ult him go away and
do as they please, and faith in his prophecies weaken as his opinions
and hopes vary from theirs. We stand by the clairvoyant just as long as
he gives us palatable things, and no longer, and nobody knows this
better than your genus clairvoyant. When his advice is contrary to our
desires, we pronounce him a fraud and go our way. When enterprises of
great pith and moment are to be carried through, we give the power into
the hands of the worldling infidel, rather than the spiritual seer.

The person on intimate terms with another world seldom knows much about
this, and when Robert Browning tells of Sludge, the Medium, he symbols
his opinion of all mediums. A medium, if sincere, is one who has
abandoned his intellect and turned the bark of reason rudderless,
adrift. This is entirely apart from the very common reinforcement of
usual psychic powers with fraud, which, beginning in self-deception,
puts out from port without papers and sails the sea with forged letters
of marque and reprisal.

There are mediums in every city who tell us they are guided by
Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Luther, Tennyson or Henry Ward Beecher. So
we are led to believe that the chief business of great men in the
spiritual realm is to guide commonplace men in this, and cause them to
take pen in hand.

All publishers are perfectly familiar with these productions written by
people who think they are psychic when they are only sick. And I have
never yet seen a publisher's reader who had found anything in
inspirational writing but words, words, words. High-sounding paraphrases
and rolling sentences do not make literature; and so far as we know,
only the fallible, live and loving man or woman can breathe into the
nostrils of a literary production the breath of life. All the rest is
only lifeless clay.

That mystery enshrouds the workings of the mind, and that some people
have remarkable mental experiences, none will deny. People who can not
write at all in a normal mood will, under a psychic spell, produce
high-sounding literary reverberations, or play the piano or paint a
picture. Yet the literature is worthless, the music indifferent, and the
picture bad; but, like Doctor Johnson's simile of the dog that walked
on its hind legs, while the walking is never done well, we are amazed
that it can be done at all.

The astounding assumption comes in when we leap the gulf and attribute
these peculiar rappings and all this ability of seei