rty years ago. It is unfortunate for the
"spiritualists" that, over and over again, celebrated and trusted
media, who really, in some respects, call to mind the Montanist[93]
and gnostic seers of the second century, are either proved in courts
of law to be fraudulent impostors; or, in sheer weariness, as it would
seem, of the honest dupes who swear by them, spontaneously confess
their long-continued iniquities, as the Fox women did the other day
in New York.[94] But, whenever a catastrophe of this kind takes place,
the believers are no wise dismayed by it. They freely admit that not
only the media, but the spirits whom they summon, are sadly apt to
lose sight of the elementary principles of right and wrong; and they
triumphantly ask: How does the occurrence of occasional impostures
disprove the genuine manifestations (that is to say, all those which
have not yet been proved to be impostures or delusions)? And, in this,
they unconsciously plagiarise from the churchman, who just as freely
admits that many ecclesiastical miracles may have been forged; and
asks, with calm contempt, not only of legal proofs, but of
common-sense probability, Why does it follow that none are to be
supposed genuine? I must say, however, that the spiritualists, so far
as I know, do not venture to outrage right reason so boldly as the
ecclesiastics. They do not sneer at "evidence"; nor repudiate the
requirement of legal proofs. In fact, there can be no doubt that the
spiritualists produce better evidence for their manifestations than
can be shown either for the miraculous death of Arius, or for the
Invention of the Cross.[95]

From the "levitation" of the axe at one end of a period of near three
thousand years to the "levitation" of Sludge & Co. at the other end,
there is a complete continuity of the miraculous, with every gradation,
from the childish to the stupendous, from the gratification of a
caprice to the illustration of sublime truth. There is no drawing a
line in the series that might be set out of plausibly attested cases
of spiritual intervention. If one is true, all may be true; if one is
false, all may be false.

* * * * *

This is, to my mind, the inevitable result of that method of reasoning
which is applied to the confutation of Protestantism, with so much
success, by one of the acutest and subtlest disputants who have ever
championed Ecclesiasticism--and one cannot put his claims to acuteness
an