In the case of the Spiritists of our own times, much harm is done by telling them the spirit-manifestations are all humbuggery, imagination, fraud, or trickery. These people know that it is not so. They know that they are not knaves, that they practise no trickery, and have no wish to deceive or be deceived. They are not conscious of any dishonest intentions, and they have no reason to think that they are less intelligent or less sharp-sighted than they who abuse them as impostors, or ridicule them as dupes. The worst way in the world to convert a man from his errors is to begin by abusing him, and denying what he knows to be true. Except in the teachings of God, or what is the same thing, the teachings of men appointed, instructed, and supernaturally assisted by him to teach, we never find unmixed truth, for to err is human; and on the other hand, we never find pure, unmixed falsehood. Unmixed falsehood is universal negation, and no negation is possible but by an affirmation. Error is the misapplication of the true. These Spiritists are deceived, are deluded, I grant, for they are the sport of a lying and deceiving spirit; but they are not deceived or deluded as to the phenomena to which they testify, nor, as a general thing, do they wish to deceive others. Among them there may be knaves and fools, there may be quacks and impostors, but I have no reason to suppose that the mass of them are not as intelligent and as honest as the common run of men, as the world goes. Their error is in their explication of the phenomena, not in asserting the reality of the phenomena; and to begin by telling them that no such phenomena have ever occurred, that the spirit-manifestations are all humbug, is, to say the least, a very unwise proceeding. If you are a minister of religion, by doing so you are only playing into the hands of the devil, for you outrage the natural sense of justice and truth which these people still retain, and dispose them in turn to look upon religion itself, as held by the Christian Church, as a humbug.