Post-mortem confessions : being letters written through a mortal's hand by spirits who, when in mortal, were officers of Harvard College : with comments by Allen Putnam / by Allen Putnam.

  • Putnam, Allen, 1802-1887.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Post-mortem confessions : being letters written through a mortal's hand by spirits who, when in mortal, were officers of Harvard College : with comments by Allen Putnam / by Allen Putnam. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    and Professors intently to that subject, which was then agitating the public mind, and threatening to turn the world upside down. Much to my surprise, Agassiz states that President Walker deemed the intelligence diabolical which was outworking the spiritualistic phenomena. It may have been that even that liberal and able man, as did our ancestors in witchcraft times, undertook to banish the Devil by punishing mortals. Better it would have been to kindly clasp his hand, and convert him to an angel of light. The attainments, character, and position of those who constituted The Faculty, that is, the admin- istrative or governing board of the College, justified their belief, if such they had, that it was in their power, and might be their duty, so to act and teach that the public mind would frown down and extin- guish any wide-spreading mental delusion. No other body of men in this region had powers equaling theirs to detect and expose the deluding force of fictitious claims. The Faculty assumed the claims of Spiritualists, that decarnated men and women return, to be fictitious,— not based on veritable facts. Therefore, in good faith, no doubt, and for what they deemed public good, they, in the words of Spirit Agassiz, as a body, agreed to give it battle, and that, too, believing we could demolish the structure, .... but we soon found we were powerless in the matter. Their purpose was to give it battle But Spirit- ualists, and the public extensively, understood that they proposed to make a fair investigation, not to