Her duty is to stop it in its course and search it, rejecting the chimerical, accepting the real. She should verify and distinguish. All human knowledge is but picking and culling. The circumstance that the false is mingled with the true furnishes no excuse for rejecting the whole mass. Hoe out the weed error, but reap the fact, and place it beside others.
Science is the sheaf of facts.
The mission of science is to study and sound everything. All of us, according to our degree, are the creditors of investigation. It came with the Rochester rappings. It came at a time when, owing to the rise of physical science, the discoveries, inventions, and research that had revolutionized the thought of the world, many of the old religious concepts had lost their hold on the public mind, and with these changes, materialism was rapidly but subtly dominating the thought of the people, paralyzing the church and taking from life one of its mightiest sources of inspiration. The phenomenally rapid rise of spiritualism, in the face of the strong opposition of the church and conventional thought, was one of the most significant facts of the religious history of America during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century.