The two children, who had at first delighted, as younglings will, in what was but a laughable mystification, were dragged into a sordid, wicked and loathsome speculation, built upon lying and fraud, as unforgivable as the sin of Satan, and of which they were but the unthinking instruments, often reluctant and remorseful, yet docile and compliant by nature. Thus the "Rochester knockings," the example and prototype of all later so-called spiritualistic "phenomena," began merely in a curious childish freak, disguised without effort, and which, from the first, was encouraged to partly formed understandings by the wonder and intense spirit of inquiry it provoked. The young operators were carried away by the undreamt-of current of enthusiasm and awe in which they soon became involved. They felt the natural need of maintaining with unabating dexterity, that false sense of the miraculous which by chance they had called forth. Thus they went from one stage to another of this queer illusion, and, being compelled by a harder and more mature intelligence to repeat their part over and over again, became the chief means of establishing that injurious belief in communications from the spirits of the departed, of which such great numbers have become the victims. Many an older offender against common sense, reason and strict morality persists through force of circumstance in the pathway he has chosen, and does not turn backward, merely because he cannot do so without wearing the face of shame. From such slight and trivial beginning came the great movement--great because of the number which it comprised and of the sensation which attended its progress--that for more than forty years has alternately surprised, puzzled, disgusted and amused the world. From so little a plant has grown a gigantic weed of deceit, corruption and fraud, nurtured upon the fattening lust of money, and of the flesh. What has developed from it is not alone a system of so-called communications through a puerile code of signals with an unseen world; but, as Dante describes, in his incomparable epic, forms of monstrosity which combine a hideous human semblance and a loathly animal foulness, so this venomous evil has become conglomerate in its hateful phases of delusion, and its petty sordidness and depravity. Thus the Tuscan bard describes the spirit of fraud: