The Spirit Land

This volume is intended as an antidote to a species of errors that have been rife in every age of the Christian church. Notwithstanding the disclosures the Most High made of himself to his ancient people, they were yet prone to turn aside from the worship of the true God, to follow the lying spirits of the prophets of Baal, and other deceivers, from the days of Moses till the destruction of Jerusalem. So, likewise, under the Christian dispensation, there has been a succession of Antichrists, until their name is legion, whose teachings have clouded the understandings and blinded the moral perceptions of men, subverting the faith of many whose mountains stood strong, and who had been counted the chosen people of God.

The present is viewed as an age of isms. Men have run mad, and are chasing phantoms. They are roaming round to find some fulcrum to overturn the church and the Bible; they are imagining they are receiving utterances from heaven, when nothing is uttered but the vain fantasies of their own minds and hearts. It is the grossest fanaticism--fanaticism in its most frightful form, leading its unhappy victims, not unfrequently, to flagrant crimes, and to the most horrid of all--that of self-destruction.

These pages are submitted to the public with the counsel of the wisest and best of all ages, that, amid the wily arts of the adversary, we should cling to the word of God, the Bible of our fathers, as the only safe and infallible guide of faith and practice.

NOTE.

We would here give credit to the principal works from which valuable and important matter has been selected for these pages: Whitman's Popular Superstitions; Upham's Lectures upon Witchcraft; Christian Freeman and Family Visitor; Abercrombie on the Intellectual Powers; Influence of the Imagination upon the Nervous System, by Rev. Grant Powers; Life of Adam Clarke; Hayward's Book of all Religions; Miller on the Second Coming of Christ; Borrow's Gypsies of Spain; Stone on False Prophets and Christs; Dickens's Household Words; Capron and Barron on the Spirit Knockings; Dick on the Improvement of Society; Revelations of A. J. Davis; The Great Harmonia; Rogers on Human and Mundane Agents; Miss Crowe's Night Side of Nature; Spiritual Telegraph, &c.

As the work embraces a mass of facts of an absorbing and intensely interesting character, we trust that it will commend itself to an enlightened and judicious public.

THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS.

PART FIRST.

INTRODUCTION.

THE OBJECT OF THIS WORK.

PAGE

Nursery tales of giants, dwarfs, ghosts, fairies, and witches.-- Their effect upon juvenile minds.--A belief in ghosts still prevalent.--The excitability of the public mind.--Ghost reported as having been seen in Waltham, Massachusetts. 17

CHAPTER I.

ORIGIN OF POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS.

Ignorance of correct reasoning.--Conclusions from particular facts.--Water boiled by heat.--Signs.--Breaking a mirror.--Gene ral conclusions from a few facts.--A victim to superstition in New Hampshire.--How signs may be multiplied.--The design of the Creator in endowing us with reason. 19

CHAPTER II.

INDUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY NOT UNDERSTOOD.

Ignorance of it the cause of many superstitions.--Lights seen in marshy grounds, &c.--Supposed to be supernatural.--Causes of these lights, and phenomena connected with them.--Shrinking and swelling of pork in boiling.--Cause.--Supposed influence of the moon in making soap, grafting trees, cutting timber, &c.--Lunar influence in matters of wedlock.--Love not to be fed on moonshine. 22

CHAPTER III.

IGNORANCE OF THE CAUSES OF DREAMS.