There is something along this road, call it odic force, or what you will.  Science has not, perhaps cannot, ever get firm footing here; but the result of long and careful observation as yet only enables us to strike a sort of average.  Experiments pursued for years with table-turning, planchettes, mediums, clairvoyantes, come to this.  You do get answers, strange messages, unaccountable communications; but nothing is ever told, in any seance, which does not lie perdu in the breast of someone of the company.  There is often no willing deception; peradventure, no fooling at all:  but as you cannot draw water from a dry well, neither can you get a message except the germ of it broods within some soul with which you have some present contact.

And then, things being so, what advance can we make?

Many people seem to be unaware that to search after necromancers and soothsayers is forbidden by the English law.  Consequently—­let us say—­a great number of cultivated ladies and gentlemen do, even in this intelligent age, resort to the homes of such folk; aye, and consult them, too, eagerly, at the most critical junctures in their lives.

I know of a London washerwoman by trade who makes vastly more money by falling into trances than by her legitimate calling, to which she adds the letting of lodgings.

On one occasion she was commissioned to comment, in her swoon, on the truth or constancy of a girl’s lover; an unopened letter from him being placed in her hands as she slept.  She did comment on him, and truly.  She said he was not true:  that he did not love the girl really, that it was all a sham.  Well, the power by which that clairvoyante spoke was the lurking distrust within the mind of the girl who stood by with an aching heart, listening to her doom.  Also, perhaps, some virtue we know not of transfused itself subtilely from the paper upon which that perfidious one had breathed and written.  Who can tell?  But in any case the thing is all a snare and a delusion, and after much observation I can honestly say—­I repeat this—­that he or she who dabbles in these mysteries loses faith in God, and is apt to become a prey to the power of Evil.

And then the delusions, collusions, and hopeless entanglement of deceit mixed up with Spiritualism!  How many tales I could tell—­an I would!

There was a certain rich old gentleman in a great centre of trade and finance.  The mediums had hope and every prospect he would make a will, or had made one, in their favour—­endowing them and theirs with splendid and perpetual grants.  This credulous searcher had advanced to the stage when doubt was terrible.  He was ardent to convert others, and thereby strengthen his own fortress.  He prevailed upon two clear-headed business men, brothers, to attend his seances.  With reluctance, to do him a favour, they, after much difficulty, were induced to yield.  Their host only wanted them, he said, to give the matter the unprejudiced attention they bestowed on—­say—­pig-iron.