The necessity for some strong remedy is the more urgent, inasmuch as the diabolical machinery of the spiritual impostors has been so much improved of late. The lady whose case I first referred to had reached the highest stage of spiritualistic development—viz., the lunatic asylum—before “dark séances” had been invented, or, at any rate, before they were introduced into this country. When the conditions of these séances are considered, it is not at all surprising that persons of excitable temperament, especially women, should be morbidly affected by them. We are endowed with certain faculties, and placed in a world wherein we may exercise them healthfully upon their legitimate objects. Such exercise, properly limited, promotes the growth and vigor of our faculties; but if we pervert them by directing them to illegitimate objects, we gradually become mad. God has created the light, and fitted our eyes to receive it; He has endowed us with the sense of touch, by which we may confirm and verify the impressions of sight. All physical phenomena are objects of sense, and the senses of sight and touch are the masters of all the other senses. Can anything, then, be more atrociously perverse, more utterly idiotic, and I may even say impious, than these dark séance investigations? Is it possible to conceive a more melancholy spectacle of intellectual degradation than that presented by a group of human victims assembled for the purpose of “investigating physical manifestations,” and submitting, as a primary condition, to be blinded and handcuffed, the room in which they sit being made quite dark, and both hands of each investigator being firmly held by those of his neighbors. That is to say, the primary conditions of making these physical investigations is that each investigator shall be deprived of his natural faculties for doing so. When we couple this with the fact that these meetings are got up—publicly advertised by adventurers who make their livelihood by the fees paid by their hoodwinked and handcuffed customers—is it at all surprising that those who submit to such conditions should finish their researches in a lunatic asylum? The gloom, the mystery, the unearthly objects of search, the mysterious noises, and other phenomena so easily manipulated in the presence of those who can see nothing and feel only the sympathetic twitching of another pair of trembling hands, naturally excites very powerfully the poor creatures who pay their half-crowns and half-guineas with any degree of faith; and this unnatural excitement, if frequently repeated, goes on increasing till the brain becomes incurably diseased. Present space will not permit me to enter upon another branch of this subject, viz.: the moral degradation and the perversion of natural, unsophisticated, and wholesome theology, which these spiritual delusions are generating.