Thus distance of place has occasioned the same variations among the opponents of the Spectre, as distance of time among the opposers of christianity. By this comparison you must not imagine that I have reference to criminality; but my design is to show that the friends and foes of the Spectre in this place are both opposed by those distant people who pronounce the whole an artifice. It is a mixture of supernatural agency and artifice in the view of the opponents here: not because the least motion of the latter was ever really discovered; but because they judge, (and feel capable of judging) that no case of marriage in any age of the world, since the finis of the Scriptures, can possibly require the interposition of an heavenly messenger. We, on the contrary, are so poorly qualified to determine how the world ought to be governed, that we know not what events should take place by ordinary means, or what by extraordinary means; and therefore we know not but there might be such a circumstance in some place or period of the world. We are too as much at a loss to account for the advent of an evil angel singing alleluias, in order to join a couple mutually attached in a relation which is honorable in all; as to account for the advent of an holy angel for the same purpose. It is necessary without all doubt, that such an extraordinary dispensation should be connected with an important consequence and a special reason why it took place. But it is not necessary that this consequence and reason should at present be universally known, though they certainly will be known hereafter, and probably in part to many in this world. The performances of the ghost are so connected with other events of Providence, as to form a connected whole, the beauty of which cannot be known even in part without much examination. The Spectre had a number of extraordinary messages, of which the marriage was but one, and that a subordinate one; and accordingly did produce extraordinary credentials. The very first notices of anything unaccountable were given at the time when Mrs. Butler, the supposed authoress of the whole delusion, was at the point of death, by a disease which soon became external and proved its reality. Was that the time for her, to commence the enterprise for a husband, when she must have been under the greatest disadvantage for the prosecution of it, and when there was no rational expectation that she would ever need a husband?