“That there is in many of the phenomena, I say not in all, which you call spirit-manifestations, a real spiritual invasion, I do not doubt; but whether the spirits are the souls of the departed, or really demons or devils personating them, is a question to which you do not seem to me, from your book, to have paid sufficient attention. You are necromancers, diviners with the spirits of the dead. Necromancers are almost as old as history. We find them alluded to in Genesis. Moses forbids necromancy, or the evocation of the dead, and commands that necromancers shall be put to death. In all ancient and modern pagan nations, necromancy is found to be a very common species of divination. The African magicians found at Cairo practise it even at the present time, as we find testified to by an English nobleman and a French academician, though by a seeing medium, not, as is the case with you, by rapping, talking, and writing mediums. The famous Count de Cagliostro, or rather Giuseppo Balsamo, at the close of the last century, professed to enable persons of distinction to converse with the spirits of eminent individuals, long since dead; and evocation of the dead has long been practised at Paris by students of the University. You are real diviners, attempting, by means of evoking the dead, to divine secrets, whether of the past or the future, unknown to the living. You practise what the world has always called divination, and that species of divination called necromancy. Thus far, all is plain, certain, undeniable, and therefore you do that which the Christian world has always held to be unlawful, and a dealing with the devils. This, however, is nothing to you, for you place the authority of the spirits above that of Jesus Christ, and do not hesitate to make Christianity give place to spiritism. But what I wish you to tell me is, the evidence on which you assert that the invading or communicating spirits are really the souls of men and women who once lived in the flesh?” “They themselves expressly affirm it, and prove it by proving that they have the knowledge of the earthly lives of the persons they say they are, which we should expect them to have in case they were those very persons.” “The question, you will perceive, my dear Judge, is one of identity—a question with which, as a lawyer and a judge, you must have often had occasion to deal. Is the evidence you assign sufficient?” “On my professional honor and reputation, I say it is.” “Do you find the spirits always tell the truth?” “No. I have said in my book they frequently lie.” “Then the simple fact that a spirit says he is Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, George Fox, William Penn, or Martin Luther, is not a sufficient proof that he is.”