and cheated the most earnest faith. It was a
degrading exhibition, and all the more so
because men of cultivated understandings and
women of ordinary perceptions gave into it
without question or examination, and set aside
the precious mental power of critical reason, in
favour of blind, headlong, unreasoning
credulity.

I know that I shall be met by believers with
the argument that all the greatest scientific
truths were, when first propounded, scouted and
disbelieved: witness Galileo, Harvey, Jenner,
and others. But although truth in all such
cases has not prevailed at once, and although
the beliefs in them have languished, yet, even
when weakest, such beliefs have always been
strong enough to leave broad marks behind them
– broad enough for the wise to stand upon,
whence to assert, and eventually to sustain,
them beyond dispute. Truth never dies away
without leaving some mark. " Spiritualism," on
the contrary, has burnt its feeble light from the
earliest times of the Old Testament; it has
flickered, then gone out from sheer exhaustion.
It has been forgotten, then " discovered" again;
then it has flourished amongst a certain class of
weak people, and has made a noise – for your
hysterical subjects are always very demonstrative.
Then belief has been exhausted, and the sickly
flame has been extinguished, to peep out again
at some future time, and, in the same way, to
die out. This seems to be the difference between
the reception and destiny of truth, and
imposture.

One of the most provoking peculiarities of
the spiritualists is the definite manner in which
they speak of indefinite things and indefinite
sensations. A publication called the Spiritual
Magazine is especially full of this sort of
unblushing assertion. Things, which in the seances
some people say they see, and others only think
they see, and others don't see at all, are set
down as positive, actual, undeniable facts; as
undeniable as this paper on which I write. If, at
the distant end of a large room, and in the dark,
a medium says he is floated up to the ceiling,
it is stoutly asserted that he is so floated up,
and that the people present are witnesses of the
feat. Not so: the people present are only
witnesses of the fact that the medium asserts this,
and that he marks the ceiling; they are not
witnesses how he got up so high to make his mark.
With ottomans, chairs, and darkness, he may
have been able to climb, unperceived, so near,
as to mark the ceiling otherwise than by being
taken up to it by spiritual hands.

Again, is an audience necessarily a collection
of converts? If I go merely to see
these things, have the exhibitors a right to
parade me as a voucher for their truth? A
certain nobleman, who took especial pains to
guard against such an assumption, is ranked as a
convert; and the unbelieving son of the conductor
of this journal figures (when he is well on his
way to China) in two numbers of the Spiritual
Magazine as a believer, for no worse
indiscretion than the dangerous one of having gone
to see what some experiments were like.*
Seeing that it is almost impossible to make
examinations during the experiments; that if you are
troublesome or avowedly sceptical, the spirits
will rap you out of the circle, and, not content
with that, rap you out of the room –  it is not very
easy to detect the manner of the trick: it is
less easy, indeed, than with the ordinary
conjuror, who stands confessed to all the world
before him as simply an ingenious mechanist,
with marvellous quickness of hand, and whom
every one is trying to find out. No critical
tests are allowed; no scientific investigation.
Indeed, it would be utterly impossible, at the
table of a friend, or even in the house of a
person of condition, to take satisfactory
measures for the detection and exposure of any
such imposture as might be seen or suspected.
If you go, you must go prepared to be convinced;
and, if you desire to remain to the end, you
must be careful not to express doubt or
dissatisfaction of anything that you may see. The
spirits have a very summary way of getting rid
of any one they have reason to fear may prove
too inquisitive; and, when the mediums express
their grief at the arrangement which expels you,
and ask you, piteously, "what can they do?
and, how can they help it?" you have no
resource but to accept your fate. Thus they
enforce the acquiescence of silence while you
remain, and then write you down a convert the
moment you retire.

* He is represented in the publication in question,
with the utmost hardihood, as telling his father that
he (his father) " has been mistaken throughout. Good
faith all these things can be, and are, for I have seen
and heard them, father." It is absolutely impossible
that any statement could be more untrue than this
is. He told his father that what he had seen and
heard was very absurd, and he gave his father a
highly ludicrous detail of the proceedings! Editor's
Note.

THE GRIMGRIBBER RIFLE CORPS.

WE COMMENCE THE "MOVEMENT."

IT was not until long after this grand
patriotic volunteer movement had been started
that we began to talk of it at Grimgribber, and
it was much later before we thought of joining
it. You see we are rather peculiar at
Grimgribber –  not aristocratic, perhaps, but decidedly
rich, and on that account rather high and stand-
off-ish. We live in large houses, considerably
given to portico; we carpet our halls, and
therein do a good deal in the proof-before-letter
prints and stags'-horn and foxes'-foot hat-rail
line; we have very large gardens, with graperies
and pineries, and everything that can cost
money; but we are decidedly not sociable. To
tell truth, Grimgribber is, perhaps, a thought
overdone with Quakerdom, having been selected
as the favoured spot in which some of the
choicest spirits of the Peace Society have
pitched their mortal tents, and the consequence
is, that it requires the greatest exertions to
prevent our general notions from becoming too
drab-coloured. So that when we read in the