Many investigators find it hard to divest themselves of a sort of superstitious reverence for the Spirits in conversation with them. It is a mistake to suppose them to know everything, and a greater one to imagine them capable of doing everything. It is sometimes an error even to believe them to be the Spirits they profess to be. Spirits are of many varieties of condition, character, and degrees of progress. There are those prone to amuse themselves with a sort of practical joking and false personation; and such Spirits, being in a low plane, are apt to be glad of any opportunity to push themselves forward into the door opened by the presence of the medium, and play their fantastic tricks on the too credulous. We must judge for ourselves of the reasonableness, the probability, and the characteristic resemblance of what Spirits may say, to that which we might have expected from them. We must strive, by our daily lives and conversation, to attract to ourselves only Spirits of the better and higher orders in that world of the next life, which is far more densely populous than the one in which we ourselves still "live and move and have our being." At the same time I think that the cause of Spiritualism would be at this day further advanced in general acceptance, if cabinets, and with them the phenomena called materialization and transfiguration, had never been introduced. For, however genuine, as well as impressive, may be the manifestations of the presence and action of the Spirits which may have occurred in the employment of them, they afford _opportunities_ for deception which dishonest mediums are but too ready to avail themselves of, and then when exposure comes (and it is generally Spiritualists who are the most earnest in detecting and punishing the infamy of such deception), they are at once trumpeted all over the land, and more harm is done to the progress of the cause than all the good ever resulting from the genuine phenomena themselves. No such exposures ever occurred in all our long and varied experience, though never have mediums been subjected to more jealous and severe investigations; and there are few of the more modern phenomena which have not occurred through our mediumship, though the usual mode of communication practised at our circles was the one which I still consider the best and most direct, as it is the simplest--that of rapping to the alphabet.