"The practices which have been considered are of heathen origin. They originated with the ancient heathen; they were spread over a greater part of the heathen world; and they continue to pervade and curse it to the present time. Among numerous heathen tribes at the present day, scarcely a calamity occurs—a death, a flood, a fit of sickness, or an instance of death—but some poor creature (and often more than one) is accused and put to death, as being the cause of it. 'The sick man is bewitched: who has bewitched him? His death (if he chance to die) has been brought about by evil spirits: who has sent the spirits upon him?' To get an answer to these questions, some old hag or conjurer is consulted; the cause of the mischief is quickly discovered, and an innocent person is put to death. Probably hundreds die every year after this manner, among the heathen, even in this nineteenth century! And the case would soon be no better among ourselves, if we were to go, extensively and confidently, into the practice of consulting with familiar spirits. The spirits would unravel all mysteries for us; they would reveal all secrets; and not a man, woman, or child would long be safe from their malicious accusations.
"Something more than a year ago, the Lunatic Asylum in Maine took fire, and a portion of its inmates were smothered and consumed. And there are hundreds of persons now in the state, who affirm that the building was set on fire by the keepers, with a view to cover up and conceal their own wickedness. These persons know it was so; they have not the shadow of a doubt on the subject. Why? Not that they have a particle of evidence to this effect from our world, but because the spirits have so informed them. Now, let these utterances become common, and be commonly received, and in three months' time those keepers might every one of them be dragged to the gallows, or the stake, while they were as innocent of the charge laid against them as a child unborn.
"I refer to this instance just to show the sin, the evil, the exceeding peril, of indulging in those practices which have been exposed. Let all those who read these things, then, beware of them and shun them. If any of us are capable of becoming mediums, as they are called, we had better not know it; or, if we know it, we had better refrain from all experiments. To tamper with such a power is to tamper with an already shattered nervous system, the only effect of which will be to shatter it the more.
"There is nothing more striking than the difference between those representations of the future world which are made known in the Bible, and which we know are true, and those which are put forth by the revealers of our own times. The former are solemn, exciting, impressive, some of them awfully so, others gloriously. While the latter, as Professor Stowe says, are 'so uniformly and monotonously silly, that we are compelled to think, if these are really the spirits of the dead, in dying they must have lost what little of common sense they ever possessed. If these are actual specimens of the spiritual world, then this world, hard and imperfect as it is, is altogether the most respectable part of God's creation.'
"In the Bible, we have frequent accounts of persons who were raised from the dead—who actually returned from the spirit world to this. But they returned uniformly with sealed lips. In not a single instance did they make any disclosures. But our modern revealers pursue a very different course. They practise no reserve. They go into the minutest particulars,—sometimes into the most disgusting details,—and publish, as one expresses it, 'a penny magazine of the spiritual world.'"
In the language of the Puritan Recorder, "The worst of the evil is the soul-hardening familiarity they produce with the most awful subjects ever offered for human contemplation. We know of nothing in human experience so fatally destructive of all that reverence for the spiritual, that awe of the unseen, that tender emotion, as well as solemn interest, which connect themselves with the idea of the other life. Who, that has a Christian heart, would not prefer the silence of the grave to the thought of the dear departed one in the midst of such imaginings, and such scenic associations as are usually connected with the performances of the spirit rappers? 'They are not dead, but sleep.' 'They enter into peace,' says the prophet. And then the precious and consoling addition—'They sleep in Jesus;' meaning, beyond all doubt, a state of rest, of calmness, of security, of undisturbed and beatific vision—far removed from all resemblance to this bustling life—a state in all respects the opposite of that which fancy pictures as belonging to the scenes presented in the manifestations of spiritual rappings, and spiritual table liftings and all those spiritual pantomimes, which seem to be becoming more and more extravagant and grotesque in proportion to the infidel credulity with which they are received."
Should any think, by reading what we have offered upon this subject in the preceding pages, that we have imputed guilt and deception to mediums, who are believed to be, many of them, above such trickery, we would merely refer such to page 29 of the Reply of Veriphilos Credens to the communications supposed to have been written by Dr. Enoch Pond, professor in the Bangor Seminary, as published in the columns of the Puritan Recorder. The reviewer says, "To suppose that mediums could practise deception on men of shrewdness and caution implies a greater credulity than does a faith in the most startling of their performances." "There is not the slightest degree of evidence," says this writer, "that such a case has ever occurred;" and yet on the selfsame page he says, "There is no doubt that some mediums, when the sounds and motions have failed to come in the usual mysterious way, have counterfeited them by some sly motions of their feet and hands. I have seen such things done, in some instances!"
The same author says, page 63, "I have not attempted to justify any reliance on disclosures made to us in the way of rappings. I think it altogether unsafe to do so, for the declaration has already come to us, from what purports to be the spirits themselves, that all these manifestations are of a low order, and are produced by the lowest grade of spirits."
As to the plea that "spirits must make the sounds," to account for the intelligence communicated, it being impossible for mere "electricity to originate facts," we reply by affirming that there is no intelligence given beyond a certain limit; i.e., the mind of some one or ones in connection, either present or absent, for it makes no difference. For available purposes, a person a thousand or ten thousand miles distant may yield all the amount of intelligence required in a given case. Distance is no obstacle whatever. Electricity counts neither time nor space. For instance, the transmission of electricity through a conducting substance is instantaneous. A wire, or other conductor, may have motion communicated to its whole length at the same moment, whatever that length may be; and it is stated that an electro-magnetic impulse may be transmitted at the rate of one hundred and eighty thousand miles in a second, thus outstripping the sun in its march!
A large number of intelligent individuals, who, for a year or two past, have instituted a series of experiments upon this matter of "intelligence," have found that in no case has information been imparted beyond what existed in their own minds or that of some kindred or friend. Finding this to be the case, they have wisely come to the conclusion that spirits have never originated a solitary idea; that is, disembodied spirits; and as to the spirit within a man, in his corporeal state, why cannot it command as much influence over vital electricity as in its disembodied existence? Since both parties claim to perform by the same agent, and both claim this agent to be that of vital electricity, we have also come to the same conclusion, with a host of others, that the "calling for spirits is mere garnish and fog, by which the real agency in the case is concealed."