THE SPIRITUALISTS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 436, 7 October 1869, Page 3

THE SPIRITUALISTS.

{From the Times, June 25.) Mr Home was present -on Wednesday night at a meeting of the committee of the Dialectical Society, which is investigating spiritual manifestations, and gave a long account of his experience. Certain manifestations, he said, occur only in a trance. He is sometimes awakened even out of a sound sleep by a presence in the room, and then the spirit will; tell him what is. doing at a distance. He writes it down at the time, and it invariably proves correct. " The only thing," he added, " I can explain about a trance is, that I have always felt it necessary for the people about me to be in a harmonious condition. Then I become like one in a dream, and then comes a dizzy sensation, and I forget everything. When I awake, it is sometimes with the utmost difficulty that I get the blood to circulate. I never know what occurs in a trance. Indeed, lam sceptical as to what people tell me I have said while in that state. It is unpleasant to me." Being asked what he meant by persons being " harmonious," Mr Home said, " I cannot tell anything more than that on going into a drawing-room, I sometimes feel at home at once; and at another time you go in when two or three persons are there, and you do not feel afc home. It is nothing more than j that." Mr Home said that he had been given over by the doctors several time 3, but the spirits told him he would get better. During the progress of the lawsuit with Mrs Lyon he had congestion; of. the brain, and his memory left him. The spirits told him he would recover, and he had recovered. Mf Home related a fact which occurred some years ago in the presence of the Emperor Napoleon. "We were," he said, "in a large room in the Salon de Louis Quatofze. The Empress and Emperor were present. lam now telling the story as I heard the Emperor tell it. A table was moved— then a hand was seen to come. It was a very beautifully formed hand. There were pencils on the table. It lifted, not the one next it, but one on the far side. We heard the sound of writing, and saw it writing on fine note paper. The hand passed before me and went to the Emperor, and he kissed the hand. It went to the Empress; she withdrew from its touch, and the hand followed her. The Emperor said, ■' Do not be frightened;' and she kissed it too. It was disappearing. I said I would like to kiss it. The hand seemed to be like a person thinking, and as if it were saying, ' Why should I? ' It came back to me. It had written the word ' Napoleon,' and it remains written now. It was a material hand, as my hand is now. The writing was an autograph of the Emperor Napoleon L, who had an exceedingly beautiful hand." Mr Home said that the Emperor of Russia as well as the Emperor Napoleon had seen hands, and had taken hold of them, " when they seemed to float away into thin air." In reply to a question whether he could give any information as to the state and condition of departed human spirits, Mr Home said that his information led him to the opinion that precisely as we go to sleep here so we awake in the other world— Wesleyans were Wesleyans, Swedenborgians were Swedenborgians, Mahomedans were Mahomedans. As to future rewards and punishments, bad spirits

see the continuous results of the wrong they have done, and, in some instances, have endeavoured to repair it by declaring where concealed papers were. Two or three other persons expressed their opinions on this subject. One of them, aMr Damrain, who said that, though not himself a medium, he " had been iv the presence of a hundred mediums at 200 seances and had in his library 600 volumes on spiritualism," gave. :' it as bis opinion that tbere are marriages in the 'spiritual world between opposite sexes, but no spiritual children. Spiritual boys go -to school, and continue to grow until 35 ; old men return to that age ; painters paint with spiritual pigments; and mechanics make spiritual tables. . XX