Now I most respectfully ask what harm does it do to believe in ghosts? Is it weakness? Then St. Paul was weak to idiocy, for he was the apostle of the supernatural, as the Bible will prove, if you choose to consult his record. Was our Saviour weak? It was he,—that supremely blessed, that uncontradictable authority, either in assertion or suggestion—who took upon himself the spectral character, and asked Thomas to test him, by placing his hands upon the image of his wounds. Or, if he was not a ghost, but a substantial form of flesh after his crucifixion, death then makes no difference in our condition, and is but a process without a change. Had his apostles and disciples disbelieved in his appearance after death, and hooted at the story told of his ghost wandering toward them, where would be the Christian church to-day, and where the theory of the resurrection? We disbelieve now, and scoff at what the Saviour did, and his apostles saw, unless he was an impostor, and they liars. Do we in our churches, when we read the biblical narrative of the innumerable appearances, sneer at the book that tells us its contents are the result of divine inspiration, and every word is true? That man or woman would not be a church-member long who dared to do a thing so impious. If fault be found with me for writing a narrative with such a spectral thread of ghastly tissue running through its woof, what should they say of the king of the ink-plume, Shakespeare himself? He fairly revels in ghosts. In the second part of “King Henry the Sixth,” Bolingbroke, the conjurer, invokes a spirit. In “Julius Cæsar,” Brutus has his celebrated interview with the ghost of Cæsar. In “Macbeth,” the ghost of Banquo comes to the king’s table and nods between the libations, frightening the king out of his royal wits; and in the “witch scene” we have the bubbling caldron, the armed head, a bloody child, a child crowned, with a tree in his hand, and “eight kings,” who pass across the stage, the last with a glass in his hand. What would the play of “Hamlet” be without the father’s spirit wandering on the moonlit battlement, or the interview with the queen-mother, known as the miniature scene? In “Richard the Third,” crowds of ghosts stalk through the tent of the hunchback king, and start him from his sleep; and Richmond, too, holds converse with them. The ghosts of Prince Edward, Henry the Sixth, Clarence, Rivers, Grey, Vaughan, Hastings, the two young Princes, Queen Ann, and Buckingham, stalk before the tyrant’s vision, and curse him as they pass. Otway makes use of ghosts in his “Venice Preserved,” and Sir Walter Scott welded them in the machinery of his novels; and the ponderous-brained Sam Johnson religiously believed in them. The ghosts of Shakespeare were born of the poetic faculty, and the legendary creed of the world’s experience. Place a rose, the sweetest you can find, under a glass case, and you shut out the odor that belongs to it.