He says that they differed from him and criticised him severely, but ultimately converted him to a higher faith than the Anglicanism he had previously preached.
Myers comments (Pr. XI, 69):
"The tone of the spirits towards Mr. Moses himself is habitually courteous and respectful. But occasionally they have some criticism which pierces to the quick, and which goes far to explain to me Mr. Moses's unwillingness to have the books fully inspected during his lifetime."
We have no space for any of this script, and it probably would not tend much to edification if we had. After a good deal of reading and pondering, I find the proportion of Moses' self in all these proceedings looming in my apprehension larger and larger. The benefits he got from them look to me like that portion—how large a portion I am not saying—of the benefits of prayer which are independent of external results, and consist in the effect upon character of intense absorption in an inspiring subject.
Myers testifies that Moses' heteromatic writing announced the death of a friend of Myers before it could have been known by other means, and that the writing closely resembled hers. Moses himself declares, and many fairly judicious people believed him, that among other marvels, the writing told him, in advance of any other possible agency, of the death of President Garfield, and of a suicide in London under a steam roller. The latter statement has several confirmatory witnesses.
The account of Moses is given here, not so much because of himself, as to prepare for later appearances of Imperator, Rector, Doctor & Co., which will be of more interest.
In America there was of course not leisure enough to continue the Am. S. P. R., which had been started a couple of years after the English one, and it was merged with the English Society, becoming a "branch." In 1887 Dr. Richard Hodgson, who had been lecturing at Cambridge, was sent over as secretary to take charge of it, and soon began a set of experiences which immeasurably surpass all others in connection with the subject.
In 1886, Professor William James had found a remarkable medium in Mrs. Piper, a New England woman of average position and education, and Dr. Hodgson devoted himself to her phenomena. In trance she spoke as a self-alleged French physician who called himself Dr. Jean Phinuit Schliville, and who professed to be in the other world in association with friends of people who came to sit with Mrs. Piper. Dr. Phinuit professed to give messages from them, and to deliver the sitters' messages to them. The only thing apparently unprecedented in these proceedings was the consistently dramatic character of Dr. Phinuit himself, and the verisimilitude, varying but often astounding, between the utterances, dramatic characterizations and recollections of the alleged message senders, and the persons as known in life.