THEOPHOBIA: ITS NEMESIS 53 



Amongst the revelations which he gives, there is 

 one purporting to come from a spirit who " had 

 been a Catholic and was still a Catholic, but had 

 not fared better than the Protestants ; there were 

 Buddhists and Mahommedans in her sphere, but 

 all fared alike." Another spirit informed Sir 

 A. Doyle that he had been a freethinker, but " had 

 not suffered in the next life for that reason." 

 This is not the occasion, and in no way am I the 

 man, to tackle the subject of spiritualism, but 

 this at least I think may be said, that the person 

 who argues that the whole thing is a fraud and 

 deception does not know what he is talking 

 about. Look at the history of the world Quod 

 semper, quod ubique, almost quod ab omnibus. 

 The records of early missionaries Jesuits espe- 

 cially teem with accounts of the same kind of 

 phenomena as we read of in connection with 

 seances to-day, occurring in all sorts of places 

 and amongst widely separated races of mankind. 

 We have it in the Odyssey ; we have it in Cicero 

 and in Pliny ; we have it in the Bible. All this 

 is not a mere matter of imposition. 



In a very curious book recently published 

 (Some Revelations as to " Raymond" by a Plain 

 Citizen ; London, Kegan Paul), to which some 

 attention may now be devoted, the writer, himself 

 a firm believer in spiritualism and one obviously 

 in a position to write about it, points out that 

 the old term " magic " has been relegated to the 

 performances of conjurers, and the terminology so 

 altered as to make spiritualism appear to be a 

 new gospel, whereas the contrary is the case. 



