ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

Additional Notes on T·wo Books.· 621
Goligher family a presumption of fraud! ( 89) " These pietistic
preliminaries * * * lend an air of suspicion." Of course the
prayers are not evidential of genuineness, but that their employment
by persons of religious proclivities in conjunction with what
is to them sacred should be presumptive of guile is a mystery to
any but a jaundiced mind. And only a pen dipped in prejtldice
could write about " the thin lips; hard expression of feature, and
calculating looks as if to take the measure of their sitter's credulity"
of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Wriedt!( 115). I have not seen the
portrait of Mrs. W reidt; but Mrs, Piper surely deserves the
derogatory description no more than a million· other Amer,ican
women. In one portrait before me she looks a little constrained
from the knowledge that she is having her picture taken, and in
another not even that, and in both she is the very picture of a
refined, reserved gentlewoman. Since when has it been incriminating
to have thin lips? Some psychics have thick lips, some
thin, and others lips that are " betwixt and between ", without
any discoverable bearings of their labial measurements upon their
character or abilities.
\Ve might go on indefinitely guoting passages which enforce
the conclusion that Mr. Clodd's book is a study in prejudice and
the art of special pleading, but these must suffice.
"THY SON LIVETH."
The Rev. John \Vhitehead, a leading Swedenborgian clergyman
of Boston, in November, 1919, reviewed this boOk in a public
address. The following is from a printed bulletin of the lecture:
'
The author claims that the first message received from her son
killed in France was received on a dismantled wireless instrument
in New York. The son immediately after being killed went to an
abandoned wireless instrument in a trench and sent a message to his
mother in New York. The instrument had not the capacity for
sending to such a distance but he depended on other disembodied
spirits to relay the message until it was received in New York by
his mother. This mode of sending and receiving a message by
spirits using a material wireless is utterly impossible. It is also
impossible for a dismantled wireless to receive any message that
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