s to eat it out, when their gnawing would
instantly commence. These spirits would pinch and pound him,
twitch him up and throw him down, yell and blaspheme, and use the
most obscene language that mortals can conceive; they would
declare that they were Christ in one breath, and devils in the
next; they would tie him head to foot for a long time together in
a most excruciating posture; declare they would wring his neck off
because he doubted or refused obedience."

Who can doubt that such spirits are the angels of the evil one himself?
Dr. Gridley in the same work, p. 19, gives the experience of another
medium, for the truthfulness of which he offers the fullest proof:--

"We have seen the medium evidently possessed by Irishmen and
Dutchmen of the lowest grade--heard him repeat Joshua's drunken
prayers [Joshua was a strong but brutish man he had known in
life], exactly like the original,--imitate his drunkenness in word
and deed--try to repeat, or rather act over his most brutal deeds
(from which for decency's sake, he was instantly restrained by
extraordinary exertion and severe rebuke)--snap and grate his teeth
most furiously, strike and swear, while his eyes flashed like the
fires of an orthodox perdition. We have heard him hiss, and seen
him writhe his body like the serpent when crawling, and dart out
his tongue, and play it exactly like that reptile. These
exhibitions were intermingled with the most wrangling and horrible
convulsions."

These descriptions, it would seem, ought to be enough to strike terror to
any heart at the thought of being a medium. But there is yet another phase
of the subject that should not be passed by. These fallen spirits who are
engineering the work of Spiritualism, to maintain their "assumed
characters," and "play their parts" like the aforesaid diakka, represent
that disembodied spirits "just over the threshold," still retain the
characteristics they bore in life, such as a disposition to sensuality and
licentiousness, love of rum, tobacco, and other vices, and that they can,
by causing the medium to plunge excessively into these things, thereby
still gratify their own propensities to indulge in them. The following
sketch by Hudson Tuttle, a very popular author among Spiritualists, is
somewhat lengthy, but the idea could not better be presented than by
giving it entire. In "Life in Two Spheres," pp. 35