PSYCHOLOGICAL CURIOSITIES OF SPIRITUALISM. 



127 



ous facts respecting a journey to Jerusalem : ' We 

 Were very poor, and we sold little pamphlets of the 

 life and doings of Jesus, to bring us in money. 

 We made great haste to get to Jerusalem, for 

 fear that the newspapers should get hold of our 

 coming, and announce it.' " (Oj). cit., p. 309.) 



This, I should think, will be quite enough ; 

 but any one who wishes for more of a yet worse 

 kind (such as " the Master, after a supper, joius 

 in a round dance with his apostles aud Mary 

 Magdalene ") will find some of it in Mr. Home's 

 Tolume, and plenty more in the three hundred 

 pages of " the nauseous stuff" — parts of which 

 (says Mr. Home) " it is simply impossible to 

 quote " — which constitutes Le Flambeau du Sju- 

 ritisme. 



The celebrated " John King " finds little fa- 

 vor with Mr. Home. For, though this spirit of 

 " an evil and famous man " has announced that 

 " it is at once his duty and his pleasure to do 

 good to his fellow-men, he is the reprover of the 

 sinful and the comforter of the sad ; his is a di- 

 vine mission, and in it he finds his glory, the 

 glory of an angel;" yet he is terribly carnal in 

 some of his proceedings — throwing a sofa-cush- 

 iou at the head of a skeptic ; rubbing a paper 

 tube over an inquirer's cranium, and remarking, 

 " This is hair-brushing by machinery ; " pouring 

 tea out of a teapot " in the usual way " for a 

 party of enthusiastic old women; and expressing 

 his own preference for " regular baths and a 

 bottle of Guinness's stout after dinner. . . . Such 

 is the fashion," says Mr. Home, " in which John 

 King makes his progress to higher states of pu- 

 rity." {Op. cit., p. 312.) 



Xow, it must be evident to every reader of 

 Mr. Home's " Lights and Shadows of Spiritual- 

 ism," that he agrees with me in the fundamental 

 principle of deciding upon the genuineness of a 

 large number of the asserted "spiritualistic" 

 revelations, by what seems to him their inherent 

 probability; trusting rather to the evidence of 

 his " sense " than to that of his " senses." And 

 I would commend to Mr. Wallace's attentive study 

 the " Modern Spiritualism " of Mr. Home, as a 

 far more complete defense of that position than 

 anything I could myself have made — my knowl- 

 edge of the wilder vagaries of the system being 

 extremely limited. 



" It is not," says Mr. Home, " to drink tea and 

 play on the fiddle, to give blasphemously-ludicrous 

 communications regarding Christ and his apostles, 

 to strut about in skull-caps and yellow boots, to 

 beat people over the head with paper tubes, to 

 throw cushions at skeptics, to hold up murderers 



' as respectable objects, to tell people by what om- 

 nibuses to travel, or to describe the next world as 

 a place where humanity deteriorates, that departed 

 spirits return to earth. Their mission is great — 

 their opportunities are limited. What time have 

 they to waste in idiotisms of which a schoolboy 

 would be ashamed ? Let us refer such to their 

 proper sources ; some to insanity, some to knavery 

 — many to this world, few to the next. Let us 

 recognize the height and the holiness of phenom- 

 ena which show how 



'The belover], the true-hearted, 

 Kevisit earth once more. 1 



Let us put from our path all which savors of folly 

 and fraud, and press steadily and undeviatingly 

 toward the truth. It is full time the errors I have 

 been treating of should ' die among their worship- 

 ers.'" {Op. cit., p. 323.) 



I feel that the cause of common-sense has 

 been so greatly served by Mr. Home's fearless 

 exposure of the knavery of " mediums " and the 

 credulous folly of their votaries, that I would not 

 here call in question his own belief in the phe- 

 nomena whose " height " and " holiness " he re- 

 gards as demonstrating the return of departed 

 spirits to earth. But to me there seems nothing 

 either morally or spiritually elevating in the 

 "elongation" of Mr. Home's already tall body; 

 or in his moonlight sail out of one window and 

 in at another, even at a height of sixty feet from 

 the ground. Nor can I see anything peculiarly 

 " holy " in Mr. Home's putting hot coals on his 

 own hand, or in his heaping them on the head of 

 a bald gentleman. I should myself have thought 

 such performances no less a waste of the limited 

 time and opportunities of the departed spirits 

 who revisit earth, than those which Mr. Home 

 "pillories" so cruelly. And I merely claim to 

 exercise, in regard to the validity of Mr. Home's 

 own pretensions, the independent judgment as to 

 what is inherently probable, which he himself so 

 freely passes upon the pretensions of others. 



Writing upon this subject six years ago, 1 I 

 remarked upon " the unhealthy craving which now 

 prevails for some 'sign' that shall testify to the 

 reality of the existence of disembodied spirits, 

 while the legitimate influence of the noble lives 

 and pregnant sayings of the great and good who 

 have gone before us is proportionately ignored." 

 And I referred to the two great men in whose 

 obsequies I had been not long before called upon 

 to take part — Sir John F. W. Ilersehel and George 

 Grote — as having left behind them an influence 

 far more elevating, more wide-spread, as well as 



1 Quarterly Bevieic, October, 1871. 



