A man who joins the Dashaways does not care to have
the circumstance announced in the newspapers. "So, he was an habitual
drunkard," the public would say. I was overcome by a similar
reluctance,--nay, I might honestly call it shame,--since, although I had
at intervals officiated as a Medium for a period of seven years, my name
had been mentioned, incidentally, only once or twice in the papers
devoted especially to Spiritualism. I had no such reputation as that of
Hume or Andrew Jackson Davis, which would call for a public statement of
my recantation. The result would be, therefore, to give prominence to a
weakness, which, however manfully overcome, might be remembered to my
future prejudice.
I find, however, that the resolution to be silent leaves me restless and
unsatisfied. And in reflecting calmly--objectively, for the first
time--upon the experience of those seven years, I recognize so many
points wherein my case is undoubtedly analogous to that of hundreds of
others who may be still entangled in the same labyrinth whence I have
but recently escaped, so clear a solution of much that is enigmatical,
even to those who reject Spiritualism, that the impulse to write weighs
upon me with the pressure of a neglected duty.
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