warm adhesion and fierce opposition from the
start. Professor Hare and Horace Greeley were among the educated
minority who tested and endorsed its truth. It was disfigured by many
grievous incidents, which may explain but does not excuse the perverse
opposition which it encountered in so many quarters. This opposition
was really largely based upon the absolute materialism of the age,
which would not admit that there could exist at the present moment such
conditions as might be accepted in the far past. When actually brought
in contact with that life beyond the grave which they professed to
believe in, these people winced, recoiled, and declared it impossible.
The science of the day was also rooted in materialism, and discarded
all its own very excellent axioms when it was faced by an entirely new
and unexpected proposition. Faraday declared that in approaching a new
subject one should make up one's mind a priori as to what is possible
and what is not! Huxley said that the messages, EVEN IF TRUE,
"interested him no more than the gossip of curates in a cathedral
city." Darwin said: "God help us if we are to believe such things."
Herbert Spencer declared against it, but had no time to go into it. At
the same time all science did not come so badly out of the ordeal. As
already mentioned, Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, inventor, among
other things, of the oxy-hydrogen blow-pipe, was the first man of note
who had the moral courage, after considerable personal investigation,
to declare that these new and strange developments were true. He was
followed by many medical men, both in America and in Britain, including
Dr. Elliotson, one of the leaders of free thought in this country.
Professor Crookes, the most rising chemist in Europe, Dr. Russel
Wallace the great naturalist, Varley the electrician, Flammarion the
French astronomer, and many others, risked their scientific reputations
in their brave assertions of the truth. These men were not credulous
fools. They saw and deplored the existence of frauds. Crookes'
letters upon the subject are still extant. In very many cases it was
the Spiritualists themselves who exposed the frauds. They laughed, as
the public laughed, at the sham Shakespeares and vulgar Caesars who
figured in certain seance rooms. They deprecated also the low moral
tone which would turn such powers to prophecies about the issue of a
race or the success of a speculation. But they had that broad