“Reader, have you ever entered the respectable saloon? Have you ever watched the stupid stare of the inebriate when the eye grew less and less lustrous, slowly closing, the muscles relaxing, and the victim of appetite sinking over on the floor in beastly drunkenness? Oh, how dense the fumes of mingled tobacco and alcohol! Oh, what misery confined in those walls! If you have witnessed such scenes, then we need describe no further. If you have not, then you had not better hear the tale of woe. Imagine to yourselves a bar-room with all its sots, and their number multiplied indefinitely, while conscience-seared and bloated fiends stand behind the bar, from whence they deal out death and damnation, and the picture is complete. One has just arrived from earth. He is yet uninitiated in the mysteries and miseries of those which, like hungry lions, await him. He died while intoxicated—was frozen while lying in the gutter, and consequently is attracted toward this society. He possessed a good intellect, but it was shattered beyond repair by his debauches.
“ ‘Ye ar' a fresh one, aint ye?’ coarsely queried a sot, just then particularly communicative.
“ ‘Why, yes, I have just died, as they call it, and 'taint so bad a change after all; only I suppose there'll be dry times here for the want of something stimulant.’
“ ‘Not so dry; lots of that all the time, and jolly times too.’
“ ‘Drink! Can you drink, then?’
“ ‘Yes, we just can, and feel as nice as you please. But all can't, not unless they find one on earth just like them. [pg 117] You go to earth, and mix with your chums; and when you find one whose thoughts you can read, he's your man. Form a connection with him, and when he gets to feeling good, you'll feel so too.—There, do you understand me? I always tell all fresh ones the glorious news, for how they would suffer if it wasn't for this blessed thing.’
“ ‘I'll try, no mistake.’
“ ‘Here's a covey,’ spoke an ulcerous-looking being; ‘he's of our stripe. Tim, did you hear what an infernal scrape I got into last night? No, you didn't. Well, I went to our friend Fred's; he didn't want to drink when I found him; his dimes looked so extremely large. Well, I destroyed that feeling, and made him think he was dry. He drank, and drank, more than I wanted him to, until I was so drunk that I could not break my connection with him, or control his mind. He undertook to go home, fell into the snow, and came near freezing to death. I suffered awfully, ten times as much as when I died.’... Reader, we draw the curtain over scenes like these, such as are daily occurring in this society.”
In these cases the whole evil of the indulgences of course falls upon the mediums; and who would wish to assume personal relation with such a world, and be forced to bear in their own bodies the evils of the unhallowed indulgences of unseen spirits, against their will?
Other scenes represented as taking place in the spirit land, are most grotesque and silly and would be taken as a burlesque upon Spiritualism, were they not put forth in all gravity by the friends and advocates of that so-called new revelation. Thus Judge Edmunds, giving an account of what he had seen in the spirit world, mentions the case of an old woman busy churning, who promised him, if he would call again, a drink of buttermilk; he speaks [pg 118] of men fighting, of courtezans trying to continue their lewd conduct; of a mischievous boy who split a dog's tail open, and put a stick in it, just to witness its misery; of the owner of the dog, who, attracted by its cries, discovered the cause, and beat the boy, who fled, but was pursued and beaten and kicked far up the road. See Edmund's “Spiritualism,” Vol. II, pp. 135-144, 181, 182, 186, 189. Surely here are the diakka playing their pranks in all their glory.