It is this intense yearning to speak again with those that have left us, on the part of the bereaved, that has led to chicanery on the part of media in order to gratify it. Wherever money is to be made, unfortunately cheating will step in; but because some tradesmen will sell you brass for gold is no reason to vote all jewellers thieves. The account of the raising of Samuel by the witch of Endor is an instance that my argument is correct. The witch was evidently an impostor, for she had no expectation of seeing Samuel, and was frightened by the apparition she had evoked; but Spiritualism must be a truth, because it was Samuel himself who appeared and rebuked Saul for calling him back to this earth. What becomes, in the face of this story, of the impassable gulf between the earthly and spiritual spheres? That atheists who believe in nothing should not believe in Spiritualism is credible, natural, and consistent. But that Christians should reject the theory is tantamount to acknowledging that they found their hopes of salvation upon a lie. There is no way of getting out of it. If it be _impossible_ that the spirits of the departed can communicate with men, the Bible must be simply a collection of fabulous statements; if it be _wrong_ to speak with spirits, all the men whose histories are therein related were sinners, and the Almighty helped them to sin; and if all the spirits who have been heard and seen and touched in modern times are devils sent on earth to lure us to our destruction, how are we to distinguish between them and the Greatest Spirit of all, who walked with mortal Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. "O! yes!" I think I hear somebody cry, "but that was in the Bible;" as if the Bible were a period or a place. And did it ever strike you that there is something else recorded in the Bible? "And He did not many miracles there because of their _unbelief_." And yet Christ came to call "not the righteous but the sinners to repentance." Surely, then, the unbelieving required the conviction of the miracles more than those who knew Him to be God. Yet there He did them not, _because_ of their unbelief, because their _scepticism_ produced a condition in which miracles could not be wrought. And yet the nineteenth century is surprised because a sceptic, whose jarring element upsets all union and harmony, is not an acceptable addition to a spiritual meeting, and that the miracles of the present--gross and feeble, compared to those of the past, because worked by grosser material though grosser agents--ceased to be manifested when his unbelief intrudes itself upon them. CHAPTER VII. THE STORY OF JOHN POWLES.