Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/12

 many a laugh, as have other truths ere now. They and their discoverer can well afford being laughed at. The author feels that when the great Reaper, Death, shall have done his work, these same truth-seeds will spring up into Form, Life, and Beauty:—all for the gladdening of the people:—and this feeling, this inner prophecy of and to the soul, contents and satisfies the being. Friendly reader, when this body shall have gone back to the dust whence it sprung in the hopeful years gone by; when this soul shall be nestling in the bosom of its Saviour and his God, people who then shall read these pages will find, if not before, more in that which the heart-weary one has here written, than either a psychological romance, or the daring speculations of undisciplined genius.

The foregoing observations have reference more especially to the first part of this work, which is presented in the form of Revelations from the Dead. It does not owe its origin to what is ordinarily known as "Spiritualism":—it did not come either by the "Raps," "Tips," "Table-turning," "Speaking mediumship," "Writing," or in any other of the modes so commonly claimed for the mass of "Spiritual" literature, now so widely circulated and read. The process by which what follows came, is to me as weirdly strange and novel, as anything can well be. I call this process.

The people called "Mediums," a singular order among men, set forth that their bodies are, for the time being, vacated by their souls, and that during the vacation, the soul of some one else, one who has died, and yet lives, takes possession of the physical structure, and then proceeds to give forth his or her wisdom or folly for the enlightenment or darkening of men's minds. Another class tell us that they are "impressed" by a departed one to give voice to the Spirit’s thought; others declare that they are "obsessed." Well, it may all be so, or it may not. I do not assume or presume to decide one way