Abstract

In 1979, Jule Eisenbud complained of those who dismissed evidence for phenomena such as D. D. Home's levitations by consigning it to the "innocuous past". For the Victorians, however, such evidence was not in the past, and was therefore far from innocuous. There was, at the same time, a debate about the evidence for Christian miracles which, for an avowedly Protestant nation, were very much in the past. How the Victorians compared the evidence for these anomalous phenomena past and present is the subject of this paper. Biblical miracles enjoyed a unique status in terms of continued popular beliefs in their authenticity. As they came to be increasingly challenged by scientific thinking, their authenticity was increasingly defended in terms of internal rather than external evidence, that is, by an appeal to religious rather than scientific authority. The question of scientific versus religious authority on such matters was raised in the contemporary discussion about the efficacy of prayer. But if the debate about the efficacy of prayer reflected scepticism about ongoing Divine intervention, such scepticism was towards contemporary suspensions of natural law. It did not necessarily reflect scepticism about Biblical miracles and, alongside the ongoing theological debate, most individuals presumably held to a conventional Christian position that what the Bible said was true, and such a position arose from a Christian culture that continued to stress the historicity of Biblical miracles. When contemporary miracles were reported to be occurring in seances around the country, it was not long before they were being compared to the miracles of the Bible. The evidence for contemporary seance phenomena, however, was presented by spiritualists primarily in scientific language, and it was regularly admitted in the mainstream periodical press that the evidence for seance phenomena was better than that for Biblical miracles. Spiritualists also defended seance phenomena in terms of their spiritual value, though the mainstream press dismissed them as trivial and worthless. Noncanonical miracles, such as those associated with Roman Catholicism, received similar treatment. Nevertheless, the growing awareness that the evidence for seance phenomena was superior to that for Biblical miracles challenged the unique status of Biblical miracles and prompted discussion about the subjective nature of belief. The fact that beliefs in Biblical miracles continued, while evidence for seance phenomena was overwhelmingly rejected, suggests the majority were simply adopting the cultural norm, rather than basing their beliefs on the evidence. Yet the tendency of Victorians to associate a variety of anomalous phenomena with areas beyond their own modern urban society suggests that such phenomena were deemed not only less problematic, but also more plausible, when kept at a safe distance.