The next articles of belief are Belief in the moderate figures of “thirty
thousand media in the United States in 1853”; and in two million five
hundred thousand spiritualists in the same country of composed minds, in
1855, “professing to have arrived at their convictions of spiritual
communication from personal experience”; and in “an average rate of
increase of three hundred thousand per annum”, still in the same country
of calm philosophers. Belief in spiritual knockings, in all manner of
American places, and, among others, in the house of “a Doctor Phelps at
Stratford, Connecticut, a man of the highest character for intelligence”,
says Mr. Howitt, and to whom we willingly concede the possession of far
higher intelligence than was displayed by his spiritual knocker, in
“frequently cutting to pieces the clothes of one of his boys”, and in
breaking “seventy-one panes of glass”—unless, indeed, the knocker, when
in the body, was connected with the tailoring and glazing interests.
Belief in immaterial performers playing (in the dark though: they are
obstinate about its being in the dark) on material instruments of wood,
catgut, brass, tin, and parchment. Your belief is further requested in
“the Kentucky Jerks”. The spiritual achievements thus euphoniously
denominated “appear”, says Mr. Howitt, “to have been of a very disorderly
kind”. It appears that a certain Mr. Doke, a Presbyterian clergyman,
“was first seized by the jerks”, and the jerks laid hold of Mr. Doke in
that unclerical way and with that scant respect for his cloth, that they
“twitched him about in a most extraordinary manner, often when in the
pulpit, and caused him to shout aloud, and run out of the pulpit into the
woods, screaming like a madman. When the fit was over, he returned
calmly to his pulpit and finished the service.” The congregation having
waited, we presume, and edified themselves with the distant bellowings of
Doke in the woods, until he came back again, a little warm and hoarse,
but otherwise in fine condition. “People were often seized at hotels,
and at table would, on lifting a glass to drink, jerk the liquor to the
ceiling; ladies would at the breakfast-table suddenly be compelled to
throw aloft their coffee, and frequently break the cup and saucer.” A
certain venturesome clergyman vowed that he would preach down the Jerks,
“but he was seized in the midst of his attempt, and made so ridiculous
that he withdrew himself from further notice”—an example much to be
commended. That same favoured land of America has been particularly
favoured in the development of “innumerable mediums”, and Mr. Howitt
orders you to believe in Daniel Dunglas Home, Andrew Davis Jackson, and
Thomas L. Harris, as “the three most remarkable, or most familiar, on
this side of the Atlantic”. Concerning Mr. Home, the articles of belief
(besides removal of furniture) are, That through him raps have been given
and communications made from deceased friends. That “his hand has been
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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