It is not that the history of Spiritual Manifestations in this century and country has not again and again been written, nor that a library of the splendid literature of Spiritualism—narrative, philosophical, and religious—does not already exist, that I have deemed it a duty to give this history to the world.

It happens that nobody else possesses—both in vivid personal recollections and in stores of documentary material—the means and the data necessary for the task of giving a correct account of the initiation of the movement known as Modern Spiritualism; and the now hastening lapse of years gives warning that if to place it on record is a duty—as many friends have often urged—it is a duty not to be much longer delayed.

Many mistakes and material omissions have been made in former summary accounts from pens of friends, as well as misstatements from those of foes; nor could any one heretofore form any clear or complete idea of the early years of the epochal period which dates from March 31, 1848.

Since that day, starting from a small country village of Western New York, Spiritualism has made its way—against tremendous obstacles and resistances, but under an impulse and a guidance from higher spheres—round the civilized globe. Starting from three sisters, two of them children, and the eldest a little beyond that age, clustered round a matchless mother (whose revered portrait does honor to my title-page), its ranks of believers, private or publicly avowed, have grown within thirty-six years to millions whose number no man positively knows, but which, I think, cannot be less than as many as it counts of years. Beginning in a small house, temporarily occupied while another was building, it has established itself in sovereign palaces; and the latest reports from England represent it as fast growing, under the encouraging influence of the reigning royal family, even into social fashionableness. As in the story of the weary forty years’ wandering of the children of Israel in the desert—fed by food and led by light, both from heaven—so does Spiritualism seem to be now nearing the borders of its Promised Land. It is but a few years since it was a favorite topic for scoff or sneer by the press, while now it is but rarely that here and there is to be found some writer so far lagging behind the march of the age as still to yield, in that way, to the force of former foolish habit. How far and how deeply it has modified the old teachings of the pulpit is patent to all observant eyes; while among the priesthood in the divine temple of Science, the number and unsurpassed rank of those who, under its influence, have abandoned the materialism of their old philosophies, after exhaustive investigation of the facts and truths of Spiritualism, is such as to stamp with the disgrace of simple ignorance those who may still dare to deny and deride;—even as history has fixed the fate of those professors and priests who refused to take a look through Galileo’s telescope; or of those doctors who, being past the age of forty, could never, to their dying day, accept Harvey’s demonstrations of the circulation of the blood.

It will be seen in the following pages how a vein of that mysterious something which, in our generation of “the Fox family,” has come to be called “mediumship,” is perceptible, cropping out in old stories, running through ancestral generations, and how it reappears most marvellously in an infant in the next one succeeding to us. It will also appear how long and strenuously we resisted its influence and its manifestations, and struggled against the absolute persecutions which at last forced us into publicity.

I conclude this Introduction by a brief allusion to the reasonable question which has been so often asked, Cui bono?—or what is the use of the manifestations of Spiritualism?

It is that they demonstrate the reality of the survival of man’s spirit, or inner self, after that “death” which is but birth into another stage of progressed and progressive life, in unchanged personality and identity; or, in other words, that immortality of the soul (heretofore a mere dogma of unproved and unprovable “faith”), which is the foundation corner-stone of all religions and of all Religion. In the words of Paul, to “faith” they “add knowledge.” They thus not only console bereavement, snatch from death its sting, and from the grave its victory, but through the concurrent teachings of all good and advanced spirits they make us feel the real reality of the brotherhood of mankind, and the common fatherhood of that supreme, unnamed, and unnamable Infinitude of Love, Wisdom, and Power, who is addressed in Pope’s Universal Prayer, as—

THE MISSING LINK
IN
MODERN SPIRITUALISM.