All the Year Round: Contributions by Unknown
page 51 of 83 (61%)
page 51 of 83 (61%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
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 |
|