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Post-Mortem Confessions: Being Letters Written Through a Mortal's Hand by Spirits Who, When in Mortal, Were Officers of Harvard College
Excerpt from Post-Mortem Confessions: Being Letters Written Through a Mortal's Hand by Spirits Who, When in Mortal, Were Officers of Harvard College
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 Danish 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 administrative 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 extinguish 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 varitable 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."
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 Danish 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 administrative 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 extinguish 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 varitable 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."
129 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2009
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February 13, 2019
The enterprising Putnam writes in 1886, near the end of his life, to set forth his views on Spiritualism. First he reports messages from beyond the grave from the Harvard professors who investigated Spiritualism in 1857 and declared psychic power to be a hoax. Now the professors attest to the truth of the spirit world. Putnam then describes how Spiritualism is a part of nature, in line with science, and praises humanity's new, direct connection to heaven. People looking for a good distillation of what nineteenth-century Spiritualists believed could learn a lot from this book.
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