[2]. A fact. The incident, which occurred literally as related (on Bob Myers’s plantation in Alabama), was communicated to the writer by an eye-witness, a respectable citizen of Boston, once resident at the South. The murder, of course, passed not only unpunished, but unnoticed.
[3]. See James Sterling’s “Letters from the Slave States.”
[4]. This last paragraph embodies the actual words of Mr. Sterling, published in 1856.
[5]. Similar occurrences are related by Cotton Mather to have taken place in Boston in 1693. Six witnesses, whose affidavits he gives, namely, Samuel Aves, Robert Earle, John Wilkins, Dan Williams, Thomas Thornton, and William Hudson, testify to having repeatedly seen Margaret Rule lifted from her bed up near to the ceiling by an invisible force. It is a cheap way of getting rid of such testimony to say that the witnesses were false or incompetent. The present writer could name at least six witnesses of his own acquaintance now living, gentlemen of character, intelligence, sound senses and sound judgment, who will testify to having seen similar occurrences. The other phenomena, related as witnessed by Peek, are such as hundreds of intelligent men and women in the United States will confirm by their testimony. Indeed, the number of believers in these phenomena may be now fairly reckoned at more than three million.
[6]. There are thousands of intelligent persons in the United States who will testify to the fact of spirit touch. The writer has on several occasions felt, though he has not seen, a live hand, guided by intelligence, that he was fully convinced belonged to no mortal person present. The conditions were such as to debar trick or deception. There are several trustworthy witnesses, whom the writer could name, who have both seen and felt the phenomenon, and tested it as thoroughly as Peek is represented to have done.
[7]. The phenomenon of stigmata appearing on the flesh of impressible mediums is one of the most common of the manifestations of modern Spiritualism. Sometimes written words and sometimes outline representations of objects appear, under circumstances that make deception impossible. The writer has often witnessed them. St. Francis, and many other saints of the Catholic Church, were the subjects of similar phenomena. The late Earl of Shrewsbury, a Catholic nobleman, has published a long account of their occurrence during the present century. The Catholic Church has been always true to the doctrine of the miraculous.
[8]. Author of “The Uprising of a Great People,” “America before Europe,” &c.; also of two large volumes on Modern Spiritualism.
[9]. See Alexander Humboldt’s Letters to Varnhagen.
[10]. See Edouard Laboulaye, “De la Personnalité Divine.”
[11]. Tertullian, a devout Christian, when he wrote the following, would seem to have believed there could be no spirit independent of substance and form: “Nihil enim, si non corpus. Omne quod est, corpus est sui generis; nihil est incorporale, nisi quod non est. Quis enim negabit Deum corpus esse, etsi Deus spiritus est? Spiritus enim corpus sui generis, sua effigie;”—“For there is nothing, if not body. All that is, is body after its kind; nothing is incorporeal except what is not. For who will deny God to be body, albeit God is spirit? For spirit is body of its proper kind, in its proper effigy.” These views are not inconsistent with those entertained by many modern Spiritualists.