The above are a few of my reasons for believing that the Chinese god is
either greatly over-estimated, or else shippers and producers are flooding
the market with fraudulent gods.
A Great Spiritualist.
I have an uncle who is a physician, and a very busy one at that. He is a
very active man, and allows himself very little relaxation indeed. How
many times he has said to me, “Well, I can't stand here and fool away my
time with you. I've got a typhoid fever patient down in the lower end of
town who will get well if I don't get over there this forenoon.”
He never allows himself any relaxation to speak of, except to demonstrate
the truth of spiritualism. He does love to monkey with the supernatural,
and he delights in getting hold of some skeptical friend and convincing
him of the presence of spirits beyond a doubt. I've known him to ignore
two cases of croup and one case of twins to attend a seance and help
convince a doubting Thomas on the spirit question.
I believe that he and I, together with a little time in which to prepare,
could convince the most skeptical. He says that with a friend to assist
him, who is _en rapport_, and who has a little practice, he can reach the
stoniest heart. He is a very susceptible medium indeed, and created a
great furore in his own town. He said it was a great comfort to him to
converse with his former patients, and he felt kind of attached to them,
so that he hated to be separated from them, even in death.
Spiritualism had quite a run in his neighborhood at one time, as I have
said. Even his own family yielded to the convincing proof and the
astounding phenomena. If his wife hadn't found some of his spiritual
tracks down cellar, she would have remained firm, no doubt, but the doctor
forgot and left his step-ladder down there, and that showed where the hole
in the floor opened into his mysterious cabinet.
He said if he had been a little more careful, no doubt he could have
convinced anybody of the presence of spirits or anything else. He said he
didn't intend to give up as long as there was anything left in the cellar.
He had such unwavering confidence in the phenomena that all he asked of
anybody was faith and a buckskin string about two feet long.
He and his brother, a reformed member of Congress, read the inmost
thoughts of a skeptical friend all one evening by the aid of supernatural
powers and a tin tube. The reformed member of Congress acted as medium,
and the doctor, who was unfortunately and ostensibly called away into the
country early in the evening, remained at the window outside, where he
could read the queries written by the victim on a slip of paper. Then he
would run around the house and murmur the same through a tin tube at
another window by the medium's ear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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