CHAPTER III.

PUBLIC SEANCES.

No comparison can justly be made between different mediums. All are excellent in their way. The preference that is given to one over others is mainly due to personal feeling, to likes and dislikes, which must always find an expression among individuals of different tastes.

In some seances the strength of the manifestations is largely exhausted in the production of forms. In others, the social and affectionate element predominates. Where there are from fifty to sixty materialized forms appearing at a sitting, it is hardly to be expected that much time can be given to the interchange of thought or the expression of feeling. Such seances are, as a rule, mere touch-and-go occasions.

The strength of the circle is often exhausted in combating the ignorance and prejudice of the audience, and the higher and more delicate phase of materialization is lost sight of.

Many condemn public seances on account of the mixed audience and the conflicting elements that surround the medium. These things are, at present, a necessity, being the only means of educating the masses.

The time has not yet come when, through a more general acceptance of the truth of materialization, it can be transferred to the domestic circle, where it properly belongs, and where its best results will be obtained. Not until the flush of excitement necessarily arising from the strangeness of the phenomena has subsided, and the investigator has settled in his mind the facts of materialization, is he capable of forming an intelligent opinion on the subject.

Thousands of persons, through their experience, have reached that point. Whether they advance beyond this will depend upon the character of the seance, the strength of the manifestations, and the purely affectional bearing toward these beings.

Seances should be classified: the first, for primary education, for facts and evidence to convince skeptics; the second, for the more advanced investigator. Into this latter class no skeptic should be admitted. Such an arrangement could not interfere with the patronage of mediums, but on the contrary would enhance it, for there comes a period in the progress of the investigator when, finding that he cannot advance, he will retreat or seek some other field for investigation. The public seance, as now constituted, must, from the nature of its surroundings, remain more or less stationary.

There are seances that are pitched on so low a key that when the investigator passes from a state of doubt into a full knowledge of the truth of materialization, he will instinctively leave them for a more genial atmosphere; for it is in vain to expect that coarse, mercenary, untruthful mediums can avoid impressing more or less of their natures upon the spirits who come through their organisms, or that mainly spirits like themselves will be attracted to them. The more intelligent investigators are beginning to realize this, and those mediums who have lost the sense of their high calling, and degraded the seance to a mere show, will, under the inevitable law of progress, find themselves supplanted by a better element. Mediums are being developed everywhere, and in the near future there will be no lack of noble men and women who will gladly come to the front with their divine gifts.

If we accept the idea that passing to the other life does not essentially change the character of the man, that his peculiarities remain the same, we can account for many things in the seance-room that appear to be simply acting,--performances which have no other object than to attract the audience, to show what power the spirits can acquire under conditions which seem impossible to us.

Considering the state of feeling with which many persons enter the seance-room, it is not singular that they are sometimes treated to what seems to be deception. The spirits, perceiving the condition of the minds around them, act very much as they would if they were still on this side of life. Thoughts are things, which appear to them very much as solid substances do to us. If, instead of attempting to remove them, they can accomplish their object by going round them, they feel themselves justified in doing so. They act very much, at times, as children would under similar circumstances; and, until they obtain complete control over the form that encases them, they cannot express themselves with much force. They are as children learning to walk, to think, and talk through a medium that is new to them.

A simple, childlike bearing, blended with the warmest affection, is the only element that enables them to progress and meet us upon the highest plane of thought.