alism I
have yet read--and I have studied many of them--but it may be taken to
include the latest views on the subject. Amongst the revelations which
he gives, there is one purporting to come from a spirit who "had been a
Catholic and was still a Catholic, but had not fared better than the
Protestants; there were Buddhists and Mahommedans in her sphere, but all
fared alike." Another spirit informed Sir A. Doyle that he had been a
freethinker, but "had not suffered in the next life for that reason."
This is not the occasion, and in no way am I the man, to tackle the
subject of spiritualism, but this at least I think may be said, that the
person who argues that the whole thing is a fraud and deception does not
know what he is talking about. Look at the history of the world--_Quod
semper_, _quod ubique_, almost _quod ab omnibus_. The records of early
missionaries--Jesuits especially--teem with accounts of the same kind of
phenomena as we read of in connection with seances to-day, occurring in
all sorts of places and amongst widely separated races of mankind. We
have it in the _Odyssey_; we have it in Cicero and in Pliny; we have it
in the Bible. All this is not a mere matter of imposition.

In a very curious book recently published (_Some Revelations as to
"Raymond_," by a Plain Citizen; London, Kegan Paul), to which some
attention may now be devoted, the writer, himself a firm believer in
spiritualism and one obviously in a position to write about it, points
out that the old term "magic" has been relegated to the performances of
conjurers, and the terminology so altered as to make spiritualism appear
to be a new gospel, whereas the contrary is the case. "The impression
prevailed that civilised people were in presence of a new order of
phenomena, and were acquiring a new outlook into the regions of the
Unknown; whereas the truth was that they were merely repeating, under
new social conditions and in a new environment, the same experiences
that had happened to their ancestors during some thousands of years."
Here I may interject the remark that as far as my reading and knowledge
go, no spirit has ever had a good word to say for the Catholic religion.
What that Church thinks about spiritualism has been made quite clear,
and that is enough for Catholics. Before leaving the Plain Citizen, we
must not omit to notice one strange hypothesis of his, all the stranger
as coming from a professed spiritualist. He maintains--perhaps it