x Kane and
Catharine Fox Jencken, and verified by letters, documents and published
data. It is written with their full knowledge and earnest sanction.

The bold fabric of lies built up to sustain the claim that the "rappings"
in which all spiritualistic so-called phenomena originated were
unaccountable except on the supernatural hypothesis, can no longer be
cited to an intelligent mind. The elaborate narrative published by the
eldest sister, Mrs. Ann Leah Fox Underhill, who is now the only remaining
stay of spiritualistic deception, is proven to be false from title-page to
finis.

I have given in the following pages, the real lives of Mrs. Kane and Mrs.
Jencken, in so far as they bear in any important degree upon the
development of the fraud of Spiritualism.

II. RENUNCIATION.

CHAPTER I.

GOD HAS NOT ORDERED IT.

The world of "spiritualists" and non-spiritualists was startled on the
24th of September, 1888, by the publication in the New York _Herald_, of
an article with the following head-lines:

"GOD HAS NOT ORDERED IT."

A Celebrated Medium Says the
Spirits Never Return.

CAPTAIN KANE'S WIDOW.

One of the Fox Sisters Promises an
Interesting Exposure of Fraud.

To many, an article of this kind seemed in a degree sensational. Not to
those, however, who had previously had some inkling of the secret history
of Spiritualism, and who for years had looked for the day of its
inevitable confounding.

A sudden disclosure like this, by one of the "Mothers of Spiritualism," if
the term may be used, suggested a sort of reckless vagary, a species of
extravagance, due, as might have been fancied, to some abnormal condition
of the mind.

Yet to those who had had an intimate acquaintance with Maggie Fox Kane
this step had long been foreshadowed. As will appear later, no one could
have imagined the real intensity of moral pain that for years she had
endured.

In recent years, both she and her sister, Catharine Fox Jencken, had been
but poorly provided with this world's goods. Obliged to depend almost
wholly on themselves for support, they had dropped more and more out of
sight, till the public at last hardly recognized their names, if perchance
they appeared in print, as those of the principal instruments in the
founding of Spiritualism. For this, there was a reason. It was a
deep-seated and long increasing disgust with their fraudulent
profession--the fuller realization to their minds, a