BY DR. P. B. RANDOLPH,
“THE DUMAS OF AMERICA,”
AUTHOR OF “WAA, GU-MAH,” “PRE-ADAMITE MAN,” “DEALINGS WITH THE DEAD,”
“IT ISN’T ALL RIGHT,” “THE UNVEILING OF SPIRITISM,” “THE GRAND
SECRET,” “HUMAN LOVE—A PHYSICAL SUBSTANCE,”
ETC., ETC., ETC.
“The fictions of genius are often the vehicles of the sublimestverities, and its flashes often open new regions of thought, and thrownew light on the mysteries of our being.”—
Channing.
NEW YORK:
SINCLAIR TOUSEY, 121 NASSAU STREET.
1863.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District of New York.
In giving what follows to the world, no one can be more alive to thefact that this is the latter half of the nineteenth century, and thatthe present is emphatically the era of the grandest Utilitarianism,Revolution, Matter of Fact, and Doubt that the world ever knew, than isthe editor of the following extraordinary tale. He has no apologies tomake for offering it—no excuses, even as a novelist, for departing fromthe beaten track of “War, Love, Murder, and Revenge,” “Politics,Passion, and Prussic acid,” which constitute the staple of the modernnovel.
Disliking all long exordia, we propose to enter at once upon the workbefore us, by inquiring: Is there such a thing as real magic—not theordinary, chemical, ambidextral jugglery, that passes current among thevulgar as magic—but the real old mysterious thing, whereof we read inold black-letter tomes?
Utterly repudiating the pretensions of modern charlatans, andconscienceless impostors, who deal in “spirit photographs,” and uttermisty phrases about “Life in the Spheres,” “Gloria,” and “Jubilo,”together with schemes to reform the world—namely, by means of Indianadivorces, improved “Lieceums,” “Air-lying dispatches,” via CaputAssinorum, and much other.
Not because there are no spirits, for one case in a million of reportedspectral phenomena, may be true, but all are totally unreliable—thatis, they lie—and the person who places the least confidence in them inone thousand instances, is sure to be deceived nine hundred andninety-nine times, and only reach approximate truth and fact in thethousandth.
Spiritualism is yet the great non sequitur of the age, so far as thevast majority of mankind is concerned—for while one portion of itsphenomena may be really spiritual, the remaining nine hundred andninety-nine portions are referable to something else than human ghosts.Spiritualism has done no good what