They will please to believe, by way of an easy beginning, all the stories
of good and evil demons, ghosts, prophecies, communication with spirits,
and practice of magic, that ever obtained, or are said to have ever
obtained, in the North, in the South, in the East, in the West, from the
earliest and darkest ages, as to which we have any hazy intelligence,
real or supposititious, down to the yet unfinished displacement of the
red men in North America. They will please to believe that nothing in
this wise was changed by the fulfilment of our Saviour’s mission upon
earth; and further, that what Saint Paul did, can be done again, and has
been done again. As this is not much to begin with, they will throw in
at this point rejection of Faraday and Brewster, and “poor Paley”, and
implicit acceptance of those shining lights, the Reverend Charles
Beecher, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (“one of the most vigorous
and eloquent preachers of America”), and the Reverend Adin Ballou.
Having thus cleared the way for a healthy exercise of faith, our
advancing readers will next proceed especially to believe in the old
story of the Drummer of Tedworth, in the inspiration of George Fox, in
“the spiritualism, prophecies, and provision” of Huntington the
coal-porter (him who prayed for the leather breeches which miraculously
fitted him), and even in the Cock Lane Ghost. They will please wind up,
before fetching their breath, with believing that there is a close
analogy between rejection of any such plain and proved facts as those
contained in the whole foregoing catalogue, and the opposition
encountered by the inventors of railways, lighting by gas, microscopes
and telescopes, and vaccination. This stinging consideration they will
always carry rankling in their remorseful hearts as they advance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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