itualism abjure its infamy.

They decree its death.

They condemn it to final destruction.

They fasten upon those who continue to practice it the obloquy of history,
and the scorn of mankind for all time to come.

Margaret and Catharine Fox, the youngest of three sisters, were the first
to produce "spiritualistic manifestations."

They are now the most earnest in denunciation of those impostures; the
most eager to dissipate the foolish belief of thousands in the flimsiest
system of deception that was ever cloaked with the hypocrisy of so-called
religion.

When, as by accident, they discovered a method of deceiving those around
them by means of mysterious noises, they were but little children,
innocent of the thought of wrong, ignorant of the world and the world's
guile, and imagining only that what they did was a clever lark, such as
the adult age easily pardons to exuberant and sprightly youth.

Not to them did the base suggestion come that this singular, this simple
discovery, should be the means of deluding the world, of exalting them in
the minds of the weakly credulous and of bringing them fame and splendor
and sumptuous pleasure.

No one who learns their true history can still believe them guilty of the
willful inception of this most grotesque, most transparent and corrupting
of superstitions.

The idea had its monstrous birth in older heads, heads that were seconded
by hearts lacking the very essence of truth and the fountain of honest
human sympathy.

The two children, who had at first delighted, as younglings will, in what
was but a laughable mystification, were dragged into a sordid, wicked and
loathsome speculation, built upon lying and fraud, as unforgivable as the
sin of Satan, and of which they were but the unthinking instruments, often
reluctant and remorseful, yet docile and compliant by nature.

Thus the "Rochester knockings," the example and prototype of all later
so-called spiritualistic "phenomena," began merely in a curious childish
freak, disguised without effort, and which, from the first, was encouraged
to partly formed understandings by the wonder and intense spirit of
inquiry it provoked.

The young operators were carried away by the undreamt-of current of
enthusiasm and awe in which they soon became involved. They felt the
natural need of maintaining with unabating dexterity, that false sense of
the miraculous which by chance they had called forth.

Thus they went from one sta