“I am not aware that I have said any thing but what any honest Christian or fair-minded man, who really wishes well to his fellow beings, and who has read history, might not very well say. It is not necessary to be a parson, I should hope, in order to have good sense and good feeling.” “I do not see, Mr. Merton,” said I, “any tendency to superstition in modern spiritualism. Superstition is in charging to supernatural intervention what is explicable on natural principles.” “That is one form of superstition,” replied Mr. Merton, “but there is another, which consists in ascribing effects to inadequate causes, as where one augurs good luck from seeing the new moon over his right shoulder, or bad luck if on the day he sets out on his travels a red squirrel crosses his path. But I interrupt you.” “I believe the spirits which are evoked in our days are real, but that they are the primal forces of nature, and that it is on strictly natural principles that they are called to our aid,” I resumed. “There is no superstition in this.” “It is not improbable that the ancient Gentiles thought as much. I am by no means disposed to ascribe all the phenomena of mesmerism, table-turning, and spiritual rapping to superhuman or preternatural agency. Satan can affect us only through the natural, but through that he may carry us beyond or drag us below nature. I believe mesmerism, strictly speaking, is natural, but I believe also that its practice is always dangerous, and that it throws its subjects under the power of Satan. In the so-called mesmeric phenomena there are those which are natural, and those which are Satanic, although in the present state of our science it may not be easy in all cases to distinguish between them.”