re made of it. But in the scale of existences there may be
as many orders above us as below. We know there are creatures so minute
that without the aid of our glasses they could never have been
discovered; and this fact, if it were not notorious as well as certain,
would appear not less incredible to sceptical minds than that there
should be beings which are invisible to us because of their subtlety.
That there are such I am as little able to doubt as I am to affirm
anything concerning them; but if there are such, why not evil spirits, as
well as wicked men? Many travellers who have been conversant with
savages have been fully persuaded that their jugglers actually possessed
some means of communication with the invisible world, and exercised a
supernatural power which they derived from it. And not missionaries only
have believed this, and old travellers who lived in ages of credulity,
but more recent observers, such as Carver and Bruce, whose testimony is
of great weight, and who were neither ignorant, nor weak, nor credulous
men. What I have read concerning ordeals also staggers me; and I am
sometimes inclined to think it more possible that when there has been
full faith on all sides these appeals to divine justice may have been
answered by Him who sees the secrets of all hearts than that modes of
trial should have prevailed so long and so generally, from some of which
no person could ever have escaped without an interposition of Providence.
Thus it has appeared to me in my calm and unbiassed judgment. Yet I
confess I should want faith to make the trial. May it not be, that by
such means in dark ages, and among blind nations, the purpose is effected
of preserving conscience and the belief of our immortality, without which
the life of our life would be extinct? And with regard to the conjurers
of the African and American savages, would it be unreasonable to suppose
that, as the most elevated devotion brings us into fellowship with the
Holy Spirit, a correspondent degree of wickedness may effect a communion
with evil intelligences? These are mere speculations which I advance for
as little as they are worth. My serious belief amounts to this, that
preternatural impressions are sometimes communicated to us for wise
purposes: and that departed spirits are sometimes permitted to manifest
themselves.

_Stranger_.--If a ghost, then, were disposed to pay you a visit, you
would be in a proper state of mind for receiving