And from the results gotten thus far from the series of sittings with this “medium” it is safe to predict that the final analysis will place him in the same category as all others to date.
[92] According to Spiritualistic publications The Dialectical Society never made a full report. The “Reports” of sub-committees only were published by Spiritualist papers used by writers in books but such reports were based on “hear-say” evidence taken from Spiritists. They told their ghost stories to Committees and they were believed. There never was a unanimous report or conclusion. The non-Spiritual (?) members of the Dialectical Society refused to have anything to do with the investigation. The great majority of the Committee were full-fledged Spiritualists, and the few whom they claimed to have convinced were simply credulous.
[93] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle seems to imagine that all the newspapers in the world are against him. After his Australian tour he accused the Australian papers of refusing to publish the truth about his seances. Writing about American newspapers in his book, “An American Adventure,” he says: “The editors seem to place the intelligence of the public very low, and to imagine that they cannot be attracted save by vulgar, screaming headlines.
“The American papers have a strange way also of endeavoring to compress the whole meaning of some item into a few words of headline, which, as often as not, are slang.”
Even in Canada Sir Arthur claims to have badly used by the newspapers. In “Our American Adventure” he writes: “There were some rather bitter attacks in the Toronto papers, including the one leader in the Evening Telegram, which was so narrow and illiberal that I do not think the most provincial paper in Britain could have been guilty of it.
“It was to the effect that British lecturers took money out of the town, that they did not give the money’s worth, and that they should be discouraged.
“‘Poking Them in the Eye’ was the dignified title.
“It did not seem to occur to the writer that a comic opera or a bedroom comedy was equally taking the money out of the town, but that the main purpose served by lectures, whether one agreed with the subject or not, was that they kept the public in first hand touch with the great current questions of mankind. I am bound to say that no other Toronto paper sank to the depth of the Evening Telegram but the general atmosphere was the least pleasant that I had met with in my American travels.”
[94] In an article in Truth, April, 1923, entitled “The New Revelation,” by Rev. P. J. Cormican, S. J., he asks:
“Does the knighted prophet of the New Revelation (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) tell the whole truth about Spiritism? We think not. He says nothing about the evil consequences, physical, intellectual and moral, to those who dabble in Spiritism. He gives a one-sided account of the matter. He says nothing about what Spiritism has done, and is still doing, to fill our lunatic asylums all over the world. There are over thirty thousand lunatics in England alone who lost their mind through this modern necromancy. Doyle does not even hint at the countless cases of insanity and suicide, of blasphemy and obscenity, of lying and deception, of broken homes and violated troth, all caused by Spiritism. To suppose that a God of truth and sanctity is giving a new message through such sources and with such consequences, is blasphemy pure and simple. Furthermore, to assert that this New Revelation is to supersede a worn-out creed is both gratuitous and absurd. Christianity will last till the crack of doom, when titled prophets shall have ceased to cross the Atlantic in quest of American shekels.”