Most of the people who had lost faith in the old churches were longing after some better way of receiving knowledge about the heavenly world. Millions of Americans and Europeans rejoiced to hear that spirits had begun to communicate by mysterious raps at Rochester, N. Y., on the last day of March, 1848. Messages from the departed were soon received in many places; but the one thing needful was that the room be filled with believers; and a crowded hall was peculiarly likely to be favoured with strange sounds and sights. Here was the social element necessary for founding a new religion. It appealed as confidently as its rivals to miracles and prophecies, while it had the peculiar attraction of being preached mainly by young women. Instinctive impulses were regarded as revelations from the spirit-land, but not considered infallible except by the very superstitious. The highest authority of an intelligent Spiritualist has usually been his own individual intuition. Some of the earliest lectures on that platform had little faith in anything but science, and put their main strength into announcing those revelations of geology which have dethroned Genesis. One of the first teachers of evolution in America was a Spiritualist named Denton, who held a public debate in Ohio, in 1858, when he defended the theory of man's gradual development from lower animals against a preacher named Garfield, who became President of the United States. Some eminent scientists have become converts to Spiritualism; but its general literature has shown little influence from scientific methods of thought.