Chapter. Page I. "God Has Not Ordered It." 25 II. The Discomfited Enemy. 39 III. A Second Blow. 53 IV. The Hand of the Persecutor. 60 V. Solemn Abjuration. 65 III. HISTORY. VI. Origin of the Fraud. 81 VII. Garbled and Distorted Testimony 94 VIII. Development of the Fraud 102 IX. The Mercenary Campaign. 121 X. Spiritualistic Boomerangs. 131 XI. The Supreme Audacity of Fraud. 150 XII. A Scientific Jury. 164 XIII. The Unalterable Verdict. 201 IV. REPENTANCE. XIV. The Heart Pleads for the Soul. 209 XV. From Shadow to Light. 231 INDEX. 241 I. INTRODUCTION. INTRODUCTION. POETIC JUSTICE OF THE EXPOSURE. That the inventors of an infamous fraud should deal to it its death-blow, is the poetic justice of fate. Over the creature, the creator has power of life and death. The creators of Spiritualism abjure its infamy. They decree its death. They condemn it to final destruction. They fasten upon those who continue to practice it the obloquy of history, and the scorn of mankind for all time to come. Margaret and Catharine Fox, the youngest of three sisters, were the first to produce "spiritualistic manifestations." They are now the most earnest in denunciation of those impostures; the most eager to dissipate the foolish belief of thousands in the flimsiest system of deception that was ever cloaked with the hypocrisy of so-called religion. When, as by accident, they discovered a method of deceiving those around them by means of mysterious noises, they were but little children, innocent of the thought of wrong, ignorant of the world and the world's guile, and imagining only that what they did was a clever lark, such as the adult age easily pardons to exuberant and sprightly youth. Not to them did the base suggestion come that this singular, this simple discovery, should be the means of deluding the world, of exalting them in the minds of the weakly credulous and of bringing them fame and splendor and sumptuous pleasure. No one who learns their true history can still believe them guilty of the willful inception of this most grotesque, most transparent and corrupting of superstitions. The idea had its monstrous birth in older heads, heads that were seconded by hearts lacking the very essence of truth and the fountain of honest human sympathy.