"Mr Home again went to the fire, and, after stirring the hot coal about with his hand, took out a red-hot piece nearly as big as an orange, and putting it on his right hand, so as almost completely to enclose it, and then blew into the small furnace thus extemporised until the lump of charcoal was nearly white hot, and then drew my attention to the lambent flame which was flickering over the coal and licking round his fingers; he fell on his knees, looked up in a reverent manner, held up the coal in front, and said, 'Is not God good? Are not his laws wonderful?'" Among those who have left on record their testimony to this manifestation are Lord Lindsay, Lord Adare, H. D. Jencken, W. M. Wilkinson, S. C. Hall, etc. etc. As the great mathematician Professor de Morgan once wittily and wisely wrote: "If I were bound to choose among things which I can conceive, I should say that there is some sort of action of some combination of will, intellect, and physical power, which is not that of any of the human beings present. But, thinking it very likely that the universe may contain a few agencies--say, half-a-million--about which no man knows anything, I cannot but suspect that a small proportion of these agencies--say, five thousand--may be severally competent to the production of all the phenomena, or may be quite up to the task among them. The physical explanations which I have seen are easy, but miserably insufficient; the spiritual hypothesis is sufficient, but ponderously difficult. Time and thought will decide, the second asking the first for more results of trial." It is inconceivable that such a man as Stainton Moses--a hard-working parish priest and a respected schoolmaster--should deliberately have entered upon a course of trickery for the mere pleasure of mystifying a small circle of acquaintances. The whole course of his previous life, his apparently sincere religious feeling, all combine to contradict such a supposition. Neither is it credible that such a petty swindler would have carried out his deceptions to the end, and have left behind fresh problems, the elucidation of which his eyes could never behold. CHAPTER XI THE MATERIALISATION OF "GHOSTS"