It will be seen in the following pages how a vein of that mysterious something which, in our generation of “the Fox family,” has come to be called “mediumship,” is perceptible, cropping out in old stories, running through ancestral generations, and how it reappears most marvellously in an infant in the next one succeeding to us. It will also appear how long and strenuously we resisted its influence and its manifestations, and struggled against the absolute persecutions which at last forced us into publicity.
I conclude this Introduction by a brief allusion to the reasonable question which has been so often asked, Cui bono?—or what is the use of the manifestations of Spiritualism?
It is that they demonstrate the reality of the survival of man’s spirit, or inner self, after that “death” which is but birth into another stage of progressed and progressive life, in unchanged personality and identity; or, in other words, that immortality of the soul (heretofore a mere dogma of unproved and unprovable “faith”), which is the foundation corner-stone of all religions and of all Religion. In the words of Paul, to “faith” they “add knowledge.” They thus not only console bereavement, snatch from death its sting, and from the grave its victory, but through the concurrent teachings of all good and advanced spirits they make us feel the real reality of the brotherhood of mankind, and the common fatherhood of that supreme, unnamed, and unnamable Infinitude of Love, Wisdom, and Power, who is addressed in Pope’s Universal Prayer, as—
“Father of all, in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord.”
THE MISSING LINK
IN
MODERN SPIRITUALISM.
CHAPTER I.
HYDESVILLE.
“Mysterious Noises” heard in the house of John D. Fox, in Hydesville (Town of Arcadia), near Newark, Wayne County, N. Y.—Statements of Witnesses.