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Now, there are facts certain and well ascertained, numerous and widely known, connected with some other portions of the border-land of science that we have not yet looked into, though I have mentioned their names. He who would assert that spiritism, table-turning, spirit-rapping, and so on are mere idle talk, sheer impostures, is not well read in the literature of the present day.
But those acquainted with the charlatanry in these days of what is called 'Christian Science, and know the extent to which crass ignorance and predisposed credulity can be duped by childish delusions, may have some 'idea how acute was the spirit-rapping epidemic some forty or fifty years ago.
The Crops Doing Chores The Sights and Sounds of Winter Road-making The Spirit-rapping Craze Tuberculosis among the Settlers A Cruel Brother The Rights of the Indians Put to the Plough at the Age of Twelve In the Harvest-Field Over-Industry among the Settlers Running the Breaking-Plough Digging a Well Choke-Damp Lining Bees.
Remember, she saw it at the very minute that the accident happened. I don't believe in spirit-rapping, and such stuff as dancing tables, and spinning chairs, and pianos that play tunes when no human being is near them; but I have heard and seen things that made the hair rise and stand on my head."
"I didn't mention it before, because I don't talk much of those sort of things. I don't pretend to understand them, and it is better to leave them alone." "But what do you mean?" Doodles looked very solemn as he answered, "I think she's a medium or a media, or whatever it ought to be called." "What! one of those spirit-rapping people?"
It cannot be conveyed." "I fancy that is just what those who believe in spirit-rapping would say." "There are the true and false of convictions, as of everything else. I mean that a man may take that for a conviction in his own mind which is not a conviction, but only resembles one. But those to whom you refer profess to appeal to facts.
Why is it that quackery rides rampant over the land; and that not long ago, one of the largest public rooms in this great city could be filled by an audience gravely listening to the reverend expositor of the doctrine that the simple physiological phaenomena known as spirit-rapping, table-turning, phreno-magnetism, and I know not what other absurd and inappropriate names, are due to the direct and personal agency of Satan?
Then, all of a sudden, the moorland villages round were overtaken by an epidemic of spirit-rapping and table-turning. 'It wor sperrits here, sperrits there, sperrits everywhere t' warld wor gradely swarmin wi 'em, said Margaret bitterly.
The boat trembled like a leaf, and was trembling yet, when, with nightmare speed, the thing had slipped into the past, and we were shot out into the midst of the seething flood below. Not the least impressive part of the affair was the strange spirit-rapping on the bow. The boatmen valiantly asserted that this was simply for signal to the man in the stern.
The same is true of half the diseases afflicting mankind; their prevention may be assured, to a great extent, by attention to the dictates of hygienic laws, which are no more or less than the laws of moderation and common sense, and not, as many suppose, the law of obligation to eat stale bread, or "cold huckleberry-pudding," all the balance of their lives, though this diet might be beneficial if ghost-seeing and spirit-rapping was determined upon.
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