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ference seemed to hold certain keys to individual and social transformation. But
the primary attraction for a movement that had consistently opposed revivalism lay
Universalism and Spiritual Science 105
in the science s exciting offer of an understanding that was at once rational and
spiritual.
Although historians have observed strong Universalist interest in mesmerism,
evidence showing the extent of Universalist involvement is extremely difficult to
obtain. Popular mesmerism was unorganized, involving more practice than theory;
the science was spread primarily through public lectures and demonstrations. At-
tempts to publish journals proved abortive and converts never instituted a fellow-
ship.24 Thus it proves virtually impossible to establish in any satisfactory way the
religious affiliations of mesmerism s followers. Yet there is good reason to believe
that the science was a bridge on which many Universalists dallied before plunging
headlong into the murky waters of spiritualism. The voluminous works of the Uni-
versalist minister John Bovee Dods, one of the nation s most prominent mesmerist
theorists, offer good insight into the way mesmerism could appeal to the Universalist
mentality. For Dods, the study of mesmerism lent rational support to religious belief,
and to Universalist teachings in particular.
Long before he became a prominent lecturer on animal magnetism, Dods, pastor
of a Universalist church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, indicated his intense in-
terest in religion as a process of rational learning. He complained in the late 1830s
that religion had become a species of reverential homage paid to God, or merely
belief in certain creeds or confessions of faith or the experience of mysterious
changes. Religion, Dods maintained, ought to reconcile the mind to the admin-
istration of God s government. Stressing the Universalist teaching of God s ultimate
control over all events, he insisted that happiness and permanent satisfaction de-
pended upon the contemplation that God governs the world and the practice of
pure and rational piety. Rationality was the firm foundation of religious convic-
tion, he concluded, and the key to our contentment in a divinely-directed world.25
Articulating powerfully the antebellum conjunction of science and religion, Dods
declared that the chariot of science would roll through the eternal world, dis-
covering great, immutable truths. 26
When he published his first lectures on the philosophy of mesmerism in 1848,
Dods had been a minister for twenty years and had also lectured on natural science.
He had, he admitted, been a skeptic on the subject of mesmerism for five of the
seven years he had studied it; he now knew it was no more a humbug than the
brilliant science of Phrenology! 27 Indeed, he believed his own study of mesmeric
force, which he termed electrical psychology, had helped him understand the
physical basis of divine governance. Dods maintained that the discovery of the
mesmeric or magnetic power served to illustrate how the all-powerful, self-existent
spirit created and ruled the world by and through electricity, the inexhaustible
foundation of primal matter. 28
Along with many professional scientists and most of mid nineteenth-century so-
ciety, Dods was fascinated by electrical force, the God principle at work, as one
spiritualist called it.29 But far more than any trained scientist, he was certain of what
it was and how it operated. Electricity, galvanism, and magnetism were the effects
of the same fluid, an emanation from the Eternal Mind. Electricity was the
tangible link between God and his creation, the evidence of the actual control of
106 The Universalist Movement in America, 1770 1880
creation by the Creator. Through electricity, God moved the world; knowledge of
electricity proved that God was connected with his universe, that he oversaw all
its multifarious operations. 30 The study of electricity allowed man to apprehend
not only that infinite mind ruled the universe but also something of how this rule
was exercised. If divinity made use of electricity as its agent, he pointed out, then
it had to possess the positive and negative forces of electricity. These corresponded
to the voluntary power, which created the universe, and the involuntary power,
which sustained it.31
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