"The Cideville wonders, thus attested by evidence strong enough to hang a dozen men, far exceed those of Hydesville. Are you prepared to pronounce these eleven witnesses (and as many more, whose testimony I have omitted, and who swear to the same incidents) to be, as you declared the Foxes, 'wretched cheats, contemptible and dishonest'? Did they, too, palm 'unscrupulous frauds on deluded people'? Have you not the 'slightest hesitation' in setting down persons of character and station as wilful perjurers?--nay, as motiveless perjurers? Or were they, one and all, deluded? Were the impressions their senses received due only to 'ill-regulated imaginations'? What sort of imagination is it that would persuade two men that a table which they sought, by main force, to prevent from moving, did move, without conceivable cause, in spite of their efforts? (p. 280.) Do people imagine 'such a clatter in the room that one can hardly endure it'?--or that 'every piece of furniture there was set in vibration'?--or such a pounding that the witness 'expected every moment that the floor of the apartment would sink beneath his feet'? (p. 280.) "You take me to task for narrating on insufficient testimony. If the rules of evidence which I have applied in the Mompesson case, in the Wesley case, in the Cideville case, and I will add in that of the Rochester Knockings, are to be rejected as untrustworthy, then not only shall we sink back to scepticism in all history and (as far as historical evidence goes) in all religion, but proof will fail us, in all our courts of justice, alike to acquit the innocent and condemn the guilty. "I do not allege that all the narratives in my book are equally well authenticated. The Stilling story, for example (p. 317), may be taken as apocryphal. That of the 'Surgeon's Assistant' (p. 325) has not been verified by me. 'The Rescue' (p. 333) came to me, thirty years after it happened, at second hand. But in these and in all similar examples throughout the book, where the nature of the case did not admit of evidence at first hand, I have specially called the attention of the reader to that fact. Nor, if one or more of these stories should prove to be without foundation, would it be just, for that cause, to discredit the others. The '_ex uno disce omnes_' argument is not applicable here. Each narrative ought to be judged independently, by its own evidence. It is a sound maxim in law, that the superfluous does not invalidate the essential.