Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)Foote, G. W. (George William)
Religion
Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)
Foote, G. W. (George William)
Free thought
The Booth family have all keen eyes for business. If they shut their
eyes you can see it by their noses. It is not surprising, therefore,
to find Mrs. Booth-Tucker capping Mr. Stead's ghost stories with a fine
romance about her dead mother. While the "Mother of the Salvation Army"
was dying, the Booth family made all the capital they could out of her
sufferings; and when she expired, her corpse was shunted about in the
financial interest of their show. Perhaps they would be exhibiting her
still if there were no law as to the disposition of corpses. But as that
avenue to profit is closed, the only alternative is to make use of Mrs.
Booth's ghost, and this has just been done by one of her daughters.
Mrs. Booth-Tucker contributes her ghost story to the Easter number of
_All the World_. No doubt Easter was thought a seasonable time for its
publication. Christians are just then dreaming about the great Jerusalem
ghost, and another "creeper" comes in appropriately.
Mr. Stead catches up Mrs. Booth-Tucker's ghost story and prints it
in the _Review of Reviews_. He admits the want of evidence "as to its
objectivity," which is a euphemism for "no evidence at all," and then
observes most sapiently that if it was only a dream, "the coincidence
of its occurrence at the crisis in her illness is remarkable"--which is
precisely what it is not.
Mrs. Booth-Tucker was very ill on board a steamer when she saw her
mother, fresh from "the beautiful land above." "Those with me," she
says, "thought I was dying, and I thought so too." When a person is in
that state, after a wasting illness, the brain is necessarily weak. But
this was not all. "I had not slept," the lady says, "for some days, at
any rate not for many minutes together." Her brain, therefore, was
not only weak, but overwrought; and in ingenuously stating this at the
outset the lady gives herself away. Given a wasted body, weakness "unto
death," a brain ill supplied with blood and ravaged with sleeplessness;
does it, we ask, require a "rank materialist" to explain the presence of
"visions" without the aid of supernaturalism?
"Suddenly," Mrs. Booth-Tucker says, "I saw her coming to me." But how
"coming"? The lady tells us she was lying in "a small sea cabin." This
does not leave much room for the "coming" of the ghost. We should also
like to know why a lady thought to be dying was _left alone_. It is
certainly a very unusual circumstance.
Mrs. Booth's ghost, after as much "coming" as could be accomplished in
"a small cabin," at last "sat beside" her sick daughter "on the narrow
bunk." No doubt the seat was rather incommodious, but why should a
ghost sit at all? It really seems to have been a mixed sort of ghost.
Apparently it came through the ship's side, or the deck, or the
cabin-door, or the key-hole; yet it was solid enough to touch Mrs.
Booth-Tucker's hand and kiss her? Nay, it was solid enough to carry on
a long conversation, which does not seem possible without lungs and
larynx.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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