before reason and religion, so also will ghosts, fairies, and all such nonsense, vanish when men shall be taught to reason upon them as they ought, and to entertain higher notions of God than to believe that his purposes could be thwarted by the power or malignity of a fairy. Why, what, for instance, is every ghost story that we have heard, granting them to be true, but a direct revelation, and so far antiscriptural and impious? What new truth has the information of a spectre ever conveyed to us? What knowledge of futurity beyond that which we already know have these dialogues with the dead ever brought to light? What view of our moral, religious, or social duties, with which we were not acquainted before, have apparitions ever taught us? None. Away, then, with these empty and pusillanimous chimeras, which are but the mere hallucinations of a weak judgment, acted upon and misled by a strong fancy or a guilty conscience. The force of imagination alone is capable of conjuring up and shaping out that which never had existence, and that too with as much apparent distinctness and truth as if it was real. We all know that in the ease of a female who is pregnant, a strong impression made upon the imagination of the mother will be visible on the body of the child. And why? Because she firmly believes that it will be so. If she did not, no such impression would be communicated to the infant. But when such effects are produced in physical matters, what will not the consequence be in those that are purely mental and imaginative? Go to the lunatic asylum or the madhouse, and there it may be seen in all its unreal delusion and positive terror.