Would not my private secretary, John William Sargent, come back to me and tell me the secrets of the beyond if it were possible? Did he not, just before he died, tell me that he would come to me if there was any way of doing it? More than being a private secretary, he was my friend,—true, loyal, sacrificing,—knew me for thirty years. He has not come back to me and he would if it were possible.
I had compacts with a round dozen. Each one promised me faithfully to come back if it were possible. I have even gone so far as to create secret codes and hand-grips. Sargent had a certain word he was to repeat to me; William Berol, the eminent mental expert, gave me the secret handshake a few hours before he died and did not regain consciousness after silently telling me that he remembered our compact; Atlanta Hall, niece of President Pierce, a woman ninety years of age, who had had seances with the greatest mediums that visited Boston, called for me just before her death, clasped my hand and gave me our agreed-upon grip which she was to give me through a medium. They have never come back to me! Does that prove anything? I have attended a number of seances since their death, the mediums have called for them, and when their spirit forms were supposed to appear not one of them could give me the proper signal. Would I have received it? I’ll wager I would have. There was love of some kind between each of these friends who are gone and myself. It is needless to point out the love of a mother and son; the love of a real friend; the love of a woman of ninety toward a man who held her dear; the love of a philosopher toward a man who respected his life study,—they were all loves, each strong, each binding. If these persons, with all the love they bore in their heart for me and all the love I have in my heart for them, did not return, what about those who did not hold me close, who had no interest in me? Why should they come back and mine not?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has repeatedly told the Spiritualists that I will eventually see the light and embrace Spiritualism. If the memory of a loved one, gone to the protection of the hands of the Great Mystifier means Spiritualism, then truly I do believe in it. But if Spiritualism is to be founded on the tricks of exposed mediums, feats of magic, resort to trickery, then I say unflinchingly I do not believe, and more, I will not believe. I have said many times that I am willing to believe, want to believe, will believe, if the Spiritualists can show any substantiated proof, but until they do I shall have to live on, believing from all the evidence shown me and from what I have experienced that Spiritualism has not been proven satisfactorily to the world at large and that none of the evidence offered has been able to stand up under the fierce rays of investigation.
It is not for us to prove that the mediums are dishonest, it is for them to prove that they are honest. They have made a statement, the most serious statement in recent times, for it affects the welfare, the mental attitude and means a complete revolution of age-old beliefs and customs of the world. If there is anything to Spiritualism then the world should know it. If there is nothing to it, if it is, as it appears, built on a flimsy framework of misdirection, then too the universe must be told. There is too much at stake for a flighty passing, for unsubstantiated truths.
APPENDIX
A
Statement of Margaret Fox
“Do you know that there is something behind the shadowy mask of Spiritualism that the public can hardly guess at? I am stating now what I know, not because I actually participated in it, for I would never be a party to such promiscuous nastiness, but because I had plenty of opportunity, as you may imagine, of verifying it. Under the name of this dreadful, this horrible, hypocrisy—Spiritualism—everything that is improper, bad and immoral is practiced. They go even so far as to have what they call ‘Spiritual children.’ They pretend to something like the immaculate conception! Could anything be more blasphemous, more disgusting, more thinly deceptive than that? In London I went in disguise to a quiet seance at the house of a wealthy man, and I saw a so-called materialization. The effect was produced with the aid of luminous paper, the luster of which was reflected upon the operator. The figure thus displayed was that of a woman, virtually nude, being enveloped in transparent gauze, the face alone being concealed. This was one of those seances to which the privileged non-believing friends of believing Spiritualists could have access. But there are other seances where none but the most tried and trusted are admitted, and where there are shameless goings on that vie with the secret Saturnalia of the Romans. I could not describe these things to you, because I would not.”
From “The Death Blow to Spiritualism,” by Ruben Briggs Davenport. Page 50.