fenced the sand with rock,
Sat perched the fiend of evil. In the void
Glancing, his tail upturn'd its venomous fork,
With sting like scorpion's armed."

The world has not seen in all its long procession of follies, vagaries,
and strange mania, one so utterly devoid of a reasonable foundation as
this.

Yet none has been more eagerly believed; and this very tendency has
evolved into so strong a desire to believe that thousands of those who
have professed to investigate it have done so only ostensibly, their eyes,
figuratively speaking, tightly bandaged, to shut out everything but the
artificial vision that they were most eager to see.

It is to be hoped that the world will now form its ultimate conclusion
upon this flagrant and audacious system of humbuggery:--that, regarded as
a superstition, it ranks even below voudooism and fetich-worship, and, as
an illusion, below the effects produced by the most ordinary magician at a
country fair.

Dragged into this life when infants, rescued from it for an interval by
two men[1] whose names are historical, the one as a hero and explorer, the
other as a journalist and daily philosopher; borne back to it again by the
tide of ill-fortune; used and controlled, by those whose heart's were "dry
as summer's dust," for their own hateful purposes; menaced when conscience
rebelled and suggested retraction and amends; driven to seek momentary
oblivion of their present degradation in a vice that was the result of
their enforced public career; finally, persecuted in a stealthy and
treacherous way by those who had profited most by the fraud that they had
set up, because it was feared that sooner or later they could no longer
keep silent and would betray its real origin; seeing their existence
slipping away from them with nothing but Dead Sea fruit remaining to their
bitter portion; feeling more and more the need of an atonement to
conscience and the opinion of the world--Margaret and Catherine Fox now
denounce and anathematize Spiritualism as absolutely and utterly false
from beginning to end; and they declare their solemn intention to devote
themselves henceforth to the noble task of undoing the great evil which
they have done, and of leaving no single stone of foundation behind them
for weak-minded future generations to base a futile faith upon.

In these pages will be found the full and truthful story of Spiritualism,
as it was and is, as gathered from the lips of both Margaret Fo