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the lookout to find evidence to support his position, his sensibilities are awakened, and everything that he sees, or hears, is fraught with Spiritual manifestations. Every shadow that flits across his path, he deems a winged messenger from the Spirit land, and every evening breeze comes freighted with prophetic information. He becomes wholly absorbed in this hallucination, it occupies his thoughts by day, and his dreams by night, he is led captive by his own imagination, and becomes monomaniac. He may be sane upon other subjects, but he is insane upon this. There may be some among those who are acting as mediums, who are silly enough to suppose that they are really supernaturally impressed and have become the bearers of messages from departed Spirits But we can have no such charity for the principal operators in this infernal drama; all is falshood and deception on their part and blindness and misapprehension on the part of the too credulous believers. As long as this matter was confined to a few hysterica females and clairvoyant quacks, it deserved very little notice; but that time has passed, and the subject has come to assume a graver aspect, and it seems to deserve so much notice as will bring upon it the just execration of an insulted community. Some idea may be formed of the rapid and insiduous increase of this delusion, from the fact, that so called Spiritual publication are almost daily springing into existence all around us, and a large number of volumes of considerable size, have already been written by its advocates. About seventy volumes are now advertised by one publishing house in New York city; some of these containing six or seven hundred pages. Men, once occupying high positions
