“Would that I had the power to give you further evidences. JAMES NICHOLS.'

"During these various experiments, the medium was walking about the room, and did not touch my slates unless in my presence, and then only casually. Three of the names were of persons who once lived here in this mortai life, and have passed to the other world. If this writing was not produced by a conscious individuality disembodied, whence the power? And whence the individuality?"

Scarcely had I read the above account, than, turning to another column of the paper, I read the following statement by a writer (not a Spiritualist), taken from the Denver (Colorado) Daily News of July, 1880. The genuineness of the phenomena through Mrs. A. R. Simpson, to whom he refers, had been previously tested repeatedly by personal friends of my own in Chicago:

"Mrs. Simpson handed two slates to the reporter, also a needle and some thread, then leaving the room, requested him to sew the two slates together through the binding on the border. This was done effectually, the two slates being securely sewed together, and the outsides marked to show that they could not possibly be separated without the fact being known. After a few seconds, during which the writer never let go of the slates, he was requested to cut them apart. When this was done, writing was found upon the inside slate, in answer to a question that had been put in the usual way, by writing, and folding it up in a paper."

In this double experiment there was manifested not only direct writing, but the power of reading what was written on a paper, folded so that by no means known to physical science could it be read. Here was a double guaranty of genuineness. Nothing could have been written beforehand by some occult chemical means on the slate; for the writing was in answer to a question written on the spot by the sitter, and the paper was folded so that no writing on it could be read by human eyesight. The clairvoyance was proved by the answer on the slate, and the direct writing

was proved not only by the conditions, but by its being in reply to what was contained in a paper not yet unfolded.

The San Francisco Sunday Chronicle of September, 1879, says that Mrs. E. W. Lennett, at 817 Bush Street, in that city, is a remarkable medium for independent slate-writing. It tells us that a skeptic recently took to her a covered, double slate, joined by hinges, put on one of the inside surfaces, with his own hand, a bit of slate-pencil, folded the slates together, and held them with both hands. The medium, without even stopping the conversation in which she was engaged, also took hold of the slate with one hand, and immediately the pencil could be heard scratching over the surface of the slate within. When the pencil ceased, and the slate was opened, the entire side of one slate was filled with writing in a plain, bold hand, in English, while the other was partially filled with writing in French, a language the medium is entirely unacquainted with, but which the gentleman in question thoroughly understood. As a still further test, the medium gave him the slate to hold in his own hands, without her being in contact with it in any way, when the result was the same as before, the slate being filled with writing.

Will you say that all this host of witnesses are fooled, or that they lie? A simple experiment of your own would soon prove to you that you were in just the same predicament for your honesty would force you, in spite of your bitter prejudices, to testify to the truth.

Spiritualism, even if true, you think ought to be dismissed from scientific consideration as immoral in its tendency. It is not necessary for me here to discuss the question, whether Spiritualism, being a cosmical fact, is moral or not in its tendency. I should as soon think of questioning the morality of the interstellar ether, or of the principle of gravitation. "Truth before all things," should be the motto of the man of science. Yet your

objection, impertinent as it is, is a common one; and we often hear the question put in regard to Spiritualism, "What is the use of it?"

The questions, "What is the use of the human race?" "What is the use of the universe?" would be quite as much to the purpose. If falsehood and depravity are manifested by spirits, so they are by the whole human family. If incitements to evil come from the spirit-world, so they do from this. The only question for science to settle is, Do these claimed phenomena occur? And in failing to place this as the scientific limit to your argument, you show that you are an untrustworthy guide on a subject which you affect to treat from the scientific point of view.

If our phenomena are destined to change the notions of scientific men as to the constitution of matter, or as to a seeming infraction of laws which may be subject to a hitherto unrecognized spiritual law, then you must accommodate your notions to the facts, and not think to get rid of the latter by crying out against them as interruptions of the sequences of nature.

If these apparent interruptions are permitted by the . great Orderer, let us summon the faith that will enable us to see in them a dispensation nothing less than divine. No matter how low, how distasteful, or how apparently immoral they may seem to our finite and unprepared minds, let us be sure they mean something for our good which it is our business to find out, however difficult the problem may seem at first. It is the absence of a wise faith in God and nature, which prompts these despairing cries of a violation of natural law, or of a loosening of moral restrictions. Order and law prevail in all that may seem chaotic to your distorted view of the spirit-world; and your fears that all is going to the bad, if Spiritualism is allowed to vindicate its claims to scientific attention, are chimerical and gratui tous, if not blasphemous.

The aim of the philosophy of Ulrici is "to demonstrate on the basis of facts that to the soul, in contradistinction to nature, not simply independent existence, but also the supremacy belongs, both of right and in fact." Can you wonder then that he welcomed the facts of Spiritualism, and, seeing the gravity of the testimony, asked for it a scientific investigation?

"The testimony," says Challis, Professor of Astronomy, Cambridge, England, "has been so abundant and consentaneous, that either the facts must be admitted to be such as are reported, or the possibility of certifying facts by human testimony must be given up."

Your easy cry of jugglery has been doing service ever since 1847. Bellachini, Houdin, Hamilton, Hermann, Jacobs,* Rhys, and other eminent professors of the conjuring art, have declared that medial phenomena are not explicable by the theory of prestidigitation; yet you fall back on it as if it were your only way of retreat from the Spiritual theory. Why not employ your great abilities, your learning, and your meditative powers in bringing forward some other theory in explanation, which may at least have the merit of novelty and of reason? If you will do it, you will do what the sages of all the centuries have been unable to accomplish. Let this be an incentive to your ambition.

* Jacobs, a well-known German professor, says (1880), that, after having thoroughly examined what are termed Spiritual phenomena, he can declare though he can imitate a great many of the more startling exhibitions of power accorded us by the disembodied — that what he is enabled to do as a sleight-ofhand performer "has nothing in common with Spiritualism."

CHAPTER IV.

CLAIRVOYANCE A SPIRITUAL FACULTY.-TRANCE-SPEAKING ~ UNSCIENTIFIC OBJECTIONS OF SPECIALISTS IN SCIENCE. —

MORE TESTIMONY.

We are told that the Spiritualist is the victim of an illu sion; that he has none of the "wariness" becoming the scientific mind; that he "seeks for comfort at the expense of truth;" that "sentiment and imagination have made that true to him which is not true; whereas the spirit of science is that attitude of mind which abhors delusion as the most colossal of errors."

It is only the self-complacency of ignorance that could invent such objections. Imagine men like Zöllner and his professional associates, all trained and accomplished physicists, watching the movements of a glass bell under the table, and being so deficient in "wariness" as to testify to seeing what they did not see, and to hearing what they did not hear, and to touching what they did not touch!

"It is from no dread of annihilation," says Alfred R. Wallace, "that I have gone into this subject of Spiritualism. I came to the inquiry utterly unbiased by hopes or fears, because I knew that my belief could not affect the reality, and with an ingrained prejudice against even such a word as spirit, which I have hardly yet overcome.”

Dr. John Elliotson, F.R.S., one of the most scientific of English physicians, and for several years editor of The Zoist in London, had advocated extreme Sadducean and mater.alistic views almost to the end of his life, although he