“Dear Madam:
“Hundreds of thousands have believed through you and you alone. Hundreds of thousands eagerly ask you whether all the glorious light that they fancied you have given them, was but the false flicker of a common dip-candle of fraud.
“If, as you say, you were forced to pursue this imposture from childhood, I can forgive you, and I am sure that God will; for he turns not back the truly repentant. I will not upbraid you. I am sure you have suffered as much as any penalty, human or divine, could cause you to suffer. The disclosures that you make take from me all that I cherished most. There is nothing left for me now but to hope for the reality of that repose which death promises us.
“It is perhaps better that the delusion should be at last swept away by one single word, and that word ‘fraud.’
“I know that the pursuit of this shadowy belief has wrought upon my brain and that I am no longer my old self. Money I have spent in thousands and thousands of dollars within a few short years to propitiate the ‘mediumistic’ intelligence. It is true that never once have I received a message or the token of a word that did not leave a still unsatisfied longing in my heart, a feeling that it was not really my loved one after all, who was speaking to me, or if it was my loved one, that he was changed, that I hardly knew him and that he hardly knew me. Oh! how I have hated the thought that used to come to me sometimes, in spite of myself, that it was not really he. But that must have been the true intuition. It is better that the delusion is past, after all, for had I kept on in that way, I am sure I should have gone mad. The constant seeking, the frequent pretended response, its unsatisfying meaning, the sense of distance and change between me and my loved one—oh! it has been horrible, horrible!
“He who is dying of thirst and has the sweet cup ever snatched from his lips, just as the first drop touches them—he alone can know what in actual things is the similitude of this spiritualistic torture.
“God bless you, for I think that you now speak the truth. You have my forgiveness at least, and I believe that thousands of others will forgive you, for the atonement made in season wipes out much of the stain of the early sin.
“Yours sincerely,
“Anna Suzanne.”
To these letters and to hundreds of others which Mrs. Kane and her sister Mrs. Jencken have received, this volume is their response.
But besides this, they have appeared in public on the platform, as an earnest of their present sincerity, and will probably continue so to appear in various parts of this country and Europe.