Dear Doctor: —Will you please send your bill and discontinue my subscription to the Herald? I regret the reasons which impel me to this step. The principal one is your teaching in reference to the future life; and your apparent contempt for the truths, facts, and solemn revealments of "THE SPIRITS."

You are certainly, as a journalist, at liberty to give your candid convictions in reference to any question of the kind; but surely, when a formidable array of facts, substantiated by an amount of testimony perfectly overwhelming, has to be met, it is hardly consistent with my ideas of candor and courtesy to set the whole aside as "a spectral illusion," and as the sportive pranks of "OD;" simply because the legitimate and irresistible deductions to be drawn from these facts would be hostile to a favourite interpretation of a series of revelations mad through the self-same channel in former ages.

The exhortation of the apostle was to "Try the Spirits," not to reject their testimony without a trial! "Every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God." Let this text be applied and I have no fear as to the result.

Doctor, I once believed with you, and as firmly as you now can, that life beyond the grave depended on a resurrection of the body; but "the Spirits" have taught me better; as they will teach you, and any other man of intelligence and honesty, who will give them an opportunity.

Will you try it? Dare you risk your hobby against a careful, and impartial, and thorough investigation of the facts? Having done this, dare you give to the world your sincere and heartfelt convictions, as drawn from the facts elicited?

Believing you to be a lover of truth, and knowing you to be capable of making sacrifices for its propagation, allow me to suggest that you call on Mrs. Brown, 78 West 26^th Street, at 3 or 8 P.M.—Fee $1.00; or on Mrs. Coan, 60 White Street; or on Mrs. Long, 416 Sixth Avenue—Fee 50 cents each: and that you exchange with The Spiritual Telegraph, which will give you an accumulation of facts drawn from all parts of the country, such as "speaking with tongues," "interpretation of tongues," "opening the eyes of the blind," "healing the sick," (by the laying on of hands,) "prophesying," "visions," &c., &c., &c., in exact accordance with the promise of Jesus—"He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these," &c.

These things are not done in a corner; but are occurring all over the land. The Bible, so far from contradicting them, is from beginning to end but a history of spiritual manifestations occurring among the Jews, and in the early Church. The pneuma hagion, which passed from one to another by the laying on of hands, was but spiritual magnetism, and the operation of imparting the magnetic impressibility (or mediumship) from one to another, the same as is daily and hourly witnessed in modern spiritual circles. —Query: Can God be thus imparted at the finger’s ends? —The prophets were mediums—some for impressions, as Isaiah and Ezekiel; others, perhaps, writing mediums; others, clairvoyants, as Daniel and John. Jesus was a great medium, or Mediator. So was Moses. You call all these miracles. WHAT IS A MIRACLE? Something that never occurred. There is a philosophy at the bottom of this thing that shows them all to be as natural as breathing—the result of natural law, by which the spirits of the dead (so called) have, can, and do manifest their living presence to men in the body. I know this. The same philosophy which can explain how spiritual beings could make themselves manifest to Daniel and John, Abraham and Lot, will explain how the same thing occurs now. If one be miracle, so is the other. Account for the visions of Daniel, John, and Paul, and you account for those of Andrew Jackson Davis, (The man at Hartford, Ct., who is reported there to teach that eighty parts of the Bible are false; and that "the spirits" reveal all it contains of truth. —EDITOR.), Swedenborg, and Edmonds. (One of our New York judges. —EDITOR.) If one be miracle, so is the other, and vice versa.

You say that the spirit or angel who appeared to John was Enoch or Elijah. How do you know? Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus and his three disciples. How came Moses there? You say, he must have been raised from the dead! Where is the testimony? Not in the Bible. You say, that those who appeared to Abraham, Daniel, Lot, and at the tomb of Jesus, were angels, and not the spirits of men. The Bible is against you; for it calls them all men! In the latter case, too, there is such a discrepancy as to number, position, &c., as to destroy the claim of infallibility urged in favour of those writings.

In your adoration of old revelation, don’t be afraid to open your eyes and mind to the new; for, be assured, you are wrong, and every convert you make must, sooner or later, be unmade. —Fraternally yours,

D. CORY, M.D.

Waukegan, Illinois, December 24, 1853.

P.S. Send your bill, and I will pay up to January 1, 1854.

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In 1841, or thereabouts, I had the pleasure of an interview with Dr. Cory at Little Fort on Lake Michigan, now styled, I believe Waukegan. He was then a member of the Campbellite "brotherhood," as it is styled by the Chief; but he was in advance of that "divine," then as now a great friend of "the spirits," or of the doctrine concerning them, termed by Paul "the doctrine of demons"—inasmuch as the Doctor then believed the important truth, as he confesses in the above, that life beyond the grave depends upon a resurrection of the body. This invulnerable truth, it appears, Dr. Cory has entirely abandoned; and we now find him side by side with the Prince of the Brotherhood, in the regions of midnight, and in telegraphic communication with gassy spirits, and transparent ghosts, demons all in spirit-land!

Until the date of the epistle before us, nothing ever reached me from the Doctor, or his familiar spirits, informing me whether he were dead, alive, or both at once; for, strange as it may appear, in spiritology, when a man is alive he is alive: but when he is dead he is not dead; but dead and alive at once, being dead in this world and alive in the other, which is, as it were, somewhere next door to this! I am glad, however, to find that he is here, and not there—that he is still a whole live man; and that he is not a dead and alive man in both worlds at once. Though I don’t know why I should be glad. Perhaps he does not thank me for my gladness; for upon spiritological principles a man both dead and alive at the same time must be better off; seeing that he has shuffled off all the troubles and vexations of this world with his mortal coil; and, as a "spirit," "ghost," or "daimon," instead of refreshing bone and muscle in Lake Michigan, doth

Bathe in gassy realms his airy soul,

In etherous seas of heavenly blue;

Where no muddy wave of waters roll,

But all’s transparent to the view!

But, as our friend Mack says, "to be serious," I am sorry to find by the letter before me, that the Doctor has read seven volumes of the Herald to so little purpose. But this is not difficult to explain, and the explanation only deepens my regret; for while he considers me as an adorer of the old revelation, he assumes the position of infidelity, which can see in Moses and the Prophets only discrepancies, fallibility, and spiritual magnetism. With a brain so perverted the Herald can do nothing; because all its statements and reasonings are to show what doctrine the Bible reveals for faith: but if, when this is brought out, it is met by a virtual rejection of the Scriptures, all demonstration from them is rendered null and void. This is the Doctor’s case. He prefers to walk by sight to walking by faith. He has seen certain phenomena which he and spiritists interpret as it pleases them. Their interpretation, as might be expected, is at variance with the Bible, which none of them understand; and as their own opinions are "the idols of their den," they bow down to them and worship them, tolerating the Bible only so far as it can be twisted to the glorification of their own crotchets.

But after all, this is not to be wondered at. In the Doctor’s case, Campbellism prepared him for his present disregard of the Scriptures. That system of Gentile philosophy is notorious for its disregard of Moses and the Prophets. Its prince is remarkable for the slight he puts upon them, styling them "an old Jewish almanac." If the Hierophant of Campbellism speak thus disparagingly of God’s "sure word of prophecy," what need be expected from those whose conscience he directs, but a higher veneration for "revealments of the spirits," than for the revelations of the Spirit of God to the prophets.

Other spiritists have been prepared for their present excesses and illogical conclusions by indoctrination with the double-distilled foolishness preached by the pulpiters of the land about souls, experiences, spiritual operations, heaven, hell, purgatory, saints in glory, and so forth; all of which the Bible has as much to do with as with table-moving and spirit-raps! When one enters an ecclesiastical conventicle, and listens to the speechification of the pulpit occupant, what use is he observed to make of Moses and the Prophets? Literally none! The Bible is not expounded. It has fallen into desuetude in that respect; and referred to only for the text, or the pro forma reading of a chapter. The people have been brought to this by the incompetency of the clergy, who know not how rightly to divide the word; nor dare they if they did; for a right division would destroy their creeds, expressed or understood. The people now like to have it so; and the clergy, who live upon them, are obliged to do their pleasure. So true is it, that "like priest like people," and vice versa.

The people thus bedrugged have unscriptural views of every thing. There is no topic, however, upon which they make such egregious blunders as that of "spiritual operations." They are unable to distinguish between the spirit of their own brains and nervous system in its workings, and the operation of the Holy Spirit of God. All the workings of their brainflesh on theologico-metaphysical topics, they most erroneously ascribe to the Spirit of God. By this ascription they heap upon God all the utter foolishness they detail in what they call their experiences, or God’s dealings with their souls! I have impatiently listened to accounts of such dealings with souls, which, if they had been attributed to the operation of my spirit upon the narrator, would have made me highly indignant at the idea that I could have been supposed fool enough to deal with any man’s soul after such a fashion. Oh that the people did but know themselves! But of his own constitution and the laws to which it is subjected, man is profoundly ignorant; and add to this his ignorance of God’s prophetic and apostolic teaching, and we have as wild a beast as any that roams the woods. Solomon’s wish may still be appropriately expressed, saying, "Would that the sons of men might see that they themselves are beasts!"—for assuredly on religious topics they manifest as little scriptural reason and sagacity.

Shall we forsake the Word’s teaching for the "revealments of the spirits," or for the brainflesh workings of the nervous fluid, which are identical? Nay, Doctor dear, I tell thee, Nay! I see prophecies recorded in the Bible thousands of years ago, fulfilling at this time upon the earth; I see a whole nation scattered abroad, existing, and having existed for ages, under the precise circumstances the One Spirit, speaking by Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Jesus, Paul, John, &c., declared they should; I see a civil and ecclesiastical constitution of the nations in the Old World in actual manifestation according to a word penned at the dictation of God’s Spirit, hundreds of years before it had a beginning: I see all these things, and innumerable others that have come to pass exactly as foretold in the Bible from end to end.—Shall I abandon such a revelation, or admit the "revealments of the spirits" through Madams Long, Brown, and Coan, to an equality with it, for the vagaries of Andrew Jackson Davis, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Judge Edmonds?! Perish the thought for ever and ever, that I should be such an egregious fool! No; give me the book of Daniel or the Apocalypse, and take who will all the dollar or fifty-cent revealments these three women’s familiar spirits may rap out to them for their especial benefit from the spirit-world, where, I suspect, they are as knavish as many of their votaries in this. I want none of them; being abundantly furnished with the most reliable revelations in the Scriptures of truth.

Dr. Cory bids us follow the apostolic exhortation to "Try the Spirits." The advice is very good when taken in its proper sense. The apostle, however, does not mean, "Go to Madams Long, Brown, and Coan, and try their familiar spirits." To one who understands the word, such an exhortation would be a self-evident absurdity; because no enlightened man would expect to find spirits worthy of the least respect in familiarity with Gentile women, ignorant, and consequently faithless and disobedient to the gospel of the kingdom of God. In the apostle’s day, the "spirits" he speaks of were "spiritual gifts," received by men and women who had previously become obedient to the faith, and imparted to them by the laying on of apostolic hands with prayer—Acts 8: 15-17. These "spirits," or gifts, were subject to those who possessed them; for Paul says, "The spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets." These gifts were styled spirits, because they were manifestations, not of so many different spirits, but of the One Spirit of God, which divided the gifts to every recipient severally as He willed—1 Corinthians 14: 32; 12: 7, 11. There is no instance of the Spirit willing spirits to Gentiles ignorant of the gospel of the kingdom since the Lord Jesus received gifts for men—Ephesians 4: 8, 11. Those who now profess to be intimate with "the spirits" are disobedient unbelievers, to whom God does not grant his Holy Spirit. Before men can receive this, granting it to be given in these days, (of which I have seen no evidence as yet,) men must believe the gospel and obey it. Some who received spirits, or spiritual gifts, after baptism—Acts 8: 16; 5: 32, fell into grievous errors of doctrine; and prostituted the gifts, or spirits, subjected to them, to the confirmation of their teaching. Among these errors was the denial of Christ’s having come in the flesh. These were "false prophets," or teachers having the gift of prophecy—1 Corinthians 12: 10, by which they could speak to edification, exhortation, and comfort—1 Corinthians 14: 3; or, by misusing it, to the perversion of their brethren. They went out from the churches of Christ; John styles them, also, "anti-christs;" who, he says, "went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us." In another place he calls these antichrists, or false prophets, deceivers, and spirits, because they were of the spiritual men, or of the class having spiritual gifts; for these were not common to all the members of the churches. John warned his brethren against these Nicolaitans, saying, "If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, (that Christ has come in the flesh,) receive him not into your house, neither bid him God-speed; for he that biddeth him God-speed is partaker of his evil deeds."

Now, in order to ascertain whether these spirits should be admitted to Christian hospitality and good wishes, they were to be tried. Those exhorted to try them were not ordered to run after them with fifty cents or a dollar in hand to fee every witch reported to have familiar spirits; but to examine the pretenders who presented themselves as claimants of your Christian courtesy, before you opened your house and heart to them. The test question was, "Do you believe that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh?" If he said, "I do," then the spirit was known to be a prophet of the right stamp; but, if he replied, "I do not," he was known to be a Nicolaitan or Gnostic, "whose deeds," says Jesus, "I hate"—Revelation 2: 6, 15.

But this test-question is no longer equal to the detection of fictitious spirits, false prophets, antichrists, and deceivers. These troublers have shifted their ground. They aim at the same result as their evil generation did in the days of the apostles, only they propose to attain to it by different expedients. Their aim is to draw away disciples after themselves for their own advantage, and in doing this, they find it necessary to get quit of Moses and the Prophets, with the testimony and teaching of the Apostles. They admit that Christ came in the flesh, and therefore died, was buried, and rose again; but they refuse to confess the law and the testimony as the sufficient rule of faith and practice. Hence they abandon "the word that lives and abides to the age," and seek for the living to "the dead," who, as the Scripture saith, "Know not any thing."

The testimony of the Rapping-Spirits is not worth a pinch of snuff; for the theology they teach is contrary to and subversive of the Bible’s. We need not run all over New York to consult the witches to ascertain this; for they pronounce "departed spirits" blessed in heaven, who while embodied were as ignorant and faithless of the gospel of the Kingdom as New Hollanders. The Lord Jesus has decreed, that he who believes not the gospel (and there is no other in the Bible) shall be condemned. He, therefore, and the spirits are at issue. John, speaking for himself and the rest of the apostles, says, "We are of God; he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Error." Here is a test the Rapping Spirits cannot stand. If they testify the same things as the apostles, their testimony is superfluous; if they testify to the contrary, their testimony is false. Their votaries have no escape from this, but to reject the apostles as liars, which they virtually do.

The consulting of familiar spirits was one of the Jewish vices of old that brought down upon them the destruction of their commonwealth. Instead of seeking wisdom, and knowledge, and counsel of the priests and prophets whom God raised up for them, they consulted the dead through mediums who pretended to hold intercourse with them. Referring to this absurd abomination, Jehovah said to Isaiah, "When they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits and unto wizards that peep and that mutter:" say unto them, "Should not a people seek unto their God?" Should a people seek "for the living to the dead?" He then gives a rule by which the people may save themselves from imposition by the pretended answers of the dead, saying, "To the Law and to the Testimony: if they (the spirits) speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them"—Isaiah 8: 19-20. This rule, like John’s, upsets all the "revealments of the Spirits," from one end of Witchdom to the other.

Seeing, then, that these spirits are by these divine tests condemned as convicted liars, what is it to us, if those who are possessed of them, or demonised, should speak with tongues, open the eyes of the blind, or raise the dead? Paul tells us no to believe an angel from heaven if he preach any other gospel than the gospel of the Kingdom he preached. If I saw an angel descending from heaven, and on conversing with him he told me that it mattered not what I believed, so that I was sincere in my errors, and were immersed into the name of Jesus; and to prove that this was a message direct from Jesus Christ, should convert stones into bread, raise the dead, or hurl Staten Island into the Atlantic, I would not receive it. Wonders have been performed to establish lies of old time; and they are permitted now to put our faith in God’s word to the proof.

Misapplication of Scripture is as fatal as ignorance of it, or unbelief. The Pope’s throne was established and is sustained by misapplied Scripture; and from the same source arose the Mormon imposture of the West. I am sorry to see that Doctor Cory has fallen into the same bottomless pit. He would have us believe that the Spiritual Telegraph’s array of facts is an illustration of the saying of Jesus, that "He who believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go to my Father." This was fulfilled in the apostles and in those "spiritual men" who believed on Jesus through their teaching. It cannot be proved by theologists or "spirits," that the power to do such works as Jesus did as the result of "believing on him" was to continue until the Nineteenth Century, or till his return. No man who has any regard to his reputation for critical accuracy will quote Matthew 28: 20 in proof; because he knows that "world" in that text signifies age, or dispensation, being, aion, and not kosmos, in a universal sense. But there are many who do wonderful things that do not believe on Jesus; this text from John is therefore not applicable to them. They do their works, not as the result and evidence of faith, but by the energy of their own wills, operating upon the nervous systems of the patients. The promise of Jesus is not to them; hence its fulfilment is not to be found in their mesmeric doings.

Nay, more than this. I would ask where are the disciples of "the spirits" to be found who believe on Jesus? The Doctor may point us to the many clergymen and pious professors who believe and consult the spirits as abundant examples! But we reject them all as counterfeit. To believe on Jesus is the same thing as to "believe on God;" and to believe on them both is to believe what they promise and preach. Paul shows this clearly. He quotes the testimony of Moses, and says, Abraham believed God, and it (his faith) was counted to him for righteousness; and this saying, Paul explains by these words, to wit: "Abraham was fully persuaded that what God had promised he was also able to perform: and therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness." For Abraham, then, to be fully persuaded that what God had promised he was able to perform, was for him to believe God. "Now," adds the apostle, "it was not written for his sake alone, that it (faith) was imputed to him; but for our sakes also, to whom it (belief of God’s promise) shall be imputed, if we believe on him who raised up Jesus from the dead." To believe on God, then, is not merely to believe that he exists, (none but a fool would deny that,) but to believe what he promises; "against hope to believe in hope."

To believe on Jesus, I repeat, is to believe what he preached. Not simply that there was, and is, such a person. A man would be set down for an ignoramus who did not admit this; and deservedly so. He that has no more faith in Jesus than that he exists, or died and rose again, does not believe on Jesus. He may believe the same thing of Lazarus; but he does not therefore believe on Lazarus. To believe on a man, in the Scripture sense, you must believe what that man presents to you for faith. This is the great thing; for if you receive the man’s doctrine, you receive him also. "He rejecting me," says Jesus, "and not receiving my words—the word which I have spoken—the same shall condemn him in the last day." This is conclusive.

Now, who of the Spirit-Rappists receive the words of Jesus—the word that he has spoken? In other words, who among them believe the gospel of the Kingdom which he preached? —Matthew 4: 23. Alas, if they have ever heard of such a gospel, infinitesimal is their conception of its import! Now, mark this—Jesus, nor any other Scripture authority, ever promised the Holy Spirit, or its powers, to any persons who did not believe on him in believing the gospel of the Kingdom he preached. Hence, whatever spirit it may be that spiritists rejoice in, it is not the Holy Spirit of God; but some other, it may be of Beelzebub, or some other representative of evil; but beyond all doubt or question, it is not of God. He gives not his Holy Spirit to the unholy, faithless, and disobedient, to play tricks with in moving tables, &c.; or to confirm the theological fooleries of Andrew J. Davis and Emanuel Swedenborg; or to endorse the scholastic divinities in the miraculous soul-dealings which preoccupy the minds of professors to the exclusion of the word.

I have no controversy with Spiritists about their "facts;" what I reject in toto is their explanation of them. I have done several wonderful things myself, and seen more remarkable ones performed by others. As far as my experiments have gone, the phenomena have all resulted from the energy of my own will operating on the brains and nervous systems acted upon. Without speaking or looking at the man, I have compelled actions that he could not successfully resist; and which appeared wonderful to all who beheld them. Now, had I been a religious knave, I might have played off Simon Magus before the company, giving out that I was "the great power of God," having a prophet-mission to the world! I might have declared that these wonders were proofs of my divine character, and have set up for as great an ambassador of Heaven as any of the clergy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the Pope himself! Had I concealed from the subject my operation on his system, and had he been fanatically inclined, he might have attributed the influence he felt to the Spirit of God dealing with his soul; especially if I had willed religious impressions upon his sensorium instead of the secular commonplaces I did. This explains to my mind the origin of "religious experiences;" such, all such, I mean, as do not result from searching the Scriptures for the truth. People in families and societies mesmerise one another unconsciously. Their brains and nervous systems are acted upon by the ideas willed, evolving and expressed, among them. The preaching, praying, talking, and silent wishings of some concerning others, create a halo of influences, which invests the community in its family and associational relations, like a fog. Individuals are pervaded by it as by the atmosphere—an atmosphere of spirituality, as it were. If the preaching, and so forth, be the vain imaginations of brain sinflesh, as it is with so few exceptions that we may say it is universally, the spiritual atmosphere is infectious, and generative of fanatical experiences, wild-fire excitements, "awakenings," "miraculous dealings of God with souls," witchcraftry, ecstasies, dreams, prophesyings, visions, "spirits," and a thousand other things detailed in the annals of fanatical religionism. And it may be noted, that where the Scriptures are least accurately understood, these nervous-system manifestations most prevail. No man who is not enlightened in the gospel of the Kingdom is safe from the influence of this sectarian mesmerism. All who are seized with it, not being able to account for it upon any principles known to them, call it miraculous, or the operation of the Holy Spirit. There is nothing, however, miraculous in it, or holy. It is the natural result of the operation of the flesh-spirit of the community upon its own members. It begins in the flesh and ends in the flesh, and always leaves its victims in disobedience, (for joining a church is not obeying the gospel,) and as ignorant of the Bible, and vastly more self-conceited, than when it originally demonised them.

"Speaking with tongues" is no proof of the existence of "the spirits," nor is the faculty necessarily a fulfilment of the promise of Jesus. I have heard an illiterate girl sing French and Italian songs who five seconds before and the instant after the singing knew not a word in either tongue. It was done by first mesmerising her, and then placing her en rapport with an educated lady who could perform. By this process the nervosity of the two became as one—as it were, mesmeric Siamese twins. Their two brains were a closed circle, the lady who played the guitar and sang being the positive brain-pole from which the will-influence passed to the negative brain-pole of the girl, causing her unconsciously to sing with tongues.

Jesus rested his claims, not upon the ground of his exclusive performance of miracles, but upon that of doing such miracles as no one had ever done before him. "If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin" in rejecting me. He admitted that his adversaries cast out demons, for he said to them, "If I by Beelzebub cast out demons, (or spirits,) by whom do your children cast them out?" The casting out of demons by the Jews was "the healing the sick" by exorcism, or mesmerism, practised with religious ceremony. Finding that Paul was so successful in casting out spirits (a Bible phrase for curing insanity, deafness, dumbness, epilepsy, and such like) by the Spirit of God in the name of Jesus, the sons of Sceva undertook to mesmerise in his name. The operation of the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus was irresistible, but mesmerism in the same name was uncertain, and dangerous to the operators, exciting the fury of the maniac against them. Modern mesmerists, though they believe not on Jesus, do wonderful things even in his name to confirm their vagaries, but do not meet with the same fate. The reason, however, is, because their patients are as ignorant of Jesus and Paul as themselves. They cannot say, "Jesus I know, and Paul I know: but who are ye?" Not knowing Jesus and Paul, they do not perceive that the mesmerisers in his name are impostors, however effectual the cure; therefore they escape, and delusion rests upon all.

In answer to the Doctor’s question, What is a miracle? I should say, A work essentially more wonderful in power than any thing that had preceded it. This was the character of most of the works of Jesus; therefore they were miracles. They were essentially more wonderful demonstrations of power than any thing performed since his day of which we have any authentic account. The apostolic miracles were also his, for "The Lord worked with them, and confirmed the word they preached with signs following"—Mark 16: 20. The time has not yet come to do greater works than his. The dead who have believed on him will arise and do them when he returns. Mesmeric manipulations, however surprising to this generation, are not miracles. They are mere physical phenomena. Cause the raging elements to cease their billowy strife by a "Peace, be still!" or feed your hungry thousands with five barley-loaves and two fishes by the power of your "spirits," ye mesmerisers, and ye may then talk to us with some show of reason of the co-mediumship of your writing-mediums and clairvoyants with Jesus and the Prophets! Till then, hide your diminished heads with shame, and face confusion.

I have nowhere said that "the spirit or angel who appeared to John was Enoch and Elijah." If Dr. Cory says this under the inspiration of his familiar spirits, they have misled him. My words were, "A prophet, one of the apostle John’s brethren, (perhaps Enoch or Elijah,) was sent as an angel to him in Patmos." I need not therefore answer his question, "How do you know?" I do not know, having only supposed it. The prophet may have been Moses. But be he whom he may, the supposition is vastly more scriptural than the affirmation, that the prophet was the ghost of a dead man, or a familiar spirit to John.

In the absence of direct testimony, scripturally-enlightened reason teaches that Moses must have been raised from the dead. Spiritists have neither reason nor testimony against it. All they can say is, they are not convinced; and we may add, while they are beguiled by "the spirits" they never will.

Yes. I say that those who appeared to Abraham, Daniel, Lot, and at the tomb of Jesus, were angels, and not human ghosts. Dr. Cory thinks that the Bible is against me, because it styles them all "men." It does; and therefore they are not ghosts. They were angel-men; that is, men sent of God: for angel defines office, not nature, signifying one sent. They were men, but differing from Abraham, Daniel, &c., in this, that they were immortal men, which earthborns are not. An angel may be either an immortal man sent of God, or a mortal man sent by the same authority. The angels in question were of the former class; while the Lord Jesus, "the Angel of the Covenant"—Malachi 3: 1, was of the latter, though now exalted far above all immortals.

I believe I have now noticed all the noticeable points in Dr. Cory’s epistle. What I have written will, no doubt, find its way to him, as the Herald still visits the house of one well known to him in Waukegan. I have written with no intentional disrespect to him, though freely and plainly; nevertheless, I confess, with profound contempt for his familiar spirits. I regard these as mere spectra of the highly-excited sensoria of mediums, reflected, as from a mirror, upon their perceptive organs, as in dreams. The mediums see the spectra; but those who "seek to the dead" through them do not, unless themselves, not supernaturally, but preternaturally excited. The believers in "the spirits" are not sufficiently skilled in science to explain the phenomena they observe. Generally speaking, they are ignorant of the little science yet embraced in "the circle of the sciences;" and still more notably ignorant of the true import of the Bible. Such observers are sure to err in their conclusions. When the things belonging to flesh and blood are better understood, the ghost-religious opinions of the Spiritists of 1854 will be as much a subject of merriment as those of the pious murderers of "Salem witches" in times bygone. They will then have come to know, that the spirit pertaining to flesh and blood, and the Holy Spirit of God given to prophets and obedient believers of the gospel, are entirely distinct. The former is the fleshly spirit of the world; and the latter, "the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive"—John 14: 17. The Davises, Swedenborgians, and Edmondses of the world cannot see this, because the spirit of the flesh is blinding. It exhales from the blood like a mist befogging the brain. No wonder such persons see sights, and, losing all control of themselves, are seized upon by the effluence of their own organization, and made to perform the gymnastics which astonish the gaping multitude equally with themselves. For myself, I have ceased to wonder at any thing short of men becoming rational and intelligent believers and obeyers of the truth. In the midst of the universal foolishness and ignorance of the Bible that prevails, this is wonderful indeed!

March 6, 1854 EDITOR.

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