Their interest is in creating a good business environment so that investments and new residents will come to the area and increase market value of the land, and aggregate rent levels will increase. This governmental and corporate emphasis on growth is at the expense of the interest of local residents and their communities. The needs of the general public are captive to the “growth machine” whose principal interest is in the transfer of wealth rentier groups. Use values of the majority are sacrificed for the exchange values of a few. Thus, community groups that advocate slow growth or neighbourhood preservation are fought by the business elites that profit from maintaining the growth machines. For how can the source of the inequality among humans be known unless one begins by knowing humans themselves? And how will humans be successful in seeing themselves as nature formed one, through all the changes that the succession of time and things must have produced in one’s original constitution, and in separating what one derives from one’s own wherewithal from what circumstances and one’s progress have added to or changed in one’s primitive state? #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Like the Winchester mansion, which time, sea, earthquakes, humans, and storms have caused wear and damage to while the owners and historians fight to preserve this priceless treasure some consider a god, the human soul, altered in the midst of society by a thousand constantly recurring causes, by the acquisition of a multitude of bits of knowledge and errors, by changes that to place in the constitution of bodies, by the constant impact of the passions, as, as it were, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable or not fully displaying its original intent. And instead of a being active always by certain and invariable principles, instead of that Heavenly and majestic simplicity whose mark its author had left on it, one no longer finds anything but grotesque contrast of passion which thinks I reasons and an understanding in a state of delirium. What is even more cruel is that, since all the progress of the human species continually moves away from its primitive state, the more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all. Thus, in a sense, it is by dint of studying humans that we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing them. It is easy to say that it is in these successive changes of the human constitution that we must seek the first origin of the differences that distinguish humans, who, by common consensus, are naturally as equal among themselves as were the terrestrial beings of each species the varieties we now observe among some of them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
In effect, it is inconceivable that these first changes, by whatever means they took place, should have altered all at once and in the same manner all the individuals of the species. However, while some improved or declined and acquired various good and bad qualities which were not inherent in their nature, the others remained longer in their original state. And such was the first source of inequality among humans, which it is easier to demonstrate thus in general than to assign with precision its true causes. Let my readers not imagine, then, that I dare flatter myself with having seen what appears to me so difficult to see. I have begun some lines of reasoning; I have hazarded some guesses, less in the hope of resolving the question than with intention of clarifying it and of reducing it to its true state. Others will easily be able to go farther on this same route, though it will not be easy for anyone to reach the end of it. For it is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of humans, and to have a proper understanding of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and yet about which it is necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge properly our own present state. One who would attempt to determine precisely which precautions to take in order to make solid observations on the subject would need even more philosophy than is generally supposed; and a good solution of the following problem would not seem to me unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our century: What experiments would be necessary to achieve knowledge of natural man? And what are the means of carrying out these experiments in the midst of society? #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Far from undertaking to resolve this problem, I believe I have meditated sufficiently on the subject to dare respond in advance that the greatest philosophers will not be too good to direct these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to carry them out. It is hardly reasonable to expect such a combination, especially with the perseverance or rather the succession of understanding and good will needed on both sides in order to achieve success. These investigations, so difficult to carry out and so little thought about until now, are nevertheless the only means we have left of removing a multitude of difficulties that conceal from us the knowledge of the real foundations of human society. It is this ignorance of the nature of humans which throws so much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right. For the ideal of right, and even more that of natural right, are manifestly ideas relative to the nature of humans. Therefore, one continues, the principles of this science must be deuced from this very nature of humans, from human’s constitution and state. It is not without surprise and a sense of outrage that one observes the paucity of agreement that prevails among the various authors who have treated it. Among the most serious writers one can hardly find two who are of the same opinion on this point. The Roman jurists—not to mention the ancient philosophers who seem to have done their best to contradict each other on the most fundamental principles—subject human and all other terrestrial beings indifferently to the same natural law, because they take this expression to refer to the law that nature imposes on itself rather than the law she prescribes, or rather because of the particular sense in which those jurists understood the word “law,” which on this occasion they seem to have taken only for the expression of the general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their common preservation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The moderns, in acknowledging under the word “law” merely a rule prescribed to a moral being, that is to say, intelligent, free, and considered in one’s relations with other beings, consequently limit the competence of the natural law to the only terrestrial being who know of endowed with reason, that is, to humans. However, with each other defining this law in one’s own fashion, they all establish it on some metaphysical principles that even among us there are very few people in a position to grasp these principles, far from being able to find them by themselves. So that all the definitions of these wise humans, otherwise in perpetual contradiction with one another agree on this alone that it is impossible to understand the law of nature and consequently to obey it without being a great reasoner and a profound metaphysician, which humans do not naturally have, and from advantages the idea of which they cannot conceive until after having left the state of nature. Writers begin by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate for humans to agree among themselves; and then they give the name natural law to the collection of these rules, with no other proof than the good which presumably would result from their universal observance. Surely this is a very convenient way to compose definitions and to explain the nature of things by virtually arbitrary views of what is seemly. However, as long as we are unaware of natural man, it is futile for us to attempt to determine the law he has received or which is best suited to his constitution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
All that we can see very clearly regarding this law is that, for it to be law, not only must he will of one who is obliged by it be capable of knowing submission to it, but also, for it to be natural, it must speak directly by the voice of nature. Leaving aside therefore all he scientific books which teach us only to see humans as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow humans, perish or suffer. It is from the conjunction and combination that our mind is in a position to make regarding these two principles, without the need for introducing that of sociability, that all the rules of natura right appear to me to flow; rules which reason is later forced to reestablish on other foundations, when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature. In this way one is not obliged to make a human a philosopher before making one a human. One’s duties toward others are not uniquely dictated to one by the belated lessons of wisdom; and as long as one does no resist the inner impulse of compassion, one will never harm another human or even another sentient being, except in the legitimate instance where, if one preservation were involved, one is obliged to give preference to oneself. By this means, an end can also be made to the ancient disputes regarding the participation of non-human terrestrial beings in the natural law. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
For it is clear that, lacking intelligence and liberty, some terrestrial beings cannot recognize this natural law; but since they share to some extent in our nature by virtue of the sentient quality with which they are endowed, one will judge that they should also patriciate in natural right, and that humans are subject to some sort of duties toward them. It seems, in effect, that if I am obliged not to do any harm to my fellow humans, it is less because one is a rational being than because one is a sentient being: a quality that, since it is common to both non-human terrestrial beings and human beings, should at least give the former the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the latter. This same study or original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principles of his duties, is also the only good means that can be used to remove those multitudes of difficulties which present themselves regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of is members, and a thousand other similar questions that are as important as they are poorly explained. In considering human society from a tranquil and disinterested point of view it seems at firs to manifest merely the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. The mind revolt against the harshness of the former; one is inclined to deplore the blindness of the latter. And since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand. It is only in examining them closely, only after having cleared away the dust and sand that surround the edifice, hat one perceives the unshakable base on which it is raised and one learns to respect its foundations. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Now without a serious study of man, of his natural faculties and their successive developments, one will never succeed in making these distinctions and in separating, in the present constitution of things, what the divine will has done from what human art has pretended to do. The political and moral investigations occasioned by the important question I am examining are therefore useful in every way; and the hypothetical history of governments is an instructive lesson for man in every respect. In considering what we would have become, left to ourselves, we ought to learn to bless him whose beneficent hand, in correcting our institutions and giving them an unshakable foundation, has prevented the disorders that must otherwise result from them, and has brought about our happiness from the means that seemed likely to add to our misery. Learn whom God has ordered you to be, and in what part of human affairs you have been placed. As it stands, 52 percent of evangelicals do not accept or do not believe in absolute moral truths! What is happening? When the church does not get it right, the World certainly cannot get it right. Revival is coming! The Heavenly messengers will quiet your fears as you learn to find Jesus Christ. “Then I saw another mighty Angel coming down from Heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from Heaven say, ‘Seal up what thunders have said and do not write it down.’ #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Then the Angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right and to Heaven. And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the Heavens and all that is in them, the Earth and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! However, in the days when the seventh Angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.’ Then then voice that I had heard from Heaven spoke to me once more: ‘Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the Angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the Angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’ I took the little scroll from the Angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many people, nations, languages and kings,” reports Revelation 10.1-11. With tender regard for human weaknesses, the Angel will give humans time to become accustomed to the divine radiance. Then the joy and glory will no longer be hidden. The whole plain will light up with the bright shinning of the hosts of God. Earth will be hushed, and the Heavens will stoop to listen to the son—“Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will towards humans.” “For the Lord your God is brining you into a good land, a land of flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a long of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“God is blessing us with a land where we will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and from whose hills you may mine copper, blue sapphires and diamond. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you,” reports Deuteronomy 8.7-11. Tall, lush rain forest dripping in the morning wild orchids banana flowers, thick vines drape los palos del sol and great white cedar; others with five foot green elephant ears flopping, hundreds of butterflies, orange caterpillars, blue birds, pink mushrooms, through billion of green leaves quivering moist in the patchy sunlight. There are exalted but rare occasion when inspiration, peace, and spiritual majesty conjoin their blessed presence within us. It is with one for the flicker of a second—an unfathomable tranquility, an indefinable beauty—and then gone. Some enter into this experience only once in a lifetime; others repeat it a few times. Only a rare individual here and there enters it frequently. In the book of life, blessing, peace, and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, let e give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths pursue. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishes peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto All America. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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You Have Witchcraft on Your Lips!
Witchcraft dates back to the beginning of time. Biblical character’s Adam and Eve were the first warlock and witch. Eve was the first to follow the serpent, then Adam, and then their children. Since then, witches have existed and passed down their skills and knowledge for many generations. The supernatural was an important aspect of Victorian society. It pervaded all forms of life and art, science and entertainment. Its language and metaphors encroached upon Victorian culture. However, before the Victorian era was brought into fruition, there was Salem—a town where the occult was alive and well. However, I consider the seventeenth century the birth of the Victorian era for it was more than just about architecture, ornate homes, and opulent wealthy—it was also about the supernatural, and Salem is known for supernatural events. The supernatural was as important as the realm of the natural in Victorian times, as is proven by its relevance in political, cultural, and religious history and in the incipient entertainment industry. Etymologically speaking, the term “supernatural” refers to what is superior or above nature. However, here are several interpretations of the word “supernatural” which are generally accepted by the critics: preternatural, spiritual, or paranormal, and supernatural. In Boston, in midsummer of the year 1688, four previously well-behaved children of a “sober and pious” mason, John Goodwin, began to have “strange fits, beyond those that attended an epilepsy, or catalepsy.” The words are those of Cotton Mather. Mr. Mather was a medical student before he was a minister, and a far more careful observer than he has been given credit for. He spent a great deal of his time with the Goodwin children and he has left us a thorough account of their symptoms in his Memorable Providences: “Sometimes they would be deaf, sometimes dumb, and sometimes blind, and often all this at once. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
“One while their tongues would be drawn down their throats; and another while they would be pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length. They would have their mouths opened unto such a wideness that their jaws went out of joint, and anon they would clap together again with a force like that of a strong spring-lock. The same would happen to their shoulder blades, and their elbows, and hand-wrists, and several of their joints. They would at times lie in a benumbed condition and be drawn together as those that are tied neck and heels [this was one of the few tortures permitted under seventeenth-century English law; neck and heels were chained together so that the body was bent into an exaggerated and painful foetal posture], and presently be stretched out, yea, drawn backwards to such an extent that it was feared the very skin of their bellies would have cracked [this is the arc de cercle of the nineteenth-century French psychiatrists]. They would make most piteous outcries that they were cut with knives, and struck with blows that they could not bear. Their necks would be broken so that their neck-bone would seem dissolved unto them that felt after it, and yet on the sudden it would become again so stiff that there was no stirring of their heads. Yea, their heads would be twisted almost round, and if main force at any time obstructed a dangerous motion which they seemed to be upon, they would roar exceedingly. Thus they lay some weeks most pitiful spectacles.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Again the symptoms are those of the hysteric: the convulsive movements, the distorted postures, the loss of hearing, speech, sight, and so forth. The fits had started immediately after one of the children had quarreled with an Irish washerwoman, whose mothers, Goodwife Glover, “a scandalous old woman” whose late husband had complained about the neighbourhood “that she was undoubtedly a witch,” had “bestowed very bad language upon the girl.” The neighbour advised the family to try white magic, but the pious father, John Goodwin, refused to traffic with the occult. He consulted first with “skillful physicians,” particularly with Dr. Thomas Oakes, who gave his opinion that “nothing but an hellish witchcraft” could be the cause of the children’s afflictions. Next he turned to the Boston clergy, who held a day of prayer at the Goodwin house, after which one of the four children was permanently cured. And finally he entered a complaint against Goodwife Glover with the magistrates. When they examined her she “gave such a wretched account of herself” that they committed her to jail under indictment of witchcraft. Cotton Mather gives a concise account of her trial: “It was long before she could with any direct answers plead unto her indictment, and when she did plead it was with confession rather than denial of her guilt. Order was given to search the old woman’s house, from whence there were brought into the court several small images, or puppets, or babies, made of rags and stuffed with goat’s hair and other such ingredients. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
“When these were produced the vile woman acknowledged that her finger with her spittle and stocking of those little images. The abused children were than present, and the woman still kept stooping and shrinking as one that was almost pressed to death with a mighty weight upon her. However, one of the images being brought unto her, immediately she started up after an odd manner and took it into her hand. However, no sooner taken it than one of the children fell into sad fits before the whole assembly. This the judges had their just apprehensions at, and carefully causing the repetition of the experiment found again the same event of it. They asked her whether she had any to stand by her [id est, as character witnesses]. She replied, she had, and looking very pertly in the air she added, ‘No, He’s gone.’ And then she confessed that she had one who was her Prince, with whom she maintained I know not what communion. For which cause, the nigh after, she was heard expostulating with a Devil for his thus deserting her, telling Him that because He had served her so basely and falsely, she had confessed all. However, to make all clear the court appointed five or six physicians one evening to examine her very strictly, whether she were not crazed in her intellectuals and had not procured to herself by follow and madness the reputation of a witch. Diverse hours did they spend with her, and in all that while no discourse came from her but what was pertinent and agreeable. Particularly, when they asked her what she would become of her soul, she replied, ‘You ask me a very solemn question, and I cannot tell what to say to it.’ #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
“She owned herself a Roman Catholic and could recite her Pater Noster very readily, but there was one clause or two always too hard for her, whereof she said she could not repeat it if she might have all the World. In the upshot the doctors returned her compos mentis, and sentence of death was passed upon her.” There has never been a more clear-cut case of witchcraft. Image magic is the commonest form of black magic. The impulse behind it survives even when the belief in magic is gone (as any one knows who has torn up the photograph of a person with whom they were angry. When they hang or burn someone in effigy, college students are obeying the same impulse, and burning were the means of executing witches. Nobody is ever shot, or stabbed, or garroted in effigy.) The dolls were studded with goat’s hair because it is the goat who is defied in Satan’s horns and cloven hooves. Spittle was applied to them because spittle was believed to have occult power, a belief that still survives in the idea of spitting on one’s hands before undertaking a particularly arduous task. To determine whether or not the plea should be insanity, the defendant was examined by a committee of physicians, who agreed she was sane. Plainly Goodwife Glover believed that she had made a pact with Satan. When she was asked who would stand by her, she attempted to call on Him, and she was overheard at night, in her cell, berating Him for having abandoned her. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
However, what is most important is that her witchcraft plainly worked, and in no indiscriminate fashion. When she was tormented one of her dolls, one of the Goodwin children “fell into sad fits.” When it is remembered that in a society which believes in witchcraft the violent hysterical symptoms to which the Goodwin children were subject not infrequently terminate in death, it cannot be said that the Boston court acted either harshly or unjustly. Indeed, when one considers the ferocity of seventeenth-century English law, simple hanging seems almost a lenient sentence. Cotton Mather visited Goodwife Glover twice in jail after she had been condemned, and made a serious effort to convert her. Her Prince, he told her, had cheated her, to which she answered, “If it be so, I am sorry for that!” He “set before her the necessity and equity of her breaking her convenient with Hell, and giving herself to the Lord Jesus Christ by an everlasting covenant.” She answered the he “spoke a very reasonable thing, but she could not do it.” He asked if Cotton Mather asked again for her permission to pray, and she replied that should could not give it unless her “spirits” would give her leave—“spirits,” or “angels,” or “saints”; she spoke only in Irish, the language she had also used at trial, and the translator told Mr. Mather that the Irish word would bear any of those translations. He prayed for her anyway, and when he was through she thanked him for it. However, he wrote, “I was no sooner out of her sight than she took a stone, a long and slender stone, and with her finger and spittle fell to tormenting it; though whom or what she meant, I had the mercy never to understand.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
During these visits Mr. Mather also asked her “many” questions about her witchcraft. On one occasion she replied that she “would fain give….a full answer” but her spirits would not give her leave. She told him that she used to go to meetings where her “Prince,” who was the Devil, was present along with four other persons, whom she named, including one “whom it might have been thought natural affection would have advised the concealing of”—presumably her daughter. When she, Goodwife Glover, was on her way to the gallows she announced that the children’s afflictions would not cease at her death, because others had a hand in the witchcraft as well as she. The afflictions did continue, but Mr. Mather kept the names the witch had mentioned to himself, presumably on the grounds that one should not accept the testimony against others of a confessed witch. After all, the Devil was, as Mr. Mather often called him, “the Prince of Lies,” and this woman had been his worshipper. The children’s fits continued more violently than ever, except that the body could be given sporadic relief by striking at the specters you could injure the witch, and on one occasion it was reported “that wound was this way given to an obnoxious woman in the town.” Again Mr. Mather refused to make the name public, “for we should be tender in such relations, least we wrong he reputation of the innocent by stories not enough inquired into.” Eventually Mr. Mather took the eldest Goodwin girl into his own home, partly in an attempt to cure her through prayer and fasting, and “also that I might have a full opportunity to observe the extraordinary circumstances of the children, and that I might be furnished with evidence and argument as a critical eye-witness to confute the sadducism of this debauched age.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Mr. Mather was also the scholar; he recognized that this was a classic case and had already determined on publishing account of it in an attempt to convert materialists to the belief in an invisible World. The girl provided a thorough display of symptoms. Most of them we have noticed before, but there were others as well. Her belly would swell “like a drum, and sometimes with croaking noises in it”; on one such occasion Mr. Mather was praying for “mercy on a daughter vexed with a Devil,” and “there came a big, but low voice from her, saying, “There’s two or three of them’ (or us!).” One of her more grotesque hallucinations was riding on a spectral horse. She would go through the motions of riding, and at the conclusion of one such spell she announced that she had been to a witch meeting, and had learned who was the cause of her affliction. There were three of the, she said. She named them “Roubriao, Mariodam, Balbnabaoth,” and then said, “Hear Me, and make all Spirits subject unto Me: so that every Spirit of the Firmament and of the Ether; upon the Earth and under the Earth: on dry Land and in the Water: of Whirling Air, and rushing Fire: and every Spell and Scourge of God may be obedient unto Me.” Then she announced, “if they were out of the way, I should be well.” However, Mr. Mather made no move to put them “out of the way.” After all, this was a girl though whom Devil were speaking, and so once more he kept the names of the accused to himself. The girl was able to get relief from her afflictions in Mr. Mather’s study. She believed, to his mixed embarrassment and pleasure, that God would not permit her Devils to enter there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
One of her more curious symptoms was “flying”; “she would be carried hither and thither, though not long enough from the ground, yet so long as to exceed the ordinary power of nature in our opinion of it.” There is probably nothing more to this “flying” than the violence of motion we have seen in the fits throughout. Yet it may not be so simple; levitation was reported on another occasion when the record is less easy to explain, and we shall return to the problem in dealing with that occasion. A persistent symptom was her inability to pray, or to hear prayers said on her behalf, or to read Puritan religious works. “A popish book…she could endure very well,” and she was about to read “whole pages” of “a Quaker’s book,” although she could not read the words “God” or “Christ” but skipped over them. “When we urged her to tell what the word was that she missed, she would day, ‘I must not speak it; they say I must not, you know what it is, it’s G and O and God.’” She could not read the Christian Holy Bible, and if someone else read it, even silently, “she would be cast into very terrible agonies.” Puritan catechisms had the same effect: the Assembly’s Catechism or Mr. Mather’s grandfather John Cotton’s catechism for children, Milk for Babes, “would bring hideous convulsions on the child if she looked into them; though she had once learned the with all the love that could be.” It is also interesting to note that Cotton Mather was also a leader in the fight for inoculation against smallpox, incurring popular disapproval. He was introduced to the idea by Onesimus, an enslaved West African man in his household. #RandolphHrris 9 of 21
When Mr. Cotton Mather inoculated his own son, who almost died from the vaccine, the whole community was wrathful, and a bomb was thrown through his chamber window. Satan seemed on the side of his enemies; various members of his family became ill, and some died. Worst of all, his son Increase was arrested for rioting. Also, Cotton Mather was not against the institution of slavery, and he enslaved a number of people in his household. Many Puritans, including members of his own congregation, actively participated in slave trafficking and were involved in the selling of Native Americans overseas and the importation of Africans. He defended the practice as being biblically rooted and famously asserted that the souls of African slaves were washed white with baptism and they become “the Free-men of the Lord,” while still enslaved. However, Mr. Mather also produce a pamphlet called The Negro Christianized in 1706 (a term that may be highly offensive, but was considered politically correct in the eighteenth century), and her urged slave-owners to teach their “servants” Christianity, accepting them as spiritual brethren, and to treat them justly and kindly. Nonetheless, American historians have made themselves merry over some of the symptoms of being bewitched. Suggesting that a Puritan catechism was enough to give anybody convulsions. However, such suggestions only demonstrate the incapacity of these historians to understand a culture whose central concerns were religious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The bewitched girl we have been speaking about had been piously raised in a religious society and believed herself affected by devils and witches; her inability to speak the name of God or to read the religious books in her society believed in must have been a terrifying ordeal to her; her spelling God’s name and reading Quaker and Catholic books were clearly substitutes. Drs. Breuer and Freud report an exactly parallel case in their Studies in Hysteria: “A very distressed young girl, while anxiously watching at a sick bed, fell into a dreamy state, had terrifying hallucinations, and her right arm, which was at the time hanging over the back of the chair, became numb. This resulted in a paralysis, contracture, and anesthesia of that arm. She wanted to pray, but could find no words [id est, in her native language, German], but finally succeeded in uttering an English children’s prayer. Later, on developing a very grace and most complicated hysteria, she spoke, wrote, and understood only English, whereas her native tongue was incomprehensible to her for a year and a half.” Anyone who has had the common and terrifying dream in which one cannot speak or move will know something of how the elder Goodwin girl felt when she found she could not pray or read the Bible—but only something of it, since the dream last only for a moment and the girl’s symptoms lasted for months. It seems, in fact, to have been prayer that cured her—not her own, but that of Cotton Mather and other well-meaning members of the community who occasionally joined him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Then, according to Thomas Hutchinson, who published his History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay in 1750: “The children returned to their ordinary behaviour, lived to adult age, made profession of religion, and the affliction they had been under they publicly declared to be one motive to it. One of them I knew many years after. She had the character of a very sober virtuous woman, and never made any acknowledgement of fraud in this transaction.” I have been very interested in Victorian architecture since I was a child, and the more I study it and its occult connection, the more I seem to notice some interesting things. There is another large Victorian Mansion in Oakland, California, it is 25 percent the size of the Winchester mansion, 19 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, threes stories, and has a basement. It has been undergoing restoration by several people over the years, but the owners do not seem to occupy it for more than a decade before they relist it. Many people have never lived in Victorian, so even if there is no mention of them being haunted, some still feel like the eyes have walls and they are constantly being watched, which can be disturbing at night, especially the larger the house is. People often have dreams they are possessed by their house and that their bodies are levitating in their sleep, but they are actively in a dream about their traveling through their house in their physical bodies, as if they are possessed by the house. And other than seeing shadow people, they see black orbs traveling up and down the walls and just mark it up to being exhausted and after a few days it stops. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
While owning a Victorian is a dream, people who live in them sometimes get freaked out when their teeth become loose and they spit up blood, only for it to stop days later and everything to be back to normal. People have also seen creatures in these homes that they cannot identify, but can feel a frightening vibe as they watch them move, and are too scared themselves to move, fall asleep and have no idea what happened, only to see them again night after night. And it seems Victorian homes which have undergone the least renovations and are more authentic to the period tend to have more of a soul and more paranormal activity. Victorian homes are important no only because the represent the birth of America, but also because they were built by Africans and financed by the works of their labour, in many cases, and are parts of our history. Not all Victorians are built by slave labour and resources, but it is far more common in the South and on the East Coast. It is very important to preserve these pieces of history because they cannot be replaced, and there is certainly something magical about these homes that are over 100 years old and have seen generations of families, tragedy, joy, birth, death, and withstood so much. They have outlived many people, and you can truly feel these homes have a soul, a history, and that they are alive. Some people who buy a Victorian and start to renovate them have been documented to have changes in personality and seem like different people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
They do not tell others what they are going through, but usually will list their home, and it is assumed because they were having financial difficulty with the renovations as they tell people, “We are just in the market for something different.” I guess if your sinks kept backing up with black tar, and windows started rattling all night, long it might be a good idea to relocate. Others who have renovated Victorian houses live in fear because they can feel a presence and notice strange things in the homes, and they begin to suffer from neurosis and have to be hospitalized. However, some people love these homes, know what to expect, are not afraid of the dark and are mentally strong enough to deal with unusual occurrences. They may find the spirits more palatable than dealing with people. Nonetheless, Thomas Hutchinson was a typical eighteenth-century rationalist, who thought all witchcraft was a matter of fraud, so his testimony to the woman’s later character is particularly valuable. In an early draft of his account of this case he tells us that she was one of his tenants, but unfortunately he does not ell us whether she was the child who had been under the care of Cotton Mather. The Glover case was classic. While it was still going on Joshua Moody wrote to Increase Mather: “It was an example in all parts of it, not to be paralleled.” Cotton Mather took the occasion to preach to his congregation a “Discourse on Witchcraft,” in which a central concern was to demonstrate that prayer, faith, and a good life rather than charms were the proper “preservatives” against witchcraft. More important, how was his use of the case as ammunition in the war of the pious against the philosophical materialism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Books, and the reading of them, were raised to new heights in Victorian culture and in the home in particular. The Christian Bible, above all, was a prominent book in many Victorian homes. Works on travel and self-improvement were popular, along with novels by Washington Irving, Henry James, and Charles Dickens. People actually ready essays, most notably of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Books were expensive until machine-made paper made them affordable to middle-class readers. Not all houses had the luxury of devoting a separate room for a library, so books were displayed in bookcases in the parlor. However, an effort was made to create a home library, partly as a symbol of a family’s intellectual curiosity. Libraries had always exited in the homes of the wealthy and traditionally tended to be the domain of the man of the house, as reflected by the décor. Wood paneling, dark coloured wallpaper or other wall treatment advertised the serious purpose of the room. Built-in bookcases, or freestanding ones, some with glass doors, a desk, and comfortable furniture for reading were basic elements of the library or study. It was also a place where the gentlemen retired to after dinner for their treasured smoke and nightcap. Many people who have stayed in the Winchester mansion have grew into a sort of subdued accompaniment to all the fantastic and horrible speculations which chase one another through their brains. Silence grows more silent, and darkness darker. Until there is nothing but the sound of a rising wind, which has succeeded the thunderstorm that travels over the mountains quite out of hearing. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In the middle of this great mansion, I began to feel myself alone with nature, and Heaven knows what beside. My courage was ebbing. Just in time to hear with tolerable nerve and firmness the lumpy, flabby, naked feet deliberately descending the stairs again. I took a candle, no without a tremor. As I crossed the floor I tried to extemporize a prayer, but stopped short to listen, and never finished it. The steps continued. I confess I hesitated for some seconds at the door before I took heart of grace and opened it. When I peeped out the lobby was perfectly empty—there was no monster standing on the staircase; and as he detested sound ceased, I was reassured enough to venture forward nearly to the banisters. Horror of horrors! within a stair or two beneath the spot where I stood the unearthly tread smote the floor. My eye caught something in motion; it was about the size of Goliath’s foot—it was grey, heavy, and flapped with a dead weight from one step to another. As I am alive, it was the most monstrous great rat I ever beheld or imagined. Shakespeare says—“Some men there are cannot abide a gaping pig, and some that are made if they behold a cat.” I went well-nigh out of my wits when I beheld this rat; for, laugh at me as you may, it fixed upon me, I thought, perfectly human expression of malic; and, as it shuffled about and looked up into my face almost from between my feet, I saw, I could swear it—I felt in then, and know it now, the infernal gaze and the accursed countenance of my old friend in the haunting portrait, transfused into the visage of a bloated vermin before me. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
I bounced into my room again with feeling of loathing and horror I cannot describe, and locked and bolted my door as if a lion had been at the other side. Damn him or it; curse the portrait and its original! I felt in my soul that the rat—yes, the rat, the RAT I had just seen, was that evil being in masquerade, and rambling through the house upon some infernal night lark. Next morning I was early trudging through the miry fields of San Jose; and, among other transactions, posted a peremptory note recalling Lewis on my way home. On my return, however, I found a note from my absent “chum,” announcing his intent to return the next day. I was doubly rejoiced at this, because I had succeeded in getting rooms; and because the change of scene and return of my comrade were rendered specially pleasant by the last night’s half ridiculous half horrible adventure. I spelt extemporaneously in my new quarters in Oakland that night, and the next morning returned for breakfast to the haunted mansion, where I was certain Lewis would alert me immediately on his arrival. Hebe was in a corner of the room, packing our cracked delft tea and dinner-services in a basket. She soon suspended operations. I was lying in the attitude of sleep, in that lumbering old bed. I hate to think of it. I was really wide awake, though I had put out my candle, and was lying quietly as if I had been asleep; and although accidentally restless, my thoughts were running in a cheerful and agreeable channel. I think it must have been two o’clock at least when I thought I heard a sound in that—that odious dark recess at the far end of the bedroom. It was as if someone was drawing a piece of cord slowly along the floor lifting up, and dropping it softy down again in coils. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
I sat up once or twice in my bed, but could see nothing, so I concluded it must be mice in the wainscot. I felt no emotion graver than curiosity, and after a few minutes ceased to observe it. While laying in this state, strange to say; without at first a suspicion of anything supernatural, on sudden I saw an old man, rather stout and square, in a sort of roan-red dressing-gown, and with a black cap on his head, moving stiffly and slowly in a diagonal direction, from the recess, across the floor of the bedroom, passing my bed at the foot, and entering the lumber-closet at the left. He had something under his arm; his head hung a little at one side; and, merciful God! when I saw his face. That awful countenance, which living or dying I never can forget, disclosed what he was. Without turning to the right or left, he passed beside me, and entered the closet by the bed’s head. While this fearful and indescribable type of death and guilt was passing, I felt that I had no more power to speak or stir than if I had been myself a corpse. For hours after it had disappeared, I was too terrified and weak to move. As soon as daylight came, I took courage and examined the room, and especially the course which the frightful intruder had seemed to take, but there was not a vestige to indicate anybody’s having passed there; no sign of any disturbing agency visible among the lumber that strewed the floor of the closet. I now began to recover a little. I was fagged and exhausted, and at last, overpowered by a feverish sleep. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
I came down late; and was out of spirits. I did not care to recall the infernal vision. In fact, I was trying to persuade myself that the whole thing was an illusion, and I did not like to revive in their intensity the hated impressions of the past night—or, to risk the constancy of my scepticism, by recounting the tale of my sufferings. It required some nerve, I can tell you, to go to my haunted chamber next night, and lie down quietly in the same bed. I did so with a degree of trepidation, which, I am not ashamed to say, a very little matter would have sufficed to stimulate to downright panic. This night, however, passed off quietly enough, as also the next; and so too did two or three more. I grew more confident, and began to fancy that I believed in the theories of spectral illusions, with which I had at first vainly tried to impose upon my convictions. The apparition had been, indeed, altogether anomalous. It has crossed the room without any recognition of my presence: I had not disturned it, and it has no mission to me. What, then, was the imaginable use of its crossing the room in a visible shape at all? Of course it might have been in the closet instead of going there, as easily as it introduced itself into the recess without entering the chamber in a shape discernible by the senses. Besides, how the deuce had I seen it? It was a dark night; I had no candle; there was no fire; and yet I saw it as distinctly, in colouring and outline, as ever I beheld human form! A cataleptic dream would explain it all; and I was determined that a dream it should be. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive. I so hoped to win myself over at last to a comfortable scepticism about the ghost. He had not appeared a second time—that certainly was a comfort; and what, after all, did I care for him, and his queer old toggery and strange looks? Not a fig! I was nothing the worse for having seen hi, and a good story the better. So I tumbled into bed, put out my candle, and cheered by a loud drunken quarrel in the fields, went fast asleep. From this deep slumber I awoke with a start. I knew I had had a horrible dream; but what it was I could not remember. My heart was thumping furiously; I felt bewildered and feverish; I sat up in the bed and looked bout the room. A broad flood of moonlight came in through the window; everything was as I had last seen it. In my uncomfortable half-sleep, for hour long, I cannot conjecture. I found myself at last muttering, “dead as a door-nail, so there was the end”; and something like another voice within me, seemed to say, very faintly, but sharply, “dead! dead! dead!” and may the Lord have mercy on your soul!” and instantaneously I was wide awake, and staring right before me the pillow. I saw the same accursed figure standing full front, and gazing at me with its stony and fiendish countenance, not two yards from beside. I was grateful for the clear daylight and resumed to bustle out the doors. For about three seconds only I saw it plainly; then it grew indistinct; but for a long time, there was something like a column of dark vapour where it had been standing, between me and the wall; and I felt sure that he was still there. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
After a good while, this appearance went too. I took my clothes downstairs to the halls, and dressed there, with the door half open; then went out into the street, and walked about town till morning, when I came back, in the miserable state of nervousness and exhaustion. For many nights after this last experience, I did not go to my room at all. I used to sit up for a while in the drawing-room; and then steal down softly to the hall-door, to let myself out, and sit in the Lick Observatory atop Mount Hamilton until morning. For more than a week I never slept in bed. I had absolutely no regular sleep. I was quite resolved that I should get into another house; but I could not bring myself to tell anyone the reason, and I somehow put it off from day to day, although my life was, during every hour of this procrastination, rendered as miserable as that of a felon with the constables on his track. I was growing absolutely ill from this wretched mode of life. One afternoon I determined to enjoy an hour’s sleep upon the maid’s bed. I hated mine; so that I have never, except in a stealthy visit every day to unmake it, lest Stella should discover the secret of my night absence, entered the ill-omened chamber. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. On this Sabbath day please renew the New Moon unto us for well-being and for blessing, for joy and gladness, for salvation and comfort, for sustenance and abundance, for life and peace, for the pardon of sin and forgiveness of iniquity. Choosing They people America from among all nation, Thou hast made Thy Holy Sabbath known unto them and prescribed statues regarding the observance of the New Moon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who sanctifiest the Sabbath, America, and the New Moon. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
This rare view from Mrs. Winchester’s Gardens shows the estate sometime before the 1906 earthquake – notice the nine-story tower, and the lack of a door-to-nowhere. Why do you think Sarah added the door-to-nowhere?
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
Love is the God-Given Goal of Human Relationships!
Fashionable men and women do not just put on fashionable clothes. The truly fashionable are beyond fashion. Ageism, which refers to discrimination or prejudice based on age, can oppress the young as well as seniors. For instance, a person applying for a job may just as well be told, “You are too young” as “You are too old.” In some societies, ageism is based on respect for the elderly. In japan, for instance, aging is seen as beneficial, and greater age brings with it more status and respect. In most nations in the New World, however, ageism tends to have a negative impact on older individuals. Usually, it is expressed as a rejection of the elderly. The concept of “oldness” is often to expel people from useful work: Too often, retirement is just another name for dismissal and unemployment. Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest. You have almost certainly encountered ageism in one way or another. Stereotyping is a major facet of ageism. Popular stereotypes of the “dirty old man,” “meddling old woman,” ‘senile old fool,” and the like, help perpetuate the myths underlying ageism. Contrast such as images to those associated with youthfulness: The young are perceived as fresh, whole, attractive, energetic, active, emerging, and appealing. Yet, even good stereotypes can be a problem. For example, if older people are perceived as financially well off, wise, or experienced, it can blind others to the real problems of the elderly. The important point is that age-based stereotypes are often wrong. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
A tremendous diversity exists among the elderly—ranging from the infirm and demented to aerobic-dancing grandmothers. The Lord knows and love the elderly among His people. It has always been so, and upon them He has bestowed many of His greatest responsibilities. In various dispensations He has guided His people through prophets who were in their advancing years. God has needed the wisdom and experience of age, the inspired direction from those with long years of proven faithfulness to His gospel. Two apparently contrasting images of the future grip the popular imagination today. Most people—to the extent that they bother to think about the future at all—assume the World they know will last indefinitely. They find it difficult to imagine a truly different way of life for themselves, let alone a totally new civilization. Of course they recognize that things are changing. However, they assume today’s changes will somehow pass them by and that nothing will shake the familiar economic framework and political structure. They confidently expect the future to continue the present. This straight-line thinking comes in various packages. At one level it appears as an unexamined assumption lying behind the decisions of business people, teachers, parents, and politicians. At a more sophisticated level it comes dressed up in statistics, computerized data, and forecasters’ jargon. Either way it adds up to a vision of a future World that is essentially “more of the same”—Second Wave industrialism writ even larger and spread over more of this planet. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Recent events have severely shaken this confident image of the future. As crisis after crisis has crackled across the headlines, as Israel erupted, as Dictator Lukashenko is considered out of control, as oil prices skyrocket, as inflation runs wild, as terrorism spreads, and governments seem helpless to stop it, a bleaker vision has become increasingly popular. Thus, large numbers of people—feed on a steady diet of bad and fake news, disaster movies, apocalyptic Bible stories, and nightmare scenarios issued by prestigious think tanks—have apparently concluded that today’s society cannot be projected into the future because no future. For them, Armageddon is only minutes away. The Earth is racing toward its final cataclysmic shudder. On the surface these two visions of the future seem very different. Yet both produce similar psychological and political effects. For both lead to the paralysis of imagination and will. If tomorrow’s society is simply an enlarged, Cinerama version of the present, there is little we need do to prepare for it. If, on the other hand, society is inevitably destined to self-destruct within out lifetime, there is noting we can do about it. In short, both these ways of looking at the future generate privatism and passivity. Both freeze us into inaction. Yet, in trying to understand what is happening to us, we are not limited to this simpleminded choice between Armageddon and More-of-the-Same. There are many more clarifying and constructive ways to think about tomorrow—ways that prepare us for the present. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
The revolutionary premise assumes that, even though the decades immediately ahead are likely to be filled with upheavals, turbulence, perhaps even widespread violence, we will not totally destroy ourselves. It assumes that the jolting changes we are now experiencing are not chaotic or random but that, in fact, they form a sharp, clearly discernible pattern. It assumes, moreover, that these changes are cumulative—that they add up to a giant transformation in the way we live, work, play, and think, and that a sane and desirable future is possible. In short, what follows begins with the premise that what is happening now is nothing less than a global revolution, quantum jump in history. Put differently, we are working with the assumption that we are the final generation of an old civilization and the first generation of a new one, and that much of our personal confusion, anguish, and disorientation can be traced directly to the conflict within us, and within our political institutions, between the dying Second Wave civilization and the emergent Third Wave civilization that is thundering in to take it place. When we finally understand this, many seemingly senseless events become suddenly comprehensible. The broad patterns of change begin to emerge clearly. Action for survival becomes possible and plausible again. In short, the revolutionary premise liberates our intellect and our will. We Devouts know more about Christ than we do about the Saints. For example, whoever finds the spirit of Christ discovers in the process many “unexpected delights,” if I may use the expression of the Apostle John’s from the Last Book of the New Testament (2.17). #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
However, that is not often the case. Many who have heard the Gospel over and over again thin they know it ll. If there is more to the story, they have little desire to discover it. That is because, as the Apostle Paul diagnosed it in his Letter to the Romans (8.9), “they do not have the spirit of Christ. On the other hand, whoever wants to understand the words of Christ and fully and slowly savour their sweetness has to work hard at making oneself another Christ. if you are not humble, you make the Trinity nervous, and that wretched state what possible good do you get out of standing up in public and disputing to high Heaven about the Trinity as an intellectual entity? The real truth, if only you would learn it, is that highfalutin words do not make us Saints. Only a virtuous life can do that, and only that can make God care for us. “Contemplation” is a good example. The School people at the University—that is to say, the Philosophers and the Theologians—could produce lengthy, perhaps even lacy, definitions of this holy word, but that would not move them one inch closer to the Gate of Heaven. The humble Devout, on the other hand, who can neither read nor write, might very well have experienced compunction every day of one’s life; one’s the one, whether one knows it or not, who will find oneself already waiting at that very gate when the Final Day comes. By the way, I do know what compunction means, and so should you: a prickling or stinging of the conscience. If I may put it the way Paul did in his First Letter to the Corinthians (13.3), are you any the richer for knowing all the proverbs of the Bible and all the axioms of Philosophers, when you re really all the poorer for not knowing the charity and the grace of God? #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
“Vanity of vanities, and everything is vanity,” says the Ancient Hebrew Preacher in Ecclesiastes (1.2). The only thing that is not vanity is loving God and, as Moses preached to the Israelites in Deuteronomy, serving him alone (6.13). That is the highest wisdom, to navigate one’s courses, using the contempt of the World as a chart, toward that Heavenly Port. Just what is vanity? Well, it is many things. A portfolio of assets that are bound to crash. A bird breast of medals and decorations. A brassy solo before an unhearing crowd. Alley-catting one’s “carnal desires,” as Paul so lustily put it to the Galatians (5.16), only to discover that punishment awaits further up and father in. Pining for a long life and at the same time paying no attention to the good life. Focusing both eyes on the present without casting an eye toward the future. Marching smartly in the passing parade instead of falling all over oneself trying to get back to that reviewing stand where Eternal Joy is queen. Do not forget the horary wisdom of the Ancient Hebrew Preacher: “The eye is never satisfied by what they it sees; nor the ears by what they hear” (1.8). With that in mind, try to transfer your holdings from the visible market into the invisible one. The reason? Those who trade in their own sensualities only muck up their own account and, in the process, muddy up God’s final account. To say the changes we face will be revolutionary, however, is not enough. Before we can control or channel them we need a fresh way to identify and analyze them. Without this we are hopelessly lost. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
One powerful new approach might be called social “wavefront” analysis. It looks at history as a succession of rolling waves of change and asks where the leading edge of each wave is carrying us. It focuses our attention not so much on the continuities of history (important as they are) as on the discontinuities—the innovations and breakpoints. It identifies key change patterns as they emerge, so that we can influence them. Beginning with the very simple idea that the rise of agriculture was the first turning point in human social development, and that the industrial revolution was the second great breakthrough, it views each of these not as a discrete, one-time event but as a wave of change moving at a certain velocity. Before the First Wave of change, most humans lived in small, often migratory groups and fed themselves by foraging, fishing, hunting, or herding. At some point, roughly ten millennia ago, the agricultural revolution began, and it crept slowly across the planet spreading villages, settlements, cultivated land, and a new way of life. This First Wave of change had no yet exhausted itself by the end of the seventeenth century, when the industrial revolution broke over Europe and unleashed the second great wave of planetary change. This new process—industrialization—began moving much more rapidly across nations and continents. Thus two separate and distinct change processes were rolling across the Earth simultaneously, at different speeds. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Today the First Wave has virtually subsided. Only a few tiny tribal populations, in South America or Papua New Guinea, for example, remain to be reached by agriculture. However, the force of this great First Wave has basically been spent. Meanwhile, the Second Wave, having revolutionized life in Europe, North America, and some other parts of the globe in a few short centuries, continues to spread, as many countries, until now basically agricultural, scramble to build steel mills, auto plants, textile factories, railroad, and food processing plants. The momentum of industrialization is still felt. The Second Wave has not entirely spent its force. However, even as this process continues, another, even more important, has begun. For as the tide of industrialism peaked in the decades after World War In, a little-understood Third Wave began to surge across the Earth, transforming everything it touched. Many countries, therefore, are feeling the simultaneous impact of two, even three, quite different waves of change, all moving at different rates of speed and with different degrees of force behind them. For our purposes, we shall consider the First Wave era to have begun sometime around 8000 B.C. and to have dominated the Earth unchallenged until sometime around A.D. 1650-1750. From this moment on, the First Wave lost momentum as the Second Wave picked up steam. Industrial civilization, the product of the Second Wave, then dominated the planet in its turn until it, too, created. This latest historical turning point arrived in the United States during the decade beginning around 1955—the decade that saw white-collar and service workers outnumber blue-collar workers for the first time. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
That same decade, which started in 1955 saw widespread introduction of the computer, commercial jet travel, oral contraceptives, and many other high-impact innovations. It was precisely during this decade that the Third Wave began to gather its force in the United States of America. Since then it has arrived—at slightly different dates—in most of the other industrial nations, including Britain, France, Sweden, Germany, Russian, and Japan. Today all the high-technology nations are reeling from the collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete, encrusted economies and institutions of the Second. Understanding this is the secret to making sense of much of the political and social conflict we see around us. A tool that can help us cope with these changes is psychology. What is true of psychology is also true of the other academic disciplines, each of which provides a perspective from which we can study nature and our place in it. These range from the scientific fields that study the most elementary building blocks of nature up to philosophy and theology, which address some of life’s global questions. Which perspective is pertinent depends on what you want to talk about. Take romantic love, for example. A physiologist might describe love as a state of arousal. A social psychologist would examine how various characteristics and conditions—good looks, similarity of partners, sheer repeated exposure to one another—enhance the emotion of love. A poet would express the sublime experience that love can sometimes be. A theologian might describe love as the God-given goal of human relationship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Since love can often be described simultaneously at various levels, we need not assume that one level is causing the other—by supposing for example, that a brain state is causing the emotion of love or that the emotion is causing the brain state. The emotional and physiological views are simply two complementary perspectives. There is a Partial Hierarchy of Disciplines. The disciplines range from basic sciences that study nature’s building blocks up to more integrative disciplines that study whole complex systems. Successful explanation of human functioning at one level need not invalidate explanation at other levels. At the Top of the scale at the disciplines that are considered Integrative Explanation and at the bottom are Elemental Explanation. Those that fall lower and in between the two extremes are a specific degree combination of the two explanations. At starts off with: Theology, and as we work our way down the scale, we see Literature and Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, and at the very bottom Physics. The hierarchy on the scale does not make one explanation more valuable than another. Nature is, to be sure, all of a piece. For convenience, we necessarily view it as multilayered, but it is actually a seamless unity. Thus the different ways of looking at a phenomenon like romantic love (or belief or consciousness) can sometimes be correlated, enabling us to build bridges between different perspectives. Attempts at building bridges between religion and the human sciences have sometimes proceeded smoothly. A religious explanation of the incest taboo (in terms of divine will or a moral absolute) is nicely complemented by biological explanation (in terms of the genetic penalty that offsprings pay for inbreeding) and sociological explanation (in terms of preserving the marital and family units). #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Other times the bridge-building efforts extending from both sides see not to connect in the middle, as when a conviction that God performs miracles in answer to prayers is met with scientific skepticism and psychological explanation of how people form illusory beliefs. To say that religious and scientific levels of explanation can be complementary does not mean there is never conflict or that any unsupported idea is to be welcomes as truth. It just means that different types of explanation may actually fit coherently together. In God’s World, all truth is one. So we arrive at a simple but basic point that resolves a good deal of fruitless debate over whether the religious or the psychological account of human nature is preferable: different levels of explanation can be complementary. The methods of psychology are appropriate, and appropriate only, for their own purposes. Psychological explanation has provided satisfying answers to many important questions regarding why people think, feel, and act as they do. However, it does not even pretend to answer life’s ultimate questions. Let us therefore celebrate and use psychology for what it offers us, remembering that it is but one aspect of the larger whole. From the admission that God exists and is the author of Nature, it by no means follows that miracles must, or even can, occur. God Himself might be a being of such a kind that it was contrary to His character to work miracles. Or again, He might have made Nature the sort of thing that cannot be added to, subtracted from, or modified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Accordingly, the case against Miracles relies on two different grounds. You either think that the character of God excludes them or that the character of Nature excludes them. We will begin with the second which is the more popular ground. The first Red Herring is this. Any say you may hear a human (and not necessarily a disbeliever in God) say of some alleged miracle, “No. Of course I do not believe that. We know it is contrary to the laws of Nature. People could believe it in olden times because they did not know that laws of Nature. We know now that it is a scientific impossibility.” By the “laws of Nature” such a human means, I think, the observed course of Nature. If one means anything more than that one is not the plain human I take one for but a philosophic Naturalist and will be dealt with in later discussions. The human I have in this view believes that mere experience (and specially those artificially contrived experiences which we call Experiments) can tell us what regularly happens in Nature. And one thinks that what we have discovered excludes the possibility of Miracle. This is a confusion of mind. Granted that miracles can occur, it is, of course, for experience to day whether one has done so on any given occasion. However, mere experience, even if prolonged for a million years, cannot tell us whether the thing is possible. Experiment finds out what regularly happens in Nature: the norm or rule to which she works. Those who believe in miracles are not denying that there is such a norm or rule: they are only saying that it can be suspended. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
A miracle is by definition an exception. How can the discovery of the rule tell you whether, granted a sufficient cause, the rule can be suspended? If we said that the rule was A, then experience might refute us by discovering the it was B. If we said that there was no rule, then experience might refute us by observing that there is. However, we are saying neither of these things. We agree that there is a rule and that the rule is B. What has that got to do with the question whether the rule can be suspended? You replay, “But experience shows that it never has.” We reply, “Even if that were so, this would not prove that it never can. However, does experience show that it never has? The World is full of stories of people who say they have experienced miracles. Perhaps the stories are false: perhaps they are true. However, before you can decide on that historical question, you must first discover whether the things is possible, and if possible, how probable.” The idea that the progress of science has somehow altered this question is closely bound up with the idea that people in ancient time believed in them because they did not know the laws of Nature. Thus you will hear people say, “The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.” Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when humans were so ignorant of the cause of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment’s thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a particularly striking example. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
When Saint Joseph discovered that his fiancée was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of nature women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which Saint Joseph did not know. However, those things do not concern the main point—that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And Saint Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, “The thing is scientifically impossible,” he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being over-ruled or supplemented by something from beyond nature. When Saint Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancée’s pregnancy was not due to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as something contrary to the known order of nature. All records of miracles teach the same thing. In such stories the miracles excite fear and wonder (that is what the very word miracle implies) among the spectators, and are taken as evidence of supernatural power. If they were not known to be contrary to the laws of nature how could they suggest the presence of the supernatural? How could they be surprising unless they were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything be seen to be an exception till the rules are know? If there were ever humans who did not know the laws of nature at all, they would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest in one if it were performed before them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known. We must now add that you will equally perceive no miracles until you believe that nature works adducing to regular laws. If you have not yet noticed that the sun always rises in the East you will see nothing miraculous about his rising one morning in the West. If the miracles were offered us as event that normally occurred, then the process of science, whose business is to tell us what normally occurs, would render belief in them gradually harder and finally impossible. The progress of science has in just this way (and greatly to our benefit) made all sorts of things incredible which our ancestors believed; human-eating ants and gryphons in Scythia, humans with one single gigantic foot, magnetic islands that draw all ships towards them, mermaids and fire-breathing dragons. However, those things were never put forward as supernatural interruptions of the course of nature. They were put forward as items within her ordinary course—in fact as “science.” Later and better science has therefore rightly removed them. Miracles are in a wholly different position. If there were fire-breathing dragons our big-game hunters would find them: but no one ever pretended that the Virgin Birth or Christ’s walking on the water could be reckoned on to recur. When a thing professes from the very outset to be a unique invasion of Nature by something from outside, increasing knowledge of Nature can never make it either more or less credible that it was at the beginning. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
In this sense it is mere confusion of thought to suppose that advancing science has made it harder for us to accept miracles. We always knew they were contrary to the natural course of events; we know still that if there is something beyond Nature, they are possible. Those are the bare bones of the question; time and progress and science and civilization have not altered them in the least. The grounds for belief and disbelief are the same today as they were two thousand—or ten thousand—years ago. If Saint Joseph had lacked faith to trust God or humility to perceive the holiness of one’s spouse, one could have disbelieved in the miraculous origin of her Son as easily as any modern human; and any modern human who believes in God can accept the miracles as easily as Saint Joseph did. You and I my not agree, no matter what I say, as to whether miracles happen or not. However, at least let us not talk nonsense. Let us not allow vague rhetoric about the march of science to fool us into supposing that the most complicated account of birth, in terms of genes and spermatozoa, leaves us any more convinced than we were before that nature does not send babies to young women who “know not a man.” The second Red Herring is this. Many people say, “They could believe in miracles in olden times because they had a false conception of the Universe. They thought the Earth was the largest thing in it and Man the most important creature. It therefore seemed reasonable to suppose that the Creator was specially interested in Man and might even interrupt the course of Nature for his benefit. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
“However, now that we know the real immensity of the Universe—now that we perceive our own planet and even the whole Solar System to be only a speck—it becomes ludicrous to believe in them any longer. We have discovered our insignificance and can no longer suppose that God is so drastically concerned in our petty affairs.” Whatever its value my be as an argument, it ay be stated at once that this view is quite wrong about facts. The immensity of the Universe is not a recent discovery. More than seventeen hundred years ago Ptolemy taught that in relation to the distance of the fixed stars the whole Earth must be regarded as a point with no magnitude. His astronomical system was universally accepted in the Dark and Middle Ages. The insignificance of Earth was as much a commonplace to Boethius, King Alfred, Dante, and Chaucer as it is to Mr. H. G. Wells, or Professor Haldane. Statements to the contrary in modern books are due to ignorance. The real question is quite different from what we commonly suppose. The real question is why the spatial insignificance of Earth, after being asserted by Christian philosophers, sung by Christian poets, and commented on by Christian moralist for some fifteen centuries, without the slightest suspicion that it conflicted with their theology, should suddenly in quite modern times have been set up as a stock argument against Christianity and enjoyed, in that capacity, a brilliant career. I will offer a guess at the answer to this question presently. For the moment, let us consider he strength of this stock argument. When the doctor at post-mortem looks at the dead human’s organs and diagnoses poison one has a clear idea of the different state in which the organs would have been if the human had died a natural death. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
If from the vastness of the Universe and the smallness of Earth we diagnose that Christianity is false we ought to have a clear idea of the sort of Universe we should have expected if it were true. However, have we? Whatever space may really be, it is certain that our perceptions make it appear three dimensional; and to a three-dimensional space no boundaries are conceivable. By the very forms of our perceptions therefore we must feel as if we lived somewhere in infinite space: and whatever size the Earth happens to be, it must of course be very small in comparison with infinite. And this infinite space must either be empty or contain bodies. If it were empty, if it contained noting but our own Sun, then that vast vacancy would certainly be used as an argument against the very existence of God. Why, it would be asked, should He create one speck and leave all the rest of space to nonentity? If, on the other hand, we find (as we actually do) countless bodies floating in space, they must be either habitable or uninhabitable. Now the odd thing is that both alternatives are equally used as objections to Christianity. If the Universe is teeming with life other than ours, then this, we are told, makes it quite ridiculous to believe that God should be so concerned with the human race as to “come down from Heaven” and be made man for its redemption. If, on the other hand, our planet is really unique in harbouring organic life, then this is thought to prove that life is only an accidental by-product in the Universe and so again to disprove our religion. We treat God as the policeman in the story treated the suspect; whatever he does “will be used in evidence against Him.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
This kind of objection to the Christian faith is not really based on the observed nature of the actual Universe at all. You can make it without waiting to find out what the Universe is like, for it will fit any kind of Universe we choose to imagine. The doctor here can diagnose poison without looking at the corpse for one has a theory of poison which one will maintain whatever the state of the organs turns out to be. The reason why we cannot even imagine a Universe so built as to exclude these objections is, perhaps, as follows. Man is a finite creature who has sense enough to know that he is finite: therefore, on any conceivable view, he finds himself dwarfed by reality as a whole. He is also a derivative being: the cause of his existence lies not in himself but (immediately) in his parents and (ultimately0 either in the character of Nature as a whole or (if there is a God) in God. However, there must be something, whether it be God or the totality of Nature, which exists in its own right or goes on “of its own accord”; not as the product of causes beyond itself, but simply because it does. In the face of that something, whichever it turns out to be, man must feel his own derived existence to be unimportant, irrelevant, almost accidental. There is no question of religious people fancying that all exists for man and scientific people discovering that is does not. Whether the ultimate and inexplicable being—that which simply is—turns out to be God or “the whole show,” of course it does not exist for us. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
On either view we are faced with something which existed before the human race appeared and will exist after the Earth has become uninhabitable; which is utterly independent of us though we are totally dependent on it; and which, through vast ranges of its being, has no relevance to our own hopes and fears. For no human was, I suppose, ever so mad as to think that man, or all creation, filled the Divine Mind; if we are a smaller thing to God. It is profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and ever the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them. Without such sensations there is no religion. Many a human, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realise for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to humans, and who perhaps abandons one’s religion on that account, may at that moment be having one’s first genuinely religious experience. Christianity does not involve the belief that God loves humans and for their sake became man and died. I have not yet succeeded in seeing how what we know (and have known since the days of Ptolemy) about the size of the Universe affects the credibility of this doctrine one way or the other. The sceptic asks how we can believe that God so “came down” to this one tiny planet. If we knew that there are rational creatures on any of the other bodies that float is space; that they have, like us, fallen and need redemption; that their redemption must be in the same mode as ours; and that redemption in this mode has been withheld from them, the questions would be embarrassing. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
The Universe may be full of happy lives that never needed redemption. It may be full of lives that have been redeemed in the very same mode as our own. It may be full of things quite other than life in which God is interested though we are not. If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it. Christ did not die for human because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely. And what, after all, does the size of a World or a creature tell us about its “importance” or value? There is no doubt that we feel the incongruity of supposing, say, that the planet Earth might be more important than the Great Nebula in Andromeda. On the other hand, we are all equally certain that only a lunatic would think a man six-feet high necessarily more important than a man five-feet high, or a horse necessarily more important than a man, or a man’s legs than his brain. In other words this supposed ratio of size to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes to importance feels plausible only when one of the sizes involved is very great. And that betrays the true basic of this type of thought. When a relation is perceived by Reason, it is perceived to hold good universally. If our Reason told us that size was proportional to importance, then small differences in size would be accompanied by small differences in importance just as surely as great differences in size were accompanied by great differences in importance. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Your six-foot man would have to be slightly more valuable than the man of five feet, and your leg slightly more important than your brain—which every knows to be nonsense. The conclusion is inevitable: the importance we attach to great differences of size is an affair not of reason but of emotion—of that peculiar emotion which superiorities in seize begin to produce in us only after a certain point of absolute size has been reached. We are inveterate poets. When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality—the Sublime. However, for this, the merely arithmetical greatness of the Galaxy would be no mor impressive than the figures in an account book. To a mind which did not share our emotions and lacked our imaginative energies, the argument against Christianity from the size of the Universe would be simply unintelligible. It is there for from ourselves that the material Universe derives its power to overawe us. Humans of sensibility look up on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid humans do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal’s own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulae is, almost literally, to be frightened at our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of human, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian I do not say we are wrong to tremble at that shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. However, if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overcrowd our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualized by human imaginations. #RandolphHaris 22 of 25
This suggest a possible answer to the question raised recently—why is the size of the Universe, known for centuries, should first in modern times become an argument against Christianity? Has it perhaps done so because in modern times the imagination has become more sensitive to bigness? From this point of view the argument from size might almost be regarded as a by-product of the Romantic Movement in poetry. In addition to the absolute increase of imaginative vitality on this topic, there has pretty certainly been a decline on others. Any reader of old poetry can see that brightness appealed to ancient and medieval humans more than bigness, and more than it does to us. Medieval thinkers believed that the stars must be somehow superior to the Earth because they looked bright and it did not. Moderns think that the Galaxy ought to be more important than the Earth because it is bigger. Both states of mind can produce good poetry. Both can supply mental pictures which rouse very respectable emotions—emotions of awe, humility, or exhilaration. However, taken as serious philosophical argument both are ridiculous. The atheist’s argument from size is, in fact, an instance of just that picture-thinking to which, as we shall later discover, the Christian is no committee. It is the particular mode in which picture-thinking appears in the twenty-first century: for what we fondly call “primitive” errors do not pass away. They merely change their form. The glimpse in its most elementary form does not come only to specially gifted persons. It belongs to the portrait of every human being as natural and no a mysterious part of one’s life-experience. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
It is simply a part of the feeling for Nature, to whose systems one belongs, and for the Sun which is Nature’s supreme expression. The Sun’s glory, beauty, power, and benignity arouse reverence. Old World faiths mostly recognized this and made prayers obligatory at dawn and twilight. The point which has yet to be made is that these glimpses are no supernatural superhuman and solely religious experiences. When scientific psychology has advanced to the point where it really understands the human being in all one’s height and depth, and not merely one’s surface, it will see this. Although one is normally quite unconscious of this connection with the Overself, once at least in a lifetime there is a flash which visits one and break the unconsciousness. One has a glimpse of one’s highest possibility. However, the clearness of intensity of this glimpse depends upon one’s receptivity. They may amount to little or much. Many people without pretensions to mystical knowledge or belief have had this experience, this glimpse of timeless loveliness, through Nature, art, music or even for no apparent reason at all. And I though over again my small adventures as with a shore-wind I drifted out in my yacht, and thought I was in danger, my fears, those small ones that I thought so big for all the vital things I have to get and to reach. And yet, there is only one great thing; to live to see in hunts and on journeys the great day that dawns, and the light that fills the World. Our God and God of our fathers, accept our rest. Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Torah. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
Can the true reason we fear the unknown, be that we know ourselves too well? Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of days, in remembrance of creation. May human beings begin to think of and dwell upon he One Infinite Life-Power, filling all space and pervading the entire Universe, existing everywhere, containing and permeating all creatures, all humanity, including one’s self. Accept and stress God’s existence. Next, call on God’s help, then concentrate on the truth of His recuperative power, which develops and sustains every cell of the body from birth, heals its wounds and knits its bones. Imagine God’s power to be flowing into you as White Light. Mentally draw the current into the body, through the forehead, the palms, and the solar plexus. Lastly, bring it to the part of the body that needs healing and concentrate it there. Think of the whole body as being manifestation of Creative Intelligence and as a projection of the higher self. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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And the Loves that May Hurt the Least are Not the Best Loves!
To those who fail to heed their own words–be warned–you never know who is listening. Loved people are loving people. Reality is a nuisance to whose who want to make it up as they go along. When you make a World tolerable for yourself, you make a World tolerable for others. One should cloak oneself in the love of God. One gets out of the spiritual life only what one puts into it, but sometimes one gets rather more, like inner consolation. Jesus is in dialog with the willing soul; even with the unwilling soul He is always trying to start a conversation. All the good soul needs to survive imprisonment in the body is food and light; that is to say, Sacrament and Scripture. We are to practice things like humanity of Christ, prayer, knowledge of self, fulfillment of obligations, the practice of virtue, the avoidance of vice, retirement from the World, devotional reading of the Scriptures, and a prickly restlessness with intellectuality for its own sake. When you receive Sacrament, Spiritual Grace is conferred, and Virtue dimmed is restored to its original beauty. Once covered with soot and sin, the pallid soul will soon blush into a full palette of colours. I am free, I am bound to nobody’s word, except to those inspired by God; if I oppose these in the least degree, I beseech God to forgive me my audacity of judgment, as I have been moved not so much by longing for some opinion of my own as by love for the freedom of science. What is the relation between faith and science? Many people—Christians and non-Christians alike—answer, “Conflict.” Reason must be assisted by observation and experiment in matters of science, and by spiritual revelation in matters of faith. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
As God’s creatures, we are dependent upon God’s sustaining power, moment by moment. Our dependence upon and allegiance to God frees us from bondage to anybody’s word, except to what we find in God’s books. We are freed even to investigate that most marvelous wonder of nature—human nature. What the Christian Bible urges upon us is a complete transformation in our relations to God and our fellow creatures, and to the World that God has made. This transformation means a liberation from old superstitious bonds and from any kind of idolatry, including the idols of common opinion and official doctrines. We who have been touched by the Spirit may respect human authorities in church, state, or science, but we will not be so deeply impressed by them that we give up our independence. Our liberation implies also a new obedience by which we must be willing to submit all our prejudices and all our prior criteria of reasonableness to test of divine revelation, including the reality of the Universe around us. Even to ordinary persons moments can come which can pass very easily into glimpses. However, their importance is not recognized and so the opportunities are missed. It is pitiful and pathetic that anyone should be so close to the diviner self and not take advantage of the propinquity by a pause of activity and a surrender to the delicate feeling which would develop of itself into a glimpse. It is pathetic, because these moments are in the nature of clues leading to the inward way; pitiful, because such people are living in a kind of blind alley and must one day retrace their steps. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
This kind of thing is supposed to lie outside common experience, but the fact is that it comes more often through Nature, art, or music than most people suspect. There is a moment in most human’s lives when they are close to an understanding of the World’s real nature. The concepts of justice and goodness are linked with distinct principles and the question of congruence is whether these two families of criteria fit together. More precisely, each concept with its associated principles defines a point of view from which institutions, actions, and plans of life can be assessed. A sense of justice is an effective desire to apply and to acts from the principles of justice and so from the point of view of justice. This what is to be established is that it is rational (as defined by the thin theory of the good) for those in a well-ordered society to affirm their sense of justice as regulative of their plan of life. It remains to be shown that this disposition to take up and to be guided by the standpoint of justice accords with the individual’s good. Whether these two points of view are congruent is likely to be a crucial factor in determining stability. However, congruence is not a foregone conclusion even in a well-ordered society. We must verify it. Of course, the rationality of choosing the principles of justice in the original position is not in question. The argument for this decision has already been made; and if it is sound, just institutions are collectively rational and to everyone’s advantage from a suitably general perspective. It is also rational for each to urge others to support these arrangements and to fulfill their duties and obligations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The problem is whether the regulative desire to adopt the standpoint of justice belongs to a person’s own good when viewed in the light of the thin theory with no restriction on information. We should like to know that this desire is indeed rational; being rational for one, it is rational for all, and therefore no tendencies to instability exist. More precisely, consider any given person in a well-ordered society. One knows, I assume, that institutions are just and that others have (and will continue to have) a sense of justice similar to one’s, and therefore that they comply (and will continue to comply) with these arrangements. We want to show that on these suppositions it is rational for someone, as defined by the thin theory, to affirm one’s sense of justice. The plan of life which does this is one’s best reply to the similar plans of one’s associates; and being rational for anyone, it is rational for all. It is important not to confuse this problem with that of justifying being a just human to an egoist. An egoist is someone committed to the point of view of one’s own interests. One’s final ends are related to oneself: one’s wealth and position, one’s pleasures and social prestige, and so on. Such a human may act justly, that is, do things that a just human would do; but so long s one remains an egoist, one cannot do them for the just human’s reasons. Having these reasons is inconsistent with being an egoist. It merely happens that on some occasions the point of view of justice and that of one’s own interests lead to the same course of action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Therefore I am not trying to show that in a well-ordered society an egoist would act from a sense of justice, nor even that one would act justly because so acting would best advance one’s ends. Nor, again, are we to argue that an egoist, finding oneself in a just society, would be well advised, given one’s aims, to transform oneself into a just human. Rather, we are concerned with the goodness of the settled desire to take up the standpoint of justice. I assume that the members of a well-ordered society already have this desire. The question is whether this regulative sentiment is consistent with their good. We are not examining the justice or the moral worth of actions from certain points of view; we are assessing the goodness of the desire to adopt a particular point of view, that of justice itself. And we must evaluate this desire not from the egoist’s standpoint, whatever this might be, but in the light of the thin theory of the good. Human actions spring from existing desires and these can be changed only gradually. We cannot just decide at a given moment to alter our system of ends. We act know as the sort of person we are and from the wants we have now, and not as the sort of person we might have been or from desires we would have had if earlier we had only chosen differently. Regulative aims are especially subject to this constraint. Thus we decide well in advance whether to affirm our sense of justice by trying to assess our situation over a frilly extensive future. We cannot have things bot ways. We cannot preserve a sense of justice and all that this implies while at the same time holding ourselves ready to act unjustly should not doing so promise some personal advantage. A just person is not prepared to do certain things, and if one is tempted too easily, one was prepared after all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Our question concerns then only those with a certain psychology and system of desires. It would obviously be demanding too much to require that stability should not depend upon definite restrictions in this respect. Now on one interpretation the question has an obvious answer. Supposing that someone has an effective sense of justice, one will then have a regulative desire to comply with the corresponding principles. The criteria of rational choice must take this desire into account. If a person wants with deliberative rationality to act from the standpoint of justice above all else, it is rational for one so to act. Therefore in this form the question is trivial: being the sorts of persons they are, the members of a well-ordered society desire more than anything to act justly and fulfilling this desire is part of their good. To do justly means acting honourably with God and other people. We act honourably with others by loving mercy. As followers of Jesus Christ, we strive—and are encouraged to strive—to do better and be better. Without the blessings that come from Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, we can never do enough or be enough by ourselves. The good news, though, is that because of and through Jesus Christ we can become enough. All people will be saved from physical death by the grace of God, through the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if we turn our hearts to God, salvation from spiritual death is available to all through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, by obedience to the laws and ordinance of the Gospel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
We can be redeemed from sin to stand clean and pure before God. Once we acquire a sense of justice that is truly final and effective, as the precedence of justice requires, we are confirmed in a plan of life that, insofar as we are rational, leads us to preserve and to encourage this sentiment. Since this fact is public knowledge, instability of the first kind does not exist, and hence neither does that of the second. The real problem of congruence is what happens if we imagine someone to give weight to one’s sense of justice only to the extent that it satisfies other descriptions which connect it with reasons specified by the thin theory of the good. We should not rely on the doctrine of the pure conscientious act. Suppose, then, that the desire to act justly is not a final desire like that to avoid pain, misery, or apathy, or the desire to fulfill the inclusive interests. The theory of justice supplies other descriptions of what the sense of justice is a desire for; and we must use these to show that a person following the thin theory of the good would indeed confirm this sentiment as regulative of one’s plan of life. For the grounds of congruence to be established, as the contract doctrine requires, the principles of justice are public: they characterize the commonly recognized moral convictions shared by the members of a well-ordered society. We are not concerned with someone who is questioning these principles. By hypothesis, one concedes as everyone else does that they are best choice from the standpoint of the original position. (Of course, this can always be doubted but it raises an entirely different matter.) #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Now since others are assumed to have (and continue to have) an effective sense of justice, our hypothetical individual is considering in effect a policy of pretending to have certain moral sentiments, all the while being ready to act as a free-rider whenever the opportunity arises to further one’s personal interest. Since the conception of justice is public, one is debating whether to set out on a systematic course of deception and hypocrisy, professing without belief, as it suits one’s purpose, the accepted moral views. That deception and hypocrisy are wrongs does not, I assume, bother one; but one will have to reckon with the psychological cost of taking precautions and maintaining one’s pose, and the loss of spontaneity and naturalness that results. In most societies as things are, such pretensions may no have a high price, since the injustice of institutions and the often squalid behaviour of others renders one’s own deceits easier to endure; but in a well-ordered society there is not this comfort. These remarks are supported by the fact that there is a connection between acting justly and natural attitudes. Given the content of the principles of justice and the laws of moral psychology, wanting to be fair with our friends and wanting to give justice to those we care for is as much a part of these affections as the desire to be with them and to feel sad at their loss. Assuming therefore that one needs these attachments, the policy contemplated is presumably that of acting justly only towards those whom we are bound by tires of affection and fellow feeling, and of respecting ways of life to which we are devoted. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
However, in a well-ordered society these bonds extend widely, and include ties to intuitional forms, assuming here that all three psychological laws are fully effective. In addition, we cannot in general select who is to be injured by our unfairness. For example, if we cheat on paying our taxes, or if we find some way to avoid doing our fair share for the community, everyone is hurt, our friends and associates along with the est. To be sure, we might consider covertly passing on part of our gains to those we especially like, but this becomes a dubious and involved affair. Thus in a well-ordered society where effective bonds are extensive both to persons and to social forms, and we cannot select who is to lose by our defections, there are strong grounds for preserving one’s sense of justice. Doing this protects in a natural and simple way the institutions and persons we care for and leads us to welcome new and broader social tires. Another basic consideration is this: it follows from the Aristotelian Principle (and its companion effect) that participating in the life of a well-ordered society is a great good. This conclusion depends upon the meaning of the principles of justice and their precedence in everyone’s plans as well as upon the psychological features of our nature. It is the details of the contract view which establish this connection. Because such a society is a social union of social unions, it realizes to a preeminent degree the various forms of human activity; and given the social nature of humankind, the fact that our potentialities and inclinations far surpass what can be expressed in any one life, we depend upon the cooperative endeavours of others not only for the means of well-being but to bring to fruition our latent powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
And with a certain success all around, each enjoys the greater richness and diversity of the collective activity. Yet to share fully in this life we must acknowledge the principles of its regulative conception, and this means that we must affirm our sentiment of justice. To appreciate something as ours, we must have a certain allegiance to it. What binds society’s efforts into one social union is the mutual recognition and acceptance of the principles of justice; it is this general affirmation which extends the ties of identification over the whole community and permits the Aristotelian Principles to have its wider effect. Individual and group accomplishments are no longer seen as just so many separate personal goods. Whereas not to confirm our sense of justice is to limit ourselves to a narrow view. Finally, there is the reason connected with the Kantian interpretation: acting justly is something we want to do as free and equal rational beings. The desire to act justly and the desire to express our nature as free moral persons turn out to specify what is practically speaking the same desire. When someone has true beliefs and a correct understanding of the theory of justice, these two desires move one in the same way. They are both dispositions to act from precisely the same principle: namely, those that would be chosen in the original position. Of course, this contention is based on a theory of justice. If his theory is unsound, the practical identity fails. However, since we are concerned only with the special case of a well-ordered society as characterized by the theory, we are entitled to assume that its members have a lucid grasp of the public conception of justice upon which their relations are founded. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Let us supposed that these are the chief reasons (or typical thereof) which the thin account of the good allows for maintaining one’s sense of justice. The question now arises whether they are decisive. Here we confront the familiar difficulty of a balance of motives which in many ways is similar to a balance of first principles. Sometimes the answer is found by comparing one balance of reasons with another, for surely if the first balance clearly favours one course of action then the second will also, should its reasons supporting this alternative be stronger and its reasons supporting the other alternatives be weaker. However, arguing from such comparisons presupposes some configurations of reasons which evidently go one way rather than another to serve as a bench mark. Failing these, we cannot get beyond conditional comparisons: if the first balance favours a certain choice, then the second does also. Now at this point it is obvious that the content of the principles of justice is a crucial element in the decision. Whether it is for a person’s good that one have a regulative sense of justice depends upon what justice requires of him. The congruence of the right and the good is determined by the standards by which each concept is specified. Utilitarianism is more strict than common sense in demanding the sacrifice of the agent’s private interests when this is necessary for the greater happiness of all. It is also more exacting than the contract theory, for while beneficent acts going beyond our natural duties are good actions and evoke our esteem, they are not required as a matter of right. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Utilitarianism may seem to be a more exalted ideal, but the other side of it is that it may authorize the lesser welfare and liberty of some for the sake of a greater happiness of others who ma already be more fortunate. A rational person, in framing one’s plan, would hesitate to give precedence to so stringent a principle. It is likely both to exceed one’s capacity for sympathy and to be hazardous to one’s freedom. Thus however improbable the congruence of the right and the good in justice as fairness, it is surely more probable than on the utilitarian view. The conditional balance of reasons favours the contract doctrines. A somewhat different point is suggested by the following doubt: namely, that while the decision to preserve our sentiment of justice might be rational, we may in end suffer a very great loss or even be ruined by it. As we have seen, a just person is not prepare to do certain things, and so in the face of evil circumstances one may decide to chance death rather than to act unjustly. Yet although it is true enough that for the sake of justice a human may lose one’s life where another would live to a later day, the just human does all things considered one most want; in this sense one is not defeated by ill fortune the possibility of which one foresaw. The question is on a par with the hazards of love; indeed, it is simply a special case. Those who love one another, or who acquire strong attachments to persons and to forms of life, at the same time become liable to ruin: their love makes them hostages to misfortune and the injustice of others. Friends and lovers take great chances to help each other; and members of families willing to do the same. Their being so disposed belongs to their attachments as much as any other inclination. Once we love we are vulnerable: there is no such thing as loving while being ready to consider water to love, just like that. And the loves that may hurt the least are not the best loves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
When we love we accept the danger of injury and loss. In view of our general knowledge of the likely course of life, we do not think these risks so great as to cause us to cease loving. Should evils occur, they are the object of our aversions, and we resist those whose machinations bring them about. If we are loving we do not regret our love. Now if these things are true of love as the World is, or very often is, then a fortiori they would appear to be true of loves in a well-ordered society, and so of the sense of justice too. For in a society where others are just our loves expose us mainly to the accidents of nature and the contingency of circumstances. And similarly for the sentiment of justice which is connected to these affections. Taking as a bench mark the balance of reasons that leads us to affirm our loves as things are, it seems that we should be ready once we become of age to maintain our sense of justice in the more favourable conditions of a just society. One special feature of the desires to express our nature as moral persons strengthens this conclusion. With other inclinations of the self, there is a choice of degree and scope. Our policy of deception and hypocrisy need not be completely systematic; our affective ties to institutions and to other persons can be more or less strong, and our participation in the wider life of society more or less full. There is a continuum of possibilities and not an all or nothing decision, although for simplicity I have spoken pretty much in these terms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, the desire to express our nature as a free and equal rational being can be fulfilled only by acting on the principles of right and justice as having first priority. This is a consequence of the condition of finality: since these principles are regulative, the desire to act upon them is satisfied only to the extent that it is likewise regulative with respect to other desires. It is acting from this precedence that expresses our freedom from contingency and happenstance. Therefore in order to realize our nature we have no alternative but to plan to preserve our sense of justice as governing our other aims. If it is compromised and balanced against other ends as but one desire among the rest, this sentiment cannot be fulfilled. It is desire to conduct oneself in a certain way above all else, a striving that contains within itself its own priority. Other aims can be achieved by a plan that allows a place for each, since their satisfaction is possible independent of their place in the ordering. However, this is not the case with the sense of right and justice; and therefore acting wrongly is always liable to arouse feelings of guilt and shame, the emotions aroused by the defeat of our regulative moral sentiments. Of course, this does not mean that the realization of our nature as a free and rational being is itself an all or nothing affair. To the contrary, how far we succeed in expressing our nature depends upon how consistently we act from our sense of justice as finally regulative. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
What we cannot do is express our nature by following a plan that views the sense of justice as but one desire to be weighed against others. For this sentiment reveals what the person is, and to compromise it is not to achieve for the self free reign but to give way to the contingences and accidents of the World. One last question must be mentioned. Suppose that even in a well-ordered society there are some persons for whom the affirmation of their sense of justice is not a good. Given their aims and wants and the peculiarities of their nature, the thin account of the good does not define reasons sufficient for them to maintain this regulative sentiment. It has been argued that to these persons one cannot truthfully recommend justice as a virtue. And this is surely correct, assuming such a recommendation to imply that rational grounds (identified by the thin theory) counsel this course for them as individuals. However, then the further question remains whether those who do affirm their sense of justice are treating these persons unjustly in requiring them to comply with just institutions. Now unhappily we are not yet in a position to answer this query properly, since it presupposes a theory of punishment and I have said very little about this part of the theory of justice. I have assumed strict compliance with any conception that would be chosen and then considered which one on the list presented would be adopted. However, we may reason much as we did in the case of civil disobedience, another part of partial compliance theory. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Thus granting that adherence to whatever conception is acknowledged will be imperfect if left completely voluntary, under what conditions would the persons in the original position agree that stabilizing penal devices can be employed Would they insist that a person can be required to do only what is to one’s advantage as defined by the thin theory? It seems clear, in the light of the contract doctrine as a whole, that they would not. For this restriction amounts in effect to general egoism which, as we have seen, would be rejected. Moreover, the principles of right and justice are collectively rational; and it is in the interest of each that everyone else should comply with just arrangements. It is also the case that the general affirmation of the sense of justice is a great social asset, establishing the basis for mutual trust and confidence from which all normally benefit. Thus in agreeing to penalties that stabilize a scheme of cooperation the parties accept the same kind of constraint on self-interest that they acknowledge in choosing the principle of justice in the first place. Having agreed to these principles in view of the reasons already surveyed, it is rational to authorize the measures need to maintain just institutions, assuming that the constraints of equal liberty and the rule of law are duly recognized. Those who find that being disposed to act justly is not a good for them cannot deny these contentions. It is, of course, true that in their case just arrangements do not fully answer to their nature, and therefore, other things equal, they will be less happy than they would be if they could affirm their sense of justice. However, here one can only say: their nature is their misfortune. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The main point then is that to justify a conception of justice we do not have to contend that everyone, whatever one’s capacities and desires, has a sufficient reason (as defined by the thin theory) to preserve one’s sense of justice. For our good depends upon the sorts of persons we are, the kinds of wants and aspirations we have and are capable of. It can even happen that there are many who do not find a sense of justice for their good; but if so, the forces making for stability are weaker. Under such conditions penal devices will play a much larger role in the social system. The greater the lack of congruence, the greater the likelihood, other things equal, of instability with its attendant evils. Yet none of this nullifies the collective rationality of the principles of justice; it is still to the advantage of each that everyone else should honour them. At least this holds true so long as the conception of justice is not so unstable that some other conception would be preferable. However, what I have tried to show is that the contract doctrine is superior to its rivals on this score, and therefore that the choice of principles in the original position need not be reconsidered. In fact, granted a reasonable interpretation of human sociability (provided by the account of how a sense of justice is acquired and by the idea of social union), justice as fairness appears to be a sufficiently stable conception. The hazards of the generalized prisoner’s dilemma are removed by the match between the right and good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Of course, under normal conditions public knowledge and confidence are always imperfect. So even in a just society it is reasonable to admit certain constraining arrangements to insure compliance, but their main purpose is to underwrite citizens’ trust in other another. These mechanisms will seldom be invoked and will comprise but a minor part of the social scheme. Congruence allows us to complete the sequence of applications of the definition of goodness. We can say first that, in a well-ordered society, being a good person (and in particular having an effective sense of justice) is indeed a good for that person; and second that this form of society is a good society. The first assertation follows from congruence; the second holds since a well-ordered society has the properties that it is rational to want in a society from the two relevant points of view. Thus a well-ordered society satisfies the principles of justice which are collectively rational from the perspective of the original position; and from the standpoint of the individual, the desire to affirm the public conception of justice as regulative of one’s plan of life accords with the principles of rational choice. These conclusions support the values of community, and in reaching them my account of justice as fairness is completed. Humankind has a moral nature. Justifying grounds do not lie ready to hand: they need to be discovered and suitably expressed, sometimes by lucky guesses, somethings by noting the requirements of theory. For publicity allows that all can justify their conduct to everyone else (when their conduct is reasonable and in according with the laws of God) without self-defeating or other disturbing consequences. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Moral elements of the original position in the form of general conditions and the veil of ignorance and the like are important to employ because they allow us to see more clearly how justice requires us to go beyond a concern for our own interest. Only if humans have a sense of justice and do therefore respect one another, will the principles of justice be effective; the notion of respect or of inherent worth of persons is not a suitable basis for arriving at these principles. It is precisely these ideas that call for interpretation. The situation is analogous to that of benevolence: without the principles of right and justice, the aims of benevolent and the requirements of respect are both undefined; they presuppose these principles already independently derived. Once the conception of justice is on hand, however, the ideas of respect and of human dignity can be given a more definite meaning. Among other things, respect for persons is shown by treating them in ways that they can see to be justified. However, more than this, it is manifest in the content of the principles to which we appeal. Thus to respect persons is to recognize that they possess an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. It is to affirm that the loss of freedom for some is not made right by a greater welfare enjoyed by others. The lexical priorities of justice represent the value of persons that is beyond all price. Justice is the first virtue of social institutions. The feelings connecting with the primacy of justice allows us to understand that justice as fairness is the outcome of a rational society because it articulates the principles in the United States Constitution. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The theory of justice is a viable systematic doctrine and the idea of maximizing the good does not hold sway by default. Thus what we are doing is to combine into one conception the totality of conditions that we are ready upon due reflection to recognize as reasonable in our conduct with regard to one another. One we grasp this conception, we can at any time look at the social World from the required point of view. It suffices to reason in certain ways and to follow the conclusions reached. This standpoint is also objective and expresses our autonomy. Without conflating all persons into one but recognizing them as distinct and separate, it enables us to be impartial, even between persons who are not contemporaries but who belong to many generations. Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view. The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the World, not the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the World. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as one lives by the, each from one’s own standpoint. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
To the ancients, as well as to many contemporary seekers, the World is alive with spirit. The surrounding landscape is infused with creativity and meaning and each place speaks to us of the divine. If one could attain it, purify of heart would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from the point of view of justice as fairness. Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for sin and salvation from spiritual death are available to all. As we receive the Saviour’s cleansing, healing, and strengthening power, we not only walk justly and humbly with God, we also learn to love mercy the way that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Every day is a God, each day is a God ad holiness holds forth in time. The Earth is more than real estate and if we have a wonderful sense of the divine it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence. God is in the arched sky; He looks out from every stary. God is spread out like a legible language upon the beautiful face of the unsleeping ocean. God is the poetry of Nature; He is that which uplifts the spirit within us. Earth is a bountiful community of living beings of which we are only one part. And each living being has an inner presence and dignity apart from any value we humans may place upon it. While certain places always have been recognized for the powerful presence of their unique localities or landforms, these places are not isolated entities. All the physical things that make up our daily life share a common spiritual reality—as such they are all to be revered and respect. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries within the inner courts of God. A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden, free medicine for everybody. The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise, the first blue violets kneeling. Whatever came from Being is caught up n being, drunkenly forgetting that way back. Thou didst establish the Sabbath and didst accept it offerings, prescribing the order of its service. They that delight in the Sabbath have a glorious heritage; they who partake of it, merit life’s highest joy, and they that love its observance have thus chosen true distinction. At Sinai our forefathers were commanded to keep the Sabbath; and Thou didst ordain, O Lord our God, that they bring the additional Sabbath offering as set forth in the Torah. Thou didst create the World from old completing Thy work by the seventh day. Loving us and exalting us above all tongues, Thou didst sanctify us by Thy commandments, and didst bring us near unto Thy service, O our King, calling us by Thy great and holy name. As a token of Thy love, O Lord our God, Thou didst also give us Sabbaths for rest and New Moons for forgiveness. Because we and our forefathers sinned against Thee, our city America has been laid waste, our Sanctuary is desolate, our splendour has gone into exile, and the glory has been removed from the abode of our life. Therefore we cannot fulfill our obligations in Thy chosen House, the great and holy Temple, which was called by Thy name, because of the destruction that has become upon Thy Sanctuary. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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The Source of those Accusations Was a Committee of Demons Who Had Infested Her!
The infinite power of God to create is far beyond what we can grasp or understand. If the Almighty devoted so much of His Word to prophecy, it certainly benefits every believer to study it. The study of the prophetic scriptures and their fulfillment attests to the authority of the Word of God. Every soul has cost an infinite price, and how terrible is the sin of turning one soul away from Christ, so that for Him the Saviour’s love and humiliation and agony shall have been in vain. Contrary to popular opinion, New England’s record in regard to witchcraft is surprisingly good, as Governor Thomas Hutchinson pointed out in 1750: “more having been put to death in a single country in England from the first settlement until the present time.” Through most of the seventeenth century the record is really astonishing. While Europe hanged and burned literally thousands, executions in New England were few and far between. (Witches were burned on the Continent and in Scotland, where witchcraft was a heresy, but hanged in England and in New England, where it was a felony. Burning a witch seems not to have been motivated by the wish to inflict a particularly painful death; Scottish witches, for instance, were first garroted by the executioner, who then proceeded to burn the corpse and scatter its ashes. Most probably, burning was an attempt to prevent the resurrection of the body.) There are some fascinating accounts in New England that deal with cases of witchcraft before 1692, and we shall look at a few of these for they will illuminate some interesting aspects of the Salem witch trials. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The first is that of Mrs. Anne Hibbins. Her husband, who died in 1654, had been a man of importance: Boston merchant, a Colonial Agent, and for several years one of the Assistants. Tradition has it that she was a sister of Governor Bellingham. She was apparently quarrelsome—quarrelsome enough so that her church censured her for it—and one quarrel was her undoing. She seems to have come upon two of her neighbours talking, to have told them she knew they were talking about her, and then to have reconstructed their conversation with enough fidelity to convince the she was possessed of “preternatural” knowledge (something Mrs. Sarah Winchester used to also have the ability to do, and a reason she dismissed so many staff members for gossiping). Nonetheless, Mrs. Hibbins was brought to trail in 1655, and the jury brought her in guilty. However, the presiding magistrates refused to accept the verdict, apparently believing her innocent, and their refusal automatically threw the case into the General Court. There again she was found guilty; the governor pronounced the required sentence of death; and in 1656 she was executed. We have seen that some of the magistrates were not satisfied of her guilt, and apparently the same were true of some of the clergy. To masses of people, death was a dread mystery; beyond was uncertainty and gloom. These people were seeking for truth, and to learn them the Spirit of Inspiration was imparted. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
A surviving letter tells us that the Reverend John Norton “once said at his own table” before the Reverend John Wilson and others that Mistress Hibbins “was hanged for a witch only for having more with than her neighbours. It was his very expression; she having, as he explained it, unhappily guessed that two of her persecutors, whom she saw talking in the street, were talking of her—which cost her her life, not withstanding all he could do to the contrary, as he himself told us.” The Hibbins case shows how slender and how circumstantial were the grounds necessary to bring an accusation of witchcraft against anyone with a reputation for malice. It also shows that the popular elements in society (the jury, and the people’s representatives in the General Court) were far more ready to believe in witchcraft than the leaders of society (the magistrates and ministers.) This latter conclusion is reinforced by the fact that before 1692 there were far more acquittals than convictions in New England; there were more people willing to charge their neighbours with witchcraft than magistrates willing to convict them. A case which took place in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1662 is known in rather more detail than that of Mrs. Hibbins. Anne Cole, “a person esteemed pious,” was taken with “strange fits.” As with the Salem girls, the fits were both violent and public. Extremely violent bodily motions she many times had, even to the hazard of her life in the apprehensions of those that saw them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
And very often great disturbances was given in the public worship of God by her and two other women who had also strange fits. Once in especial, on a day of prayer kept on that account, the motion and noised of the afflicted was so terrible that a godly person fainted under the appearance of it. In some of her fits strange voices came from her, voices that were clearly not her own. Such voices are now known to be a consequence of multiple personality, which is the extreme form of the hysterical fugue. However, the seventeenth-century observers of Anne Cole judged them to be the voices of demons who had entered into her, and that judgment was sensible enough in view of the fact that the voices seemed to be plotting ways in which Anne Cole might be further afflicted. Eventually, seeming to realize that they were being overheard, one of the voices announced, “‘Let us confound her language, [that] she may tell no more tales.’” For some time nothing came from her but “unintelligible mutterings”; then the conversation resumed in a Dutch accent, and this time names were mentioned, names of the witches who were responsible for these afflictions. When Anne Cole was out of her fits, she “knew nothing of those things that were spoken by her” during them, but she was understandably distressed to find she had been speaking things which, to the best of her knowledge, had never been in her mind; it was a “matter of great affliction to her.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
It must have been afflicting to the local magistrates as well; they now had accusations of witchcraft against several persons, but the source of these accusations was not Anne Cole; it was a committee of demons who had infested her. The magistrates investigated further, and imprisoned some (and perhaps all) of the accused on suspicion of witchcraft One of these, a “lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman” named Rebecca Greensmith sent for the two clergymen who has taken down in writing the demonic conversation issuing from the mouth of Anne Cole. She had the transcript read to er, and then “forthwith and freely confessed those things to be true,” confirming the statement of the voiced “that she (and other persons named in the discourse) had familiarity with the Devil.” She confessed to a number of other things as well, including “that the Devil has frequent use of her body with much seeming (but indeed horrible, hellish) delight to her.” Reports of copulation with demons (including the unpleasantness of the experience) are common in the literature of Continental witchcraft, but this is one of the few known cases in New England. What is involved is apparently an erotic fit in which the woman actually goes through the motions of copulation and achieves a climax; similar fits have been observed in mental patients in the twenty-first century. Thus it appears that in the case of Anne Cole the confessor as well as the afflicted person was an hysteric. This pattern we shall see again at Salem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Rebecca Greensmith was hanged in 1663. So was her husband Nathaniel, although we do not know the grounds for his conviction; according to Increase Mather he did not confess. “Most” of the other persons accused by the demonic voices “made their escape into another part of the country.” What happened to the others we do not know, but they were apparently not executed. And since at least one of those who made her escape had at first been imprisoned in suspicion of witchcraft (Judith Varlet, a relative of Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New York), it can be assumed that the authorities were reluctant to press the matter further. The evidence they had was, after all, highly suspect, coming from demonic voices on the one hand and a confessed witch on the other. (Confessors are a group of women with the power to make anyone they touch love them. This love, however, is more aptly described as a soul-destroying obsession whose objective is pleasing the Confessor in any way possible. Confessors were created by warlocks to travel Medieval lands and act as law enforcers. The Confessors could possess anyone and make them tell the truth in great detail. There were also a few male Confessors, but they became megalomanics and plunged the entire World into a dark age. As a result, after all the male Confessors were defeated and wiped out, the warlocks and female Confessors took up the tradition of killing all male Confessors shortly after birth.) In any event, after the “execution of some and escape of others” Anne Cole’s fits ceased, and did not return. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Twenty years later, in 1682, the Reverend John Whiting reported that “she yet remains maintaining her integrity.” This together with what the voices said, suggests that Anne Cole’s fits probably were caused by her fear of witchcraft and cured by the removal of the fear. A few other cases are remarkable for a number of reasons, one of them being the exemplary thoroughness with which the symptoms of the affiliated persons are described, which makes it possible to say without question that these were pathological cases of hysteria. The first took place in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1671-1671 and was recorded by the Reverend Samuel Willard, then minister of Groton (during the Salem trials he was a member of the Boston Clergy). On 30 October 1671, Elizabeth Knapp began to behave strangely: “In the evening, a little before she went to bed, sitting by the fire she cried out, ‘Oh! My legs!’ and clapped her hands on them; immediately, ‘Oh! My breast!’ and removed her hands thither; and forthwith, ‘Oh! I am strangled’ and put her hands on her throat.” The similarity to Janet’s twentieth-century description of the onset of a typical hysterical fit is unmistakable; it starts, he writes “with a pain or a strange sensation situated at such or such a point of the body…[It] often begins in the lower part of the abdomen [and] seems to ascend and to spread to other organs. For instance, it very often spreads to the epigastrium, to the breast, then to the throat. There it assumes rather an interesting form, which was for a very long time considered as quite characteristic of hysteria. The patient has the sensation of too big an object, as it were, a ball, rising in her throat and choking her.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The chocking sensation we shall find over and over again; it is the bolus hystericus and is related to the “lump in the throat” felt by normal people in moments of extreme stress. The normal person, like the hysteric, tries to relieve it by swallowing; this is why the comic-strip artist has one’s characters say “Gulp” when they are in trouble. The choking sensations in the throat was followed by “fits in which she was violent in bodily motions, leapings, strainings and strange agitations, scarce to be held in bound by the strength of three or four; violent also in roarings and screamings.” The fits continued until 15 January 1692, the date of Willard’s writings. Several of the details he recorded are worth noting. On 15 November, “her tongue was for many hours together drawn into a semicircle up to the roof of her mouth, and not to be removed, for some tried with the fingers to do it.” On 17 December her tongue was drawn “out of her mouth most frightfully, to an extraordinary length and greatness.” Devils appeared to her, and witches; “Oh,” she cried to one of them, “you are a rouge.” On 29 November she had a particularly grotesque hallucination, when she believed a witch in the shape of a dog with a woman’s head was strangling her. The hallucinations and the woman’s sufferings were terrifyingly convincing; Willard noted that when she thought the witch was strangling her, “she did often times seem to our apprehension as of she would forthwith be strangled.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Elizabeth Knapp’s case is strikingly similar to that of Ler—one of the best-known cases of J.-M. Charcot, the nineteenth-century psychologist. Her fits, he wrote, “are characterized in the first stage by epileptiform and tetaniform convulsions; after this come great gesticulations of a voluntary character, in which the patient, assuming the most frightful postures, reminds one of the attitudes which history assigns to the demoniacs…At this stage of the attack, se is a prey to delirium, and raves evidently of the events which seem to have determined her first seizures. She hurls furious invectives against imaginary individuals, crying out, “villains! robbers! brigands! fire! fire! O, the dogs! I’m bitten!”—Reminiscences, doubtless, of the emotions experienced in her youth.” When the convulsive portion of Ler—’s attack was over other symptoms usually followed, including “hallucination of vision: the patient beholds horrible animals, skeletons, and specters” and “lastly, a more or less marked permanent contracture of the tongue.” Charcot drew this contracture of the tongue; it is quite appalling. Willard was not exaggerating in calling it frightful. Elizabeth Knapp displayed still other symptoms are identifiably hysterical, including loss of speech on some occasions, and on others speaking in voices other than her own; once “she barked like a dog, and bleated like a calf.” Willard noted that her fits did not seem to do her any permanent physical damage: “She hath no ways in body or strength by all these fits, though so dreadful, but gathered flesh exceedingly, and hath her natural strength when her fits are off, for the most part.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This is typical; as Janet remarks, the “hysteric patient, after howling for several hours, feels rather comfortable; she experiences, as it were, a relaxation, and declares she is out of her fits has often raised the question of whether they are genuine. Willard thought they must be, if only for their violence: “such a strength is beyond the force of dissimulation.” (It should be noted that hysterics are not always well in the intervals between their fits. Some, for instance, lose their appetites and starve themselves. It is probably such cases who are referred to in the statue of James I against witchcraft as being “wasted, consumed, pined.) On 1 November, Elizabeth Knapp named one of her neighbour as the probable cause of her afflictions. The accused woman was sent for, and entered the house while the afflicted girl was in a fit. Her eyes were closed, as they usually were in her fits, yet she could distinguish this neighbour’s touch from all others, “though no voice was uttered.” That would have been quite enough to convict the neighbour in many witchcraft cases. However, fortunately she was permitted to pray with the afflicted girl, and at the conclusions Miss Knapp “confessed that she believed Satan had deluded her.” Willian was happy that “God was pleased to vindicate the case and justify the innocent,” and reported that Miss Knapp never again complained of any “apparition or disturbance from this neighbour.” Instead, she turned to accusing the Devil, who had, she said, been offering her a covenant for several years, a covenant she had frequently been tempted to sign. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The dark shadow that Satan has cast over the World grew deeper and deeper. About a month later Miss Knapp accused another person of witchcraft, this time during a period of hallucinations. Her father brought the woman to the house, and Willard, who had been asked to be present, noted that her fit became particularly violent when this woman entered. However, Willard, wrote, “we made nothing of it” since her fits had been as violent on other occasions. Instead they inquired carefully into the mater and found “two evident and clear mistakes” in the accusation. This was enough to exonerate the second accused woman. Satan had implanted this principle. Wherever it was held, people had no barrier against sin. Elizabeth Knapp was still having fits when Willard wrote about her, and all he could be certain of was that “she is an object of pity.” He did not think she was bewitched, but he did believe she was possessed (that is, that Devils has entered into her). This remained his opinion (and that of most others) when the case was remembered in 1692. He also believed that the girl’s terrible afflictions provided an occasion for the community to examine its collective conscience. Therefore he admonished his congregation in a sermon, “Let us all examine by this Providence [id est, this event] what sins they have been, that have given Satan so much footing in this poor place.” Satan was seeking to shut out from humans a knowledge of God, to turn their attention from the temple of God, and to establish His own kingdom. His strife for supremacy had seemed to be almost wholly successful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
They robbed God of His glory, and defrauded the World by a counterfeit of the gospel. They had refused to surrender themselves to God for the salvation of the World, and they became agents of Satan for its destruction. They were doing the work Satan designed them to do, taking a course to misrepresent the character of God, and cause the World to look upon Him as a tyrant. The convulsive fits which played so prominent a part in most witchcraft cases, and continued to be one of the most common symptoms of hysteria through the earl years of the twentieth century, have no become relatively rare in Western civilization. D.W. Abse reports fits occurred in only six out of one hundred and sixty-one cases of hysteria treated at a British military hospital during World War II, but that they were the most common symptom among Indian Army hysterics treated at Delhi during the same period. There are a number of possible explanations for this curious fact. Hysterics are notoriously suggestible, so the change may be ascribable to nothing more than the refusal of our culture to give the hysterical fit the respectful and awed attention it used to command. In any case, it seems clear that abnormal behaviour varies with time and place just as normal behaviour does. However, since this particular variation occurred so recently, after the classic studies of hysteria had been completed, it is possible to identify the seventeenth-century Massachusetts fits for what they were. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Mr. William Wirt Winchester, while we were attending lectures, purchased three or four old houses in California, one of which was unoccupied. He resided in the country, and he proposed that he wanted his wife and myself to take up our abode in the untenanted house, so long as it should continue unlet; a move which we would accomplish the double end of settling us nearer alike to our lecture-rooms and to our amusements, and of relieving us from the weekly charge of rent for our lodgings. Our furniture was very scant—our whole equipage remarkably modest and primitive; and in short, our arrangements pretty nearly as simple as those of a bivouac. Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s new plan was, therefore, executed almost as soon as conceived. The front drawing-room was our sitting-room. I had the bedroom over it, and Mrs. Winchester had the back bedroom on the same floor, which nothing could have induced me to occupy. The house to begin with was an incomplete, three-story farm house with a basement. It was very old. Dated back to the sixteenth century, I believe. It had nothing modern about it. The agent who looked into the property titles for Mrs. Winchester told her it was originally sold, along with much other forfeited property in 1702; and it had belonged to John Conduit, whose wife was the niece of Sir Isaac Newton, a father of modern science, although keenly interested in the occult. How old it was then, I cannot say; but, at all events, in had seen years and changes enough to have contracted all the mysterious and saddened air, at once exciting and depressing, which belongs to most old mansions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
There had been very little done in the way of modernizing details and, perhaps, it was better so; for there was something queer and by-gone in the very walls and ceilings—in the shape of doors and windows—in the odd diagonal site of the chimney-pieces—in the beams and ponderous cornices—not to mention the singular solidity of all the woodwork, from the bannisters to the window-frames, which hopelessly defined disguise, and would have emphatically proclaimed their antiquity through any conceivable amount of modern finery and varnish. An effort had, indeed, been made, to the extent of papering the drawing-rooms; but somehow, the paper looked raw and out of keeping. This woman said, old Judge Sir James Hales (who, having earned the reputation of a particularly ‘hanging judge’, ended by hanging himself, as the corner’s jury found, under an impulse of ‘temporary insanity’, with a child’s skipping-rope, over the massive old bannisters) resided there, entertaining good company, with fine venison and rare old port. In those halcyon days, the drawing-rooms were hung with gilded leather, and, I dare say, cut a good figure, for they were really spacious rooms. The bedrooms were wainscoted, but the front one was not gloomy; and in it the cosiness of antiquity quite overcame its somber associations. However, the back bedrooms, with its two queerly-placed melancholy windows, staring vacantly at the foot of the bed, and with the shadowy recess to be found in most old houses in Dublin, like a large ghostly closet, which, from congeniality of temperament, had amalgamated with the bedchamber, and dissolved the partition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
At the night-time, this “alcove”—as our “maid” was wont to call it—had, in my eyes, a specially sinister and suggestive character. Mrs. Winchester’s distant and solitary candle glimmered vainly into its darkness. There it was always overlooking her—always itself impenetrable. However, this was only part of the effect. The whole room was, I cannot tell, how repulsive to me. There was, I supposed, in its proportions and features, a latent discord—a certain mysterious and indiscernible relation, which jarred indistinctly upon some secret sense of the fitting and the safe, and raised indefinable suspicious and apprehensions of the imagination. On the whole, as I began saying, nothing could have induced me to pass a night alone in it. We have not been very long in occupation of our respective chambers, when I began to complain of uneasy nights and disturbed sleep. I was, I suppose, the more impatient under this annoyance, as I was usually a sound sleeper, and by no means prone to nightmares. It was not, however, my destiny, instead of enjoying my customary repose, every night to “sup full of horrors.” After a preliminary course of disagreeable and frightful dreams, my troubles took a definite form, and the same vision, without an appreciable variation in a single detail, visited me at least (on average) every second night of the week. Now, this dream, nightmare, or infernal illusion—which you please—of which I was the miserable port, was on this wise: I saw, or thought I saw, with the most abominable distinctness although at the time in profound darkness, every article of furniture and accidental arrangement of the chamber in which I lay. This, as you know, is incidental to ordinary nightmare. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Well, while in this clairvoyant condition, which seemed but the lighting up of the theatre in which was to be exhibited the monotonous tableau of horror, which made my nights insupportable, my attention invariably became, I know not why, fixed upon the windows opposite the foot of my bed; and, uniformly with the same effect, a sense of dreadful anticipation always took slow but sure possession of me. I became somehow conscious of a sort of horrid but undefined preparation going forward in some unknown quarter, and by some unknown agency, for my torment; and, after an interval, which always seemed to me of the same length, a picture suddenly flew up the window, where it remained fixed, as if by an electrical attraction, and my discipline of horror then commenced, to last perhaps for hours. The picture this mysteriously glued to the window-panes, was the portrait of an old man, in crimson flowered silk dressing-gown, the folds of which I could now describe, with countenance embodying a strange mixture of intellect, sensuality, and power, but withal sinister and full of malignant omen. His nose was hooked, like the beak of a vulture; his eyes large, grey, and prominent and lighted up with a more than mortal cruelty and coldness. The features were surmounted by a crimson velvet cap, the hair that peeped from under which was white with age, while the eyebrows retained their original blackness. Well I remember every line, hue, and shadow of that stony countenance, and well I may! The gaze of this hellish visage was fixed upon me, and mine returned it with the inexplicable fascination of nightmare, for what appeared to me to be hours of agony. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
At last—the cock he crew, away then flew, the fiend who had enslaved me through the awful watches of the night and, harassed and nervous, I rose to the duties of the day. I had—I cannot say exactly why, but it may have been from the exquisite anguish and profound impressions of unearthly horror, with which this strange phantasmagoria was associated—an insurmountable antipathy to describing the exact nature of my nightly troubles to Mrs. Winchester. Generally, however, I told her I was haunted by abominable dreams; and, true to the imputed materialism of medicine, we put our heads together to dispel my horrors, not by exorcism, but by a tonic Vin Mariani. However, the evil spirit, who enthralled my senses in the shape of that portrait, may have been just as near me, just as energetic, just as malignant, though I saw him not. Everybody knows how contagious is fear of all sort, but more especially that particular kind of fear under which poor Mrs. Winchester was at that moment labouring. I would not have heard, nor I believe would she have recapitulated, just at that moment, for half the World, the details of the hideous vision which had so unmanned her. “I was sitting in my room,” said Mrs. Winchester “by my fireplace, the door locked when I heard a step on the flight of stairs descending from the attics. It was two o’ clock, and the streets were as silent as a churchyard—the sounds were, therefore, perfectly distinct. There was slow, heavy tread, characterized by the emphasis and deliberation of age, descending by the narrow staircase from above; and, what made the sound more singular, it was plain that the feet which produced it were perfectly bare measuring a descent with something between a pound and a flop, very ugly to hear. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“I knew quite well that you and my attendant had gone away many hours before, and that nobody but myself has any business in the house. It was quite plain also that the person who was coming down stairs had no intention whatever of concealing his movements; but, on the contrary, appeared disposed to make even more noise, and proceed more deliberately, than was at all necessary. When the step reached the foot of the stairs outside my room, it seemed to stop; and I expected every moment to see my door open spontaneously, and give admission to soul killed by the Winchester rifle. I was, however, relieved in a few second by hearing the descent renewed, just in the same manner, upon the stair case leading down to the drawing-rooms, and thence, after another pause, down the next flight, and so on to the hall, whence I heard no more. Now, by the time the sound had ceased, I was wound up, as they say, to a very unpleasant pitch of excitement. I listened, but there was not a stir. I screw up my courage to a decisive experiment—opened my door, and in a stentorian voice bawled over the banisters, ‘Who’s there?’ There was no answer but the ringing of my own voice through the empty old house—no renewal of the movement; nothing short, to give my unpleasant sensations a definite direction. There is, I think, something most disagreeably disenchanting in the sound of one’s own voice under such circumstances, exerted in solitude, and in vain. It redoubled my sense of isolation, and my misgivings increased on perceiving that the door, which I certainly thought I had left open, was closed behind me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“In a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning. Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark—somewhere, I supposed, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets. This time I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time—the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shinning dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at that moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the halls, as on the former occasion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“In a vague alarm, lest my retreat should be cut off, I got again into my room as quickly as I could, where I remained in a state of imaginary blockade, and very uncomfortable indeed, till morning. Next night brought no return of my barefooted fellow-lodger; but the night following, being in my bed, and in the dark—somewhere, I supposed, about the same hour as before, I distinctly heard the old fellow again descending from the garrets. This time I jumped out of bed, clutched the poker as I passed the expiring fire, and in a moment was upon the lobby. The sound had ceased by this time—the dark and chill were discouraging; and, guess my horror, when I saw, or thought I saw, a monster, whether in the shape of a man or a bear I could not say, standing, with its back to the wall, on the lobby, facing me, with a pair of great greenish eyes shinning dimly out. Now, I must be frank, and confess that the cupboard which displayed our plates and cups stood just there, though at that moment I did not recollect it. At the same time I must never could satisfy myself that I was made the dupe of my own fancy in this matter; for this apparition, after one or two shiftings of shape, as if in the act of incipient transformation, began, as it seemed on second thoughts, to advance upon me in its original form. From an instinct of terror rather than of courage, I hurled the poker, with all my force, at its head; and to the music of a horrid crash made my way into my room, and double-locked the door. Then, in a minute more, I heard the horrid bare feet walk down the stairs, till the sound ceased in the halls, as on the former occasion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“If the apparition of the night before was an ocular delusion of my fancy sporting with the dark outlines of our cupboard, and if tis horrid eyes were nothing but a pair of inverted teacups, I had, at all events, the satisfaction of having launched the poker with admirable effect, and in true ‘fancy’ phrase, ‘knocked its two daylights into one,’ as the commingled fragments of my tea-service testified. I did my best to gather comfort and courage from these evidences; but it would not do. And then what could I say of those horrid bare feet, and the regular tramp, tramp, tramp, which measured the distance of the entire staircase through the solitude of my haunted dwelling, and at an hour when no good influence was stirring? Confound it!—the whole affair was abominable. I was out of spirits, and dreaded the approach of night. It came, ushered ominously in with a thunderstorm and dull torrents of depressing rain. Earlier than usual the streets grew silent; and by twelve o’clock nothing but the comfortless patterning of the rain was to be heard. I made myself as snug as I could. I lighted two candles instead of one. I forswore bed, and held myself in readiness for a sally, candle in hand; for, coute qui coute, I was resolved to see the being, if visible at all, who troubled the nightly stillness of my mansion. I was fidgety and nervous and, tried in vain to interest myself with my books. I walked up and down my room, whistling in turn martial and hilarious music, and listening ever and anon for the dreaded noise.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Do not Grieve. Anything you lose comes around in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk now drinks cranberry juice. God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed. As roses, up from ground. Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines, now a horse being saddled. It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open. There is the light gold of wheat in the sun, and the gold of bread made from wheat. I have neither, I am only talking about them as a town in the desert looks up to stars on a clear night. The Son of God, looking upon the World, beheld suffering and misery. With pity He saw how humans had become victims of satanic cruelty. He looked with compassion upon those who were being corrupted, murdered, and lost. They had chosen a ruler who chained them to his carriage as captives. God’s glory pervades the Universe; His ministering Angels inquire of one another: Where is the place of His glory? In response they give praise: Praised be the glory of the Lord from His Heavenly abode. From His Heavenly abode may He turn in mercy and bestow grace unto the people who, reciting the Shema evening and morning, twice daily, proclaim in love the unity of His name, saying: Hear, O America: the Lord our God, the Lord is One. He is our God; He is our Father, our sovereign and our Deliverer. In His mercy He will make known in presence of all the living that He will be your God. “I am the Lord your God.” As it is written in holy Scripture: The Lord shall reign forever; Thy God, O America, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
Ghostly tales are bountiful at Sarah Winchester’s Mystery House. What have you experienced? Photos are encouraged!
The Winchester mansion is 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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“Whoever shadows my every move will not lose me in the dark.” At least that is what Christ says, or what the Evangelist John heard Him say (8.12). He tells us to walk on, through the darkness, with Christ as our only torch. That way, when we mayn’t have gained a step, but we won’t have lost one either. And on into the day we must pursue with dogged tread the life of Jesus Christ. Is this the secret to Mrs. Winchester’s 7-11 staircase?
Randolph Harris II International Institute 