ized the message of your own darling--perhaps
the handwriting also. Thousands of modest, honest seekers of truth
have done these things. But the Pharisees who talk of heaven and then
fly from its approach have "religiously shunned" them; that is the way
they express it, and you are their apologist. But what is your
apology?

You give a graphic description of a cheap style of dishonest
mediumship with vulgar surroundings, in which, nevertheless, there are
wonderful revelations, "the golden thread of a truth that is worth
having," and you suggest that the truth must now be "garnered" by a
psychical research society, intimating that if they do not garner it,
it will cease to be recognized as truth, and that the mediums must
bring it all to them for sanction, or cease to be respected by
honorable people. Was ever a more unfair and delusive statement made
by a hired attorney? The grandeur of the theme has not inspired a
spirit of fairness or justice. The question lies between the eternal
and holy verities of spiritual science or religious science and the
conscience of the inquirer. The poor, illiterate, and obscure people
who exhibit for a living whatever capacity they may have, have nothing
to do with it. Would our lady critic select a cheap sign painter to
represent the beauty and glory of art, or the exhibitors of laughing
gas to illustrate the science of Sir Humphrey Davy, or the
performances of an illiterate quack to illustrate the dignity of the
medical profession? Is our critic so profoundly ignorant of the
progress of psychic science as to think such representations fair or
allowable?

A science is represented by its leaders, its authors, its teachers,
not its camp followers. Examine the writings of Alfred Russell
Wallace, Professor Crookes of London, Epes Sargent, William Howitt,
Professor Hare--of Swedenborg, Kerner, Ennemoser, Du Prel, Hellenbach,
Fichte, Varley, Ashburner, Flammarion, Aksakoff, and a score of others
of the highest rank, and criticize if you can the magnificent
philosophy of these and of many an ancient writer. Consider the well
attested facts and sublime religion that you will find in them, and
observe that the facts are a hundred times better attested and a
thousand times more critically observed than any of those upon which
the world's great religions rest, before which our critic reverently
bows.

[NOTE.--Rev. Henry Ward Beecher is reported to have said in 1860: "The
physiology, the anthr