Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/131

 in the Dark Ages, of some pretended seeress who had collected together the myriad delusions of her equally foolish and benighted predecessors. There were tales of Ghosts and Apparitions, of Dreams and Omens and Visions, of mysterious rappings, of "clairvoyance" and "clairaudience," of Divination and Astrology; in a word, I had before me the great rubbish heap of human fatuity, a museum, as it were, of all the miserable debasing superstitions that have haunted man for centuries and have ministered to the artful devices of charlatans and priests. I assure you that I was thunderstruck, and as I looked through this encyclopædia of imposture, imbecility and hallucination, I could scarce persuade myself that the whole series was not a translation from some journal published in the interior of Africa for the benefit of the local fetich-worshippers and medicine-men. But no; I was reading extracts from an English Newspaper; and, indeed, before long I perceived that wherever possible the Bogies and Turnip-Spectres of the writer