It renders the hypothesis of a First Cause not only
unnecessary, but exquisitely ludicrous. Under such dry light as it
offers to our intelligence the whole epos of Christianity seems a
vapid dream.

But I anticipate conclusions. We must go back to the dinner-party and
to Mr. Cyper Redalf, who has been restored to consciousness, and who
still is the object of general sympathy; for it is not until the
disturbance in the distinguished foreigner's nerve aura has amounted
to a psychic cyclone that the company perceive his interesting
condition, and begin to look for a manifestation. The hopes of some
fondly turn to raps, others desire the pressure of a spirit hand, or
the ringing of a bell, or the levitation of furniture, or the sound of
a spirit voice, the music of an immaterial larynx. Dinner is soon
forgotten; the thing has become a _seance_, hands are joined, the
lights are instinctively lowered, and the whole company, following an
irresistible impulse, march round and round the room, and then out
into the darkness after the soul-stirred foreigner, after the
foreigner of distinction. Is it unconscious cerebration that leads
them to the potato-plot, or is it the irresistible influence of some
Supreme Power, something more occult and more interesting than God,
that compels them to fall on their knees, and grub with their hands in
the recently manured potato-bed? I must leave this question
unanswered, as a sufficiently occult explanation does not occur to me:
but suffice it to say that this search after truth, this burrowing in
the gross earth for some spiritual sign, appears to me a spectacle at
once inspiring and touching. It seems to me that human life has seldom
had anything more beautiful and more ennobling to show than these
postmaster-generals, boards of revenue, able editors, and foreigners
of distinction asking Truth, the Everlasting Verity, for a sign and
then searching for it in a potato-field. In this glorious quest every
circumstance demands our respectful attention. They search on their
hands and knees in the attitude of passionate prayer; they search in
the dark; they seize the dumb earth with delirious fingers; they knock
their heads against one another and against the dull, hard trunks of
trees. Still they search: they wrestle with the Earth: she must yield
up her secrets. Nor will Earth deny to them the desired boon. Theirs
is the true spirit of devout inquiry, and they are persons of
consideration in ev