The Dewsbury Chronicle, and West Riding Advertiser. — 1872-05-18 (Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, England)

AMONG THE SPIRITUALISTS.  Mr. Gerald Massey has commenced a course of four lectures on subjects connected with Spiritualism. "Facts of my own personal experience narrated and discussed, together with various theories of the alleged. phenomena"—this was his subject on Sunday afternoon, and some two or three hundred people, mostly spiritualists, assembled to hear him. It is to be presumed that. Mr. Massey's object is to promote the cause of spiritualism by establishing those who are in the faith and convincing those who are not. As to what may have been the effect of his first lecture upon believers, we cannot venture to express any opinion. People who are occasionally found to be so entirely independent of physical laws cannot safely be regarded as at all times amenable to ordinary mental influences. But if the experience Mr. Gerald Massey related on Sunday be the standard and ordinary experience of spiritualists, then people may exclaim. "Heaven preserve us from conversion." He began by declaring that either with the pitchfork, or the pen, he had been all his life long accustomed to hard work. The circumstances which led him first to believe in clairvoyancy, and then to become a spiritualist, were very interesting, and might perhaps afford a subject for a painter, or a situation for a novelist. He was in the company of a young lady clairvoyante, who undertook to read a book without seeing it, and he was appointed to hold her eyes. This, it must be confessed, was a very delicate office for a young man and a poet. Ho frankly confessed on, Sunday that his anxiety for the yo7ng lady's success overcame for once his love of sincerity and truth, and  that he purposely opened his fingers to enable her to see through. Although this proved to be a very unnecessary display of partiality, it was of course a very unmistakable one, and we cannot be surprised that Mr. Massey ran away with the young clairvoyante and made her his wife.  The lecturer proceeded to give the facts of his married life in connection with spiritualism. We really cannot bring ourselves to recount them. We have read them over—the spirits that nibble like a rat, and rap like a telegraph, and whisk like a dog's tail—ad nauseam. Here and there Mr. Massey certainly ran somewhat above the ordinary level. It is not every spiritualist who can relate from hi g own experience such a hideous ghost story as that with which he on Sunday delighted his audience, nor is it everyone who has occasionally found his wife ghastly and convulsed, and possessed by the spirit of a murderer, who cries, "Give me back my bones." It is, too, only fair to add that unlike most spiritualistic experience, Mr. Massey's are not entirely void of a practical utility. The spirit of Shakespeare has occasionally communicated with him, and on one occasion gave him a genuine hint about the interpretation of one of those perplexing sonnets of his. Now, this is something like what we have so • long been demanding. There really is some sort of sense in a manifestation of this kind. An edition of Shakespeare edited by himself would be . absolutely priceless,  - If all the facts of our experience lead us to believe, for instance, that ceilings must be impervious to Mrs. Guppy, why should Mr. Massey be severe upon us if we hold on by our facts and maintain that Mrs. Guppy can't come through, and that those who say she can must be lunatics? It was impossible to hear this lecture and remain serious. Trashy ghost stories might have been all very well when Mr. Massey wielded the pitchfork; but to hear them soberly delivered in terse, vigorous English, and with the racy, humorous good sense which is characteristic of his style, suggests the idea of a man of real intellectual power degenerated into a hopeless craze.