With regard to ‘Spiritualism,’ so called, you might as well say ‘books’ are dangerous, without specifying the books.  Surely you know that every sort of doctrine is enjoined by these means, from Church of Englandism to Free Love.  A lady was with me this very morning, who was converted from infidelity to Christianity solely by these means, and I am told that thousands declare the same.  As far as I am concerned, I never heard or read a single communication which impressed me in the least:  what does impress me is the probability of there being communications at all.  I look at the movement.  What are these intelligences, separated yet relating and communicating?  What is their state? what their aspiration? have we had part or shall we have part with them? is this the corollary of man’s life on the earth? or are they unconscious echoes of his embodied soul?  That anyone should admit a fact (such as a man being lifted into the air, for instance), and not be interested in it, is so foreign to the habits of my mind (which can’t insulate a fact from an inference, and rest there) that I have not a word to say.  Only I see that if this class of facts, however grotesque, be recognised among thinkers, our reigning philosophy will modify itself; scientific men will conceive differently from Humboldt (for instance) of the mystery of life; the materialism which stifles the higher instincts of men will be dislodged, and the rationalism which divides Oxford with Romanism (nothing between, we hear!) will receive a blow.

No truth can be dangerous. What if Jesus Christ be taken for a medium, do you say?  Well, what then?  As perfect man, He possessed, I conclude, the full complement of a man’s faculties.  But if He walked on the sea as a medium, if the virtue went out of Him as a mesmeriser, He also spoke the words which never man spoke, was born for us, and died for us, and rose from the dead as the Lord God our Saviour.  But the whole theory of spiritualism, all the phenomena, are strikingly confirmatory of revelation; nothing strikes me more than that.  Hume’s argument against miracles (a strong argument) disappears before it, and Strauss’s conclusions from a priori assertion of impossibility fall in pieces at once.

Now I have done with this subject.  Upon the whole, it seems to me better really that you should not mix yourself up with it any more.  Also I wish you joy of the dismissal of M. Pierart.  There was no harm that he took away your headache, if he did not presume on that.  You tell me not to bid you to beware of counting on us in Paris.  And yet, dearest Fanny, I must.  The future in this shifting world, what is it?  As for me, whom you recognise as ‘so much myself,’ dear, I have a stout pen, and till its last blot, it will write, perhaps, with its ‘usual insolence’ (as a friend once said), but if you laid your hand on this heart, you would feel how it stops, and staggers, and fails.