Immediately the alphabet was called for, and spelled out this sentence, “When good Spirits say ‘done,’ you should not seek for further communications. Order is heaven’s first law, and you should not overtax mediums; for no good Spirit will answer, after their guardians say ‘done.’”
The doctor received the explanation favorably, and felt greatly relieved when he saw his friend, the minister, was disposed to investigate further. With us all was turmoil and confusion. When manifestations and communications were consistent, we believed them to come from good Spirits; but when they were to the contrary, we condemned all as evil. We had no religious prejudices, no motive whatever in establishing theories. We could make no satisfactory explanations to the various interrogatories, made by promiscuous parties who were constantly in attendance.
Let me here emphasize the fact that the general feeling of our family, of all of us, including Calvin Brown, who was virtually one of us, was strongly adverse to all this strange and uncanny thing. We regarded it as a great misfortune, as it was an affliction, which had fallen upon us; how, whence or why, we knew not. The influence of the surrounding opinion of neighbors, and the country round about, reacted upon us in conformation of our own natural and educational impressions, that the whole thing was of evil origin, unnatural, perplexing, and tormenting; while its unpopularity tended to cast a painful shadow upon us. We resisted it, struggled against it, and constantly and earnestly prayed for deliverance from it, even while a strange fascination attached to these marvellous manifestations thus forced upon us, against our will, by invisible agencies and agents whom we could neither resist, control, nor understand. If our will, earnest desires and prayers could have prevailed or availed, the whole thing would have ended then and there, and the world outside of our little neighborhood would never have heard more of the Rochester Rappings, or of the unfortunate Fox family.
But the movement was not in our hands nor under our control. It had an object, and we, as reluctant and humble instruments, were in the hands of other and higher wills and forces, from whom it had proceeded, by whom it was directed, and, so to speak, engineered. We have since come to understand that all these events and incidents, perplexing and distressful as they were to us, were but the birth-throes of a new truth, which was destined to revolutionize this world, and establish a communication between the here and the hereafter; of the Earth and of the Spirit.
And I may here say that, inasmuch as Electricity and Magnetism seem to play some part in the machinery of this intercommunication, it is not surprising that the Spirit on the other side who seems to have been the principal initiator, not to say the inventor of this new development in the evolution of Humanity, was the great man known to earthly fame as the father of electrical science, as he was one of the great fathers of American liberty; he of whom it has been grandly written that he snatched the lightning from the sky, and the sceptre from the hand of the tyrant: the immortal Benjamin Franklin.
[5] It opened up communication between the two worlds of matter and spirit, as that of Morse had done between distant places in the material plane of our life.—Ed.
CHAPTER V.
ROCHESTER (Continued), November, 1848.
Light Articles made Immovable—The Coffins—Adieu of the Spirits—Their Return—First Steps toward Public Investigation—“Hire Corinthian Hall”—First Committee of Investigation—Second—Third or “Infidel” Committee—Behavior of a Great Dining-table—The Tar and Torpedo Mob.