million five hundred thousand spiritualists in the same country of
composed minds, in 1855, "professing to have arrived at their
convictions of spiritual communication from personal experience";
and in "an average rate of increase of three hundred thousand per
annum", still in the same country of calm philosophers. Belief in
spiritual knockings, in all manner of American places, and, among
others, in the house of "a Doctor Phelps at Stratford, Connecticut,
a man of the highest character for intelligence", says Mr. Howitt,
and to whom we willingly concede the possession of far higher
intelligence than was displayed by his spiritual knocker, in
"frequently cutting to pieces the clothes of one of his boys", and
in breaking "seventy-one panes of glass"--unless, indeed, the
knocker, when in the body, was connected with the tailoring and
glazing interests. Belief in immaterial performers playing (in the
dark though: they are obstinate about its being in the dark) on
material instruments of wood, catgut, brass, tin, and parchment.
Your belief is further requested in "the Kentucky Jerks". The
spiritual achievements thus euphoniously denominated "appear", says
Mr. Howitt, "to have been of a very disorderly kind". It appears
that a certain Mr. Doke, a Presbyterian clergyman, "was first seized
by the jerks", and the jerks laid hold of Mr. Doke in that
unclerical way and with that scant respect for his cloth, that they
"twitched him about in a most extraordinary manner, often when in
the pulpit, and caused him to shout aloud, and run out of the pulpit
into the woods, screaming like a madman. When the fit was over, he
returned calmly to his pulpit and finished the service." The
congregation having waited, we presume, and edified themselves with
the distant bellowings of Doke in the woods, until he came back
again, a little warm and hoarse, but otherwise in fine condition.
"People were often seized at hotels, and at table would, on lifting