HPB-SB-1-48: Difference between revisions

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{{Style P-HPB SB. Title continued|Msr. Holmes Caught Cheating|1-47}}

and in very gentlemanly manner requested her to allow a committee of four ladies to search her before she left the room or cabinet, in order to prove skeptics that they had been looking at materialized spirits and not at rubber masks. This Mrs. Holmes stoutly refused to submit to, and, under the plea being faint, tottered from room; but no sooner was she upon the stairs than she rushed, without hat or shawl, into the street, and no amount persuasion induce her to submit to the test of an investigation. She was offered one hundred dollars in addition to what was promised her, if she would submit to the investigation and was found innocent of the charge that bad been made against her. But she remained persistent in her refusal; therefore, we, unhesitatingly declare that as Mrs. Holmes has failed, in every instance, to give us satisfactory proof of her genuineness, we believe that her manifestations in Brooklyn were gross frauds, practiced upon as earnest, sincere and humble an assembly of investigators as ever met, who feel that their the holiest and most sacred feelings have been outraged by the imposition practiced upon them, and which the refusal of Mrs. Holmes to vindicate herself clearly proves.

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  | source title = New-York Daily Tribune  

  | publication date = 1875-08-30

  | notes = Reprinted in The Banner of Light, September 11, 1875

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''To the of Editor The Tribune''

But suppose all our smart pamphleteers have been upon a wrong scent, what precious waste of wit has there not been! Suppose these ancient authors whom you name in your opening paragraph were right after all, and it should be found that they had pushed beyond the vail of Isis to where Nature lurks, and, standing beside her, had learned her secrets, discovered the clue to her labyrinth, and could teach us how to summon and master the “spirits of the vasty deep?” ''Suppose I should tell you<ref>Text in italic in Banner of Light, there is no such italic in New-York Daily Tribune. — O.B.</ref>'' that, in most unexpected way and at a most fortuitous time, I had come into contact with living persons who could do and had in my presence done the very marvels that Paracelsus, Albertus and Apollonius are accredited with; and that it was shown to me that all these seeming miracles of the circle are no miracles at all, but natural manifestations of absolutely natural law; that man has dominion over the powers of nature by right of his immortal soul’s divine parentage; ''that the “spirits” which produce nine-tenths of the genuine “manifestations” are not the spirits of men or women from this earth, but something quite different, and something that does not inhabit our future world, nor stroll with us the asphodels; that the wise, the pure, the just, the heroic souls who have passed on before us into the Silent Land, cannot and do not come back to spout sapphics through scrub-women, nor swing through the air on a spiritual trapeze at the bidding or poverty-stricken mediums, for the delectation of the gaping crowd. What when?<ref>Text in italic in Banner of Light, there is no such italic in New-York Daily Tribune. — O.B.</ref>'' You see there are likely to be found grains of wheat under this mountain of chaff. If the priceless treasures of the Alexandrian Library had not been used to heat the public baths, the “Lost Arts” of the ancients, including the art of communing with the dead and the power to look beyond the vail to our future home, might not be now “lost” to all but a select few in the Oriental fraternities, and it would not be necessary for so humble a pen as mine to rebuke so distinguished a critic as yourself for writing what you have about these people from the other world.

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  | title = Physical Mediums and The Banner of Light  

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  | source title = Banner of Light, The  

  | publication date = 1875-09-11

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