cannot work upon these wretched marvels, the food of
a morbid curiosity, nor could they put themselves at
the disposal of ious men to be trotted out as monkeys
on the stage. The spirits which are made to appear at
the seances are degraded spirits. Spiritualists them-
selves tell us they are lying spirits. Those lying spirits
say they are the souls of the ,departed, but who can
believe their testimony, if they are lying spirits as they
are acknowledged to be? This whole combination of
imposture and superstition is simply the revival in a
modem dress of a very ancient deception of mankind
by playing on men’s craving for themarvelous. Many
imagine these are recent discoveries, peculiar to this
age of progress. Why, this spirit-writing is and has
been for centuries extensively practiced in benighted
pagan China, while even Africans and Hindoos are
great adepts at table turning. It is simply the revival
of ancient witchcraft, which Simon Magus practiced
in St. Peter’s time; which flourished in Ephesus while
St. Paul was preaching the gospel there. It is more
ancient still. These were the abominations for which
God commissioned the Jews in Moses’ time to exter-
minate the Canaanites and the other inhabitants of the
promised land.”
MODERN SPIRITISM AND ITS TENDENCIES.
The claim of Spiritists is .that Spiritism is the new
gospel which is shortly to revolutionize the world-so-
dally, religiously, politically. But, as we have just
seen, Spiritism, under various garbs, has long held
possession of the world and borne bad fruit in every
clime.
It is nearly fifty years since the rapping and
tipping manifestations first occurred, in Rochester, N.
Y. (1848), and gave start to what ls at present known
in the United States as “Spiritualism.”
It began with
strange noises in a ‘ ‘haunted house” and first answered