I said, 'Professor Eustis, I demand that you meet me again.' Again he said, 'Never.' I said, 'Professor Eustis, do you intend to make public your charge of imposture?' Yes, sir.' I said, 'Then, sir, in the presence of this company I demand that you meet me again, when I will submit to any conditions you may choose to impose upon me. You may put me in a wire cage; you may bind my hands and feet to my chair, but I demand you shall meet me again.' Mrs. Hall then said, 'Professor Eustis, Mr. Willis is my guest, and I demand, as a matter of justice, that you meet him again.' The rest of the company also expressed their desire, and he at last consented. The excitement threw me into a violent fit of hysteria. As soon as I had recovered, and a carriage was called, I turned to Professor Eustis and asked him if he would be in his room the next day, at noon. He said, 'Very well, I will be there.' I went to my room at Cambridge, where I had another of those fearful attacks. I went through it alone, and was found next morning nearly dead, and was too ill to think anything about my engagement; but about four o'clock I happened to remember it. I said to a friend, 'I have a very important engagement-will you go to Professor Eustis and tell him how very ill I am; tell him I am scarcely able to drag myself from my bed.' But Professor Eustis, when he found I did not come, went directly from his study, and instead of spending an hour in giving his scientific lecture, he spent it in denouncing me as a villain and impostor, thus prejudicing my case, and prejudicing the whole committee against me, while I was lying helpless in my room, trusting in his honour.

"I was very ill for several days. When I resumed my classes, the Professor who was lecturing, and who was one of the faculty, said to me, 'Mr. Willis, you will please remain behind; you are doubtless aware of the grave charges that have been made to the faculty, seriously involving your moral character.' I said 'Doctor, I am not surprised, but I am ready to meet them whenever you like, and the sooner the better, for my health is suffering from the doubt. Whom shall I meet?' You will meet no one but your faculty-the faculty of the Divinity School -the President of the College and the Professors of the Divinity School, and your accuser.' Very well, sir, I will be present.' I was then very feeble in health, but I felt what was coming. Dr. Walker assured me I should meet with no one else. On the morning of the day, there came from him a most informal message, saying, 'Professor Eustis has requested the privilege of bringing a friend;' and had I received the shadow of a hint as to who this person was, and the purpose for which he was to be brought, I should have procured the services of a lawyer. I had

been summoned before my teachers, men whom I had learned to love and respect, almost to reverence, and I could not believe they would summon a weak, sick, defenceless young man into their presence and allow him to be tortured. I sent for a friend of mine, the late Rev. B. S. King, and explained to him the circumstances, and asked him to go with me. He said, 'I am very sorry I cannot go with you, as 1 have to lecture at that time; but don't give yourself the slightest uneasiness, I will go and see Dr. Walker, and will come back and tell you the result of my interview with him.' Hour after hour passed away and Mr. King did not return, and I began to feel something was wrong. In his interview with Dr. Walker, Mr. King found I was already tried, convicted, and condemned unheard; and he felt so badly about it that he had not the heart to come back and tell me, so he went on to Boston without seeing me. It was four o'clock, and I sent to another clergyman, and related to him my circumstances. He said, 'I will go with you, I do not think you ought to go without some one.'

"The man Professor Eustis had taken with him was a Dr. Wyman, intensely bitter against Spiritualism, and he took him with him for the express purpose of having his aid in browbeating me, and inveigling me into self-contradictions. The Professor had his charges all drawn up; he gave a very literal account of the manifestations of the two evenings, but he acknowledged in response, that many things occurred for which he could not account in the slightest, and, said he, 'I even watched the shadow of Mr. Willis on the wall, and I could not see that he moved.' When he came to the accordion manifestations, they seemed to stagger the Rev. Doctors; they could not see how the accordion could be manipulated by my toes, or how it could possibly respond to mental questions put by different members of the circle. They put some questions to the Professor, and Dr. Wyman took them up and said, 'Oh! ask Willis about that;' and turning to me he said, 'Willis, how do you do that trick?' assuming at once that I was a scoundrel. Said I, 'Dr. Wyman, when the faculty are ready to hear what I have to say, I will tell all I have to tell, and I will address my reply to them;' even then my teachers allowed their prejudices against Spiritualism to lock their ears against me. Finally my friend, seeing how the investigation was being carried on, and being a man of position and influence, put a stop to the whole thing. He took Dr. Wyman on one side, and said, 'Dr. Wyman, it is outrageous the course you have pursued.' 'Oh,' returned he, Mr. Willis is not a rascal; he is a gentleman, his countenance shews that, but he is insane.' The next morning I was summoned to the study of the Rev. Dr. James Walker, a metaphysician and a celebrated

6

divine. In the most wily and shrewd manner he said, 'We have come to the conclusion that the investigation held last evening was not of such a nature as to warrant our drawing any inference from it, and that we were not the tribunal to carry on the investigation, and until you can go before such a tribunal we wish you to withdraw from the institution. This will be the best course, as nothing will be put upon our books.' They were ashamed to put upon their records the transactions of that evening. I could scarcely believe my senses. I looked at Dr. Walker in silence. Finally I said, 'Every man has a right to be deemed innocent till his guilt is established. You have constituted yourselves as a jury, have listened to the Professor with a man to act as his counsel, and now I demand that you hear me, and until you do so I shall resume my position in my class.' A meeting of the faculty was summoned and they effected my expulsion, but I had the sympathy of the whole of my country, and even from abroad came letters of sympathy. The entire press with the exception of the Boston Courier, which was inspired by my accusers, was on my side.

But the

"But the thing broke me down completely; old and young, friends whom I had known from my childhood, passed me by. I had a tender loving heart, and it was death to me in its worst form the crucifixion of every sensibility of my nature. I was broken down in health and have never been well since. work of Spiritualism has become endeared to me by these sufferings. At this day Spiritualism has become to some degree popular and respected, and you can form no idea of the bitterness of the persecution in that early day.

"For eleven months after my first experience in these manifestations I was fighting with all my energies with these influences, for I knew not where they would lead me. I had passed from the views received in my early childhood and had gone to the opposite extreme. I was a Materialist, and had no faith in immortality, because I had no demonstration of it. The Bible afforded me no demonstration, neither did Nature, and I knew if I accepted Spiritualism just what it would bring me to. I saw that I would have to give up my position, reputation, friends, everything; and I confess I did not feel equal to it, because I possess a very sensitive nature and organism, as you can all perceive, and I am exceedingly tender and strong in my affections, and naturally conservative. After I had been fighting eleven months against these things, and had been reading everything I could get hold of against Spiritualism, one evening, in perfect despair, I went to call upon a friend, and I explained the whole phenomena to him in his study, and gave a narration of my experiences from beginning to end; and at the

conclusion I said, 'Now, my dear friend, what shall I do? If I am insane I want to know it, and to be put where insane people belong.' He said, 'My dear boy, since this thing is entirely beyond your control, I advise you to give yourself up to it, follow where it leads.'

"That evening I had just extinguished my light, and was turning from my study to my bedroom when I mentally exclaimed, 'Take me, ye powers, whatever ye be, and do with me as you will.' I felt the struggle was over. I saw a beautiful phosphorescent light filling the atmosphere before me, and as I looked it expanded until it became large enough to contain a bust, and there I saw the most beautiful being I ever beheld, and I knew it was my mother who died in my infancy, leaving me to the tender mercies of others. Oh! how I had longed for a mother's love! Many and many a night I have gone to bed and wept myself asleep for the love of a mother, such as I saw constantly lavished upon other children. She told me she had long endeavoured to make me feel her presence, and that her love had not been inactive because she could not make me realise her presence. But in the midst of this manifestation, so beautiful and chaste, the thought flashed over me-it is all folly. The terrible idea seized me that these things were the precursors of insanity, and I said to myself this is part of the same hallucination that has been upon me for the past eleven months. My mother saw these things passing in my mind, and she said, 'Listen, and I will demonstrate this matter to you!' and she went on to state circumstances in her life-circumstances known only to herself and my grandmother, then living about three miles from the University. She told me she had taken these means of convincing me, and also that it might arrest the attention of minds not otherwise easily attainable. The next day, after I had fulfilled my duties at the college, I called on my grandmother, and propounded certain questions to the old lady, and I shall never forget her amazement. 'Why!' said she, 'where on earth did you get that information, it was known to no human being but your mother and myself." Said I, 'Grandmother, my mother came to me last night and told me these things; and the old lady declared she must believe me. And never from that day to this have I had one single doubt. Why? I should just as soon doubt the sun in the heavens, or my own existence.'

THE LATE SIR DAVID BREWSTER.

By BENJAMIN COLEMAN.

THE conduct of the late Sir David Brewster in his relations with the celebrated medium, Mr. Daniel D. Home, and the controversy which arose in the year 1855, form a prominent episode in the history of English Spiritualism.*

That "dead men tell no tales" is an adage which Spiritualists cannot admit. We know that the so-called dead do in many instances, and under certain conditions, return and tell us many tales.

But we who have had much experience are cautious in accepting all that is revealed to us in this way, and were I now dealing with a message purporting to have come from the spirit of the departed philosopher through the ordinary channels of mediumship, I should hesitate before venturing to make a public announcement of the fact. There are, however, other means by which the voices of the dead speak to us-namely, by the records of their public and private acts when living. I have just found one, which coming as it does through the mediumship of Sir David Brewster's own daughter, will not be disputed; and as it tends to justify the statements made by those who stood forward in 1857 to defend Mr. Home and the genuine character of the manifestations witnessed by Sir David Brewster and Lord Brougham, it may, I think with propriety, find a place in the pages of this journal. As there are, since that period, many readers of this Magazine who have become converts to the doctrine which it promulgates, and as it is still a common thing to hear from opponents that Lord Brougham and Sir David Brewster had examined and exposed the delusive character of Spiritualism, it will, perhaps, be as well for the better understanding of what follows, to give an epitome of the events which led to the controversy of 1855, in which I took a prominent part and was directly contradicted by Sir David Brewster in the public press.

The late Mr. William Cox, of Jermyn Street, with whom Mr. Home was residing in 1854-5, invited Lord Brougham and Sir David Brewster to a private séance; and Mr. Cox, who was an intelligent and much respected gentleman, told me the following day how profoundly impressed both of his visitors had been with what they had witnessed, and he described minutely to me the

*A full account will be found in the Appendix to Mr. Home's bookIncidents of my Life.