Any lawyer will tell
you, that if you ask three honest men to bear testimony concerning
an event which happened but yesterday, none of them, if he be at all
an interested party, will give you exactly the same account of it:
not that he wishes to say what is untrue; but that different parts
of the whole matter having struck each man with different force, a
different picture has been left on each man's memory. I have been
utterly astounded of late, in investigating these strange stories of
table-turning and spirit-rapping, to find how even clear-headed and
well-instructed persons (as one had fancied them) become unable to
examine fairly into a thing, the moment the desire to believe has
entered the heart; and how no amount of mere cultivation, if the
scientific habit of mind be wanting, can prevent people from finding
(as in table-turning) miracles in the most simple mechanical
accidents; or from becoming (as in spirit-rapping) the dupes of the
most clumsy, palpable, and degrading impostures, even after they
have been exposed over and over again in print. Humiliating,
indeed, it is, in this so self-confident and boastful nineteenth
century, amid steam-engines, railroads, electric telegraphs, and all
the wonders of our inductive science, to find exploded superstitions
leaping back into life even more monstrous and irrational than in
past ages, and to see our modern Pharisees and Sadducees, like those
in Judea of old, seeking after a sign of an unseen world; and being
unable to find one either in the heaven above or in the earth
beneath, discovering it at last (I am almost ashamed to speak the
words) under the parlour-table.
Pages:
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150