THEO. What I mean is that, whether conscious or unconscious, all this dealing with the dead is _necromancy_, and a most dangerous practice. For ages before Moses such raising of the dead was regarded by all the intelligent nations as sinful and cruel, inasmuch as it disturbs the rest of the souls and interferes with their evolutionary development into higher states. The collective wisdom of all past centuries has ever been loud in denouncing such practices. Finally, I say, what I have never ceased repeating orally and in print for fifteen years: While some of the so-called “spirits” do not know what they are talking about, repeating merely—like poll-parrots—what they find in the mediums’ and other people’s brains, others are most dangerous, and can only lead one to evil. These are two self-evident facts. Go into spiritualistic circles of the Allan Kardec school, and you find “spirits” asserting re-incarnation and speaking like Roman Catholics born. Turn to the “dear departed ones” in England and America, and you will hear them denying re-incarnation through thick and thin, denouncing those who teach it, and holding to Protestant views. Your best, your most powerful mediums, have all suffered in health of body and mind. Think of the sad end of Charles Foster, who died in an asylum, a raving lunatic; of Slade, an epileptic; of Eglinton—the best medium now in England—subject to the same. Look back over the life of D. D. Home, a man whose mind was steeped in gall and bitterness, who never had a good word to say of anyone whom he suspected of possessing psychic powers, and who slandered every other medium to the bitter end. This Calvin of Spiritualism suffered for years from a terrible spinal disease, brought on by his intercourse with the “spirits,” and died a perfect wreck. Think again of the sad fate of poor Washington Irving Bishop. I knew him in New York, when he was fourteen, and he was undeniably a medium. It is true that the poor man stole a march on his “spirits,” and baptized them “unconscious muscular action,” to the great _gaudium_ of all the corporations of highly learned and scientific fools, and to the replenishment of his own pocket. But _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_; his end was a sad one. He had strenuously concealed his epileptic fits—the first and strongest symptom of genuine mediumship—and who knows whether he was dead or in a trance when the _post-mortem_ examination was performed? His relatives insist that he was alive, if we are to believe Reuter’s telegrams. Finally, behold the veteran mediums, the founders and prime movers of modern spiritualism—the Fox sisters. After more than forty years of intercourse with the “Angels,” the latter have led them to become incurable sots, who are now denouncing,