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of professed Christians are to Christianity, or the unprincipled acts of Democratic partisans are to genuine Democracy.
“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of God,” is as needful advice to-day as it was in the Apostolic age.
In the following year he wrote thus to
Edward M. Davis of a certain adventuress:
Mrs.——thinks “there is no more thoughtless and1 irrational conclusion than that people acting under Spirit guidance are less to be trusted, and less personally trustworthy, than those acting under other guidances.”
But this is to beg the question; for it assumes, first, that when any persons claim to be “acting under Spirit guidance,” their word is not to be questioned; and secondly, that conceding that they are thus influenced (which certainly I do not doubt), it is not to be supposed that they are not wisely led. Now this is a sieve that will not hold water. . . . Hers is not the first case of Spirit hallucination which has come under my notice; and in every instance it has seemed to me to border closely upon lunacy.
Certainly, immense credulity attends it.
It must be freely admitted that my father was himself too credulous in regard to marvels, such as the ‘spirit photographs,’ which have been thoroughly exposed as sheer imposition.
Partly he was misled by his assumption of integrity in every human being with whom he came in contact, but partly also by the fact that if you say A in any class of spiritual phenomena, there is no reason why you should not say B. For example, if a bell is lifted from the table by the unseen agency, it is not past belief that the table itself may in turn be lifted from the floor; and so on through the whole round of physical manifestations.
He witnessed, as he says above, a very great variety of manifestations in daylight and in dark, at the houses of
2 friends, at the rooms of mediums, in his own home, both with and without mediums.
As to this class he wrote to
Mrs. Child in 1857: ‘I do not greatly wonder at your
3 “distrust of professional
paid mediums”; and yet, is it unreasonable, if I ask a person to give me his time, his ’