As Dr. J. D. Jones has written, “The dead who are so gloriously alive can hold fellowship with the living who have not yet died. The communion of saints is not to be limited to those who still dwell in this temporal and material world; it extends to those who have passed to the other side of death.... The only way in which we can combat Spiritualism is ourselves to rescue this truth about fellowship from the neglect into which it has fallen--to speak and think in a more Christian way about those who have passed on.... ‘Ye are come to the spirits of just men made perfect.’” FOOTNOTES: [44] In a letter written during his last illness to his friend, Dr. J. H. Rigg. [45] Wordsworth. _Chapter XI_ THE APPEAL TO SCIENCE Seventy-eight years have passed since Nathaniel Hawthorne warned his future wife, Sophia Peabody, against “the so-called ‘magnetic’ and ‘mesmeric’ impostures which prepared the way for an unspiritual Spiritism.”[46] The words of his letter are not obsolete, though written in 1841. “Take no part, I beseech you,” he wrote, “in these magnetic miracles. I am unwilling that a power should be exercised on you of which we know neither the origin nor consequence, and the phenomena of which seem rather calculated to bewilder us than to teach us any truths about the present or future state of being.... Supposing that the power arises from the transfusion of one spirit into another, it seems to me that the sacredness of an individual is violated by it; there would be an intruder into the holy of holies.... Without distrusting that the phenomena have really occurred, I think that they are to be accounted for as the result of a material and physical, not of a spiritual influence.... And what delusion can be more lamentable and mischievous than to mistake the physical and material for the spiritual? What so miserable as to lose the soul’s true, though hidden, knowledge and consciousness of heaven in the mist of an earth-born vision?... The view which I take of this matter is caused by no want of faith in mysteries, but by a deep reverence of the soul and of the mysteries which it knows within itself, but never transmits to the earthly eye and ear. Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.”