464 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY. 



Montanist* and gnostic seers of the second century, are either 

 proved in courts of law to be fraudulent impostors ; or, in sheer 

 weariness, as it would seem, of the ' honest dupes who swear by 

 them, spontaneously confess their long-continued iniquities, as 

 the Fox women did the other day in New York.f But whenever 

 a catastrophe of this kind takes place, the believers are nowise 

 dismayed by it. They freely admit that not only the media, but 

 the spirits whom they summon, are sadly apt to lose sight of the 

 elementary principles of right and wrong ; and they triumphantly 

 ask : How does the occurrence of occasional impostures disprove 

 the genuine manifestations (that is to say, all those which have 

 not yet been proved to be impostures or delusions) ? And, in 

 this, they unconsciously plagiarize from the churchman, who just 

 as freely admits that many ecclesiastical miracles may have been 

 forged ; and asks, with the same calm contempt, not only of legal 

 proofs, but of common-sense probability, Why does it follow that 

 none are to be supposed genuine ? I must say, however, that the 

 spiritualists, so far as I know, do not venture to outrage right 

 reason so boldly as the ecclesiastics. They do not sneer at " evi- 

 dence " ; nor repudiate the requirement of legal proofs. In fact, 

 there can be no doubt that the spiritualists produce better evi- 

 dence for their manifestations than can be shown either for the 

 miraculous death of Arius, or for the invention of the cross. J 



From the " levitation " of the axe at one end of a period of near 

 three thousand years to the " levitation " of Sludge & Co. at the 

 other end, there is a complete continuity of the miraculous with 

 every gradation from the childish to the stupendous, from the 

 gratification of a caprice to the illustration of sublime truth. 

 There is no drawing a line in the series that might be set out of 

 plausibly attested cases of spiritual intervention. If one is true, 

 all may be true ; if one is false, all may be false. 



This is, to my mind, the inevitable result of that method of 



* Consider Tertullian's " sister " (" hodie apud nos "), who conversed with angels, saw 

 and heard mysteries, knew men's thoughts, and prescribed medicine for their bodies (" De 

 Anima," cap. 9). Tertullian tells us that this woman saw the soul as corporeal, and described 

 its color and shape. The " infidel " will probably be unable to refrain from insulting the 

 memory of the ecstatic saint by the remark that Tertullian's known views about the cor- 

 poreality of the soul may have had something to do with the remarkable perceptive powers 

 of the Montanist medium, in whose revelations of the spiritual world he took such profound 

 interest. 



f See the New York " World" for Sunday, October 21, 1888 ; and the "Keport of the 

 Seybert Commission," Philadelphia, 1887. 



% Dr. Newman's observation that the miraculous multiplication of the pieces of the 

 true cross (with which " the whole world is filled," according to Cyril of Jerusalem ; and of 

 which some say there are enough extant to build a man-of-war) is no more wonderful than 

 that of the loaves and fishes, is one that I do not see my way to contradict. See " Essay on 

 Miracles," second edition, p. 163. 



