The Founder of Mormonism/Chapter 7

The Testimony of Three Witnesses is commonly quoted by writers in both camps; the Saints take it as proof of divinity,^[1] the scoffers as proof of duplicity.^[2] Quotation is one thing, explanation another. If it is used as psychological material, the problem is whether the vision was an individual hallucination, generated normally by the subject, or aroused semi-hypnotically by a second person.

The latter form of statement may serve as a tentative hypothesis, but not before the former is examined. According to some authorities,^[3] hallucinations can be induced, in a normal state of consciousness, without hypnosis. As there are suggestions in dreams, so are there suggestions in the waking state. But here, from the start, is manifest the chief phenomenon of hypnosis,—​namely that a certain accepted idea leads to a mental delusion. More particularly, it is antecedently probable that this was hypnotic hallucination, since there are present the three productive factors: susceptibility to suggestion on the part of the subject, the effect of expectant attention, and previous success, as increasing the principal's influence.

To apply these essentials: all three are found in the case of the first witness, Oliver Cowdery. His suggestibility is evidenced by his excitement over the story of the gold plates, by his belief that it was predetermined that he should be Joseph's scribe, and lastly by his entire absorption in the project. 'Shortly after receiving a sketch of the facts relative to the plates,' says Mother Smith, 'he told Mr. Smith that he was highly delighted with what he had heard, that he had been in a deep study upon the subject all day, and that it was impressed upon his mind, that he should yet have the privilege of writing for Joseph. On coming in on the following day, he said, "The subject upon which we were yesterday conversing seems working in my very bones, and cannot, for a moment, get it out of my mind; for I have made it a subject of prayer, and firmly believe that it is the will of the Lord that I should go." From this time, Oliver was so completely absorbed in the subject of the Record, that ​it seemed impossible for him to think or converse about anything else.'^[4]

Cowdery's suggestibility was not merely self-induced, the prophet himself increased that state of mind by a long and subtle series of preliminary suggestions. He was ignorant of the formula, but he knew as a fact the effect of expectant attention. Nothing could be more efficient than the cumulative revelations now received. In April, 1829, there came:—

'A Revelation to Oliver, when employed a scribe to Joseph,—Behold thou hast a gift, and blessed art thou because of thy gift. Remember it is sacred and cometh from above; and if thou wilt inquire, thou shalt know mysteries which are great and marvelous. . . . Verily, verily I say unto you, if you desire a further witness, cast your mind upon the night that you cried unto me in your heart, that you might know concerning the truth of these things; did I not speak peace to your mind concerning the matter? . . . Verily, verily I say unto you that there are records which contain much of my gospel. . . . And now behold I give unto you, and also unto my servant Joseph the keys of this gift, . . . and in the mouth of two or three witnesses, shall every word be established.'^[5]

​How the master was gaining ascendency over the subject is shown by what follows. Under the mask of divinity, he now seeks to inspire him with a belief in the working of the divining rod, and to direct the very course of his thoughts:—

'Now this is not all, for you have another gift, which is the gift of working with the rod: behold it has told you things: behold there is no other power save God, that can cause this rod of nature to work in your hands, for it is the work of God; and therefore whatsoever you shall ask me to tell you by that means, that will I grant unto you, that you shall know.^[6] . . . Behold I say unto you, my son, that, because you did not translate according to that which you desired of me, . . . Behold you have not understood, you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought, save it was to ask me;

But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right; But if it be not right, you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought, that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong; therefore you cannot write that which is sacred, save it be given you from me.'^[7]

​In the meanwhile the subject did not realize the degree of his psychic plasticity; this is clear from his own statement. In the first of the Letters of Oliver Cowdery occurs this passage:—'Near the time of the setting of the sun, Sabbath evening, April 5th, 1829, my natural eyes, for the first time beheld this brother. He then resided in Harmony, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. On Monday, the 6th, I assisted him in arranging some business of a temporal nature, and on Tuesday, the 7th, commenced to write the Book of Mormon. These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven, awakened the utmost gratitude of this bosom. Day after day I continued, uninterruptedly to write from his mouth, as he translated, with the Urim and Thummim, or as the Nephites would have said, "Interpreters," the history, or record, called the Book of Mormon.'

The preparatory manipulation of the first witness was not yet completed. The longest revelation to Oliver opens with the words,—'A great and a marvelous work is about to come forth unto the children of men.'^[8] This was the prophet's scriptural formulation of the actual principle of expectant attention. In the same way, he had a practical, though not a technical cognizance of the third factor in the pro​duction of hypnosis. His previous success, as increasing his personal influence, is manifest from the following episode. Of the two accounts, the matter-of-fact assumptions of the seer may be well compared with the rhapsody of his follower:—

​Up to his dying day, Cowdery believed there was no 'fiction and deception' either in this manifestation, or in the plate vision.^[11] This fact has a twofold significance: the persistance of his belief shows the vividness of the original hallucination, but the conviction of reality points to hypnosis—in which there is 'an apparently logical connection between the suggested idea and the hypnotic subject's own thoughts.'^[12] The final testimony of the second witness is equally illuminating, both as to the seeming external projection of the sensible image, and the condition of mind in which the subject sees but does not reason. In an interview, September, 1878, David Whitmer said:—

Whitmer's entire faith in the reality of the vision of the plates is perpetuated by the inscription on his tomb.^[14] His grandson supplies further information, and, what is more, suggests hypnotism as a cause.^[15] ​Of the credulity of the last of the three witnesses an instance has already been given: it was Martin Harris 'a farmer of respectability' who had already lent money to Joseph^[16] and had taken the transcription or 'Caractors' to New York City. In a letter written by him in 1870, he said:—'No man ever heard me in any way deny either the Book of Mormon, or the administration of the angel that showed me the plates, or the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints under the administration of Joseph Smith, junior, the prophet, whom the Lord raised up for that purpose in these later days, that He might show forth His power and glory. The Lord has shown me these things by His Spirit, and by the administration of angels, and confirmed the same with signs following for the space of forty years. I do say that the angel did show me the plates containing the Book of Mormon, and further that the translation that I carried to Professor Anthon was copied from the plates.'^[17]

The case of Harris presented greater difficulties than that of the other two. His financial dealings with Smith; his loss of the one hundred and sixteen ​pages of manuscript, and the revelation implying that he was in league with the devil,—made him, for the time being, less susceptible to the revelators' influence. Yet Harris was by nature a good subject; he had always been a firm believer in dreams, visions, and supernatural appearances, such as apparitions and ghosts.^[18] Five years before his death, an attack of vertigo was interpreted by him as 'a snare of the adversary to hinder him from going to Salt Lake City.'^[19]

With all this in view, it is interesting to watch how Smith approached one whose constitutional susceptibility was biased by a personal grudge. Three months before the vision took place there was 'A Revelation given to Joseph and Martin, in Harmony, Pennsylvania, when Martin desired of the Lord to know whether Joseph had, in his possession, the record of the Nephites.'^[20] Not long ​after this occurred the loss of the manuscript, and the consequent rupture between the translator and his first scribe. But with the completion of the translation there came reconciliation and renewed expectancy. 'As soon as the Book of Mormon was translated,' narrates Mrs. Smith, 'we conveyed this intelligence to Martin Harris, for we loved the man, although his weakness had cost us much trouble. Hearing this, he greatly rejoiced, and determined to go straightway to Waterloo to congratulate Joseph upon his success. . . . The next morning, after attending to the usual services, namely, reading, singing, and praying, Joseph arose from his knees, and approaching Martin Harris with a solemnity that thrills through my veins to this day, when it occurs to my recollection, said, "Martin Harris, you have got to humble yourself before your God this day, that you may obtain a forgiveness of your sins. If you do, it is the will of God that you should look upon the plates, in company with Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer."'^[21]

But with Martin the 'eye of faith' had not yet taken the place of the natural vision. As Whitmer says, 'Martin Harris was not with us this (first) time, but he obtained a view of them [the plates] afterwards, the same day.'^[22] It was the going ​aside and praying over the third witness that delayed the return to the house until between three and four in the afternoon. Joseph then gave vent to his joy, saying, 'Father, mother, you do not know how happy I am; the Lord has now caused the plates to be shown to three more besides myself.' 'Upon this,' adds Lucy, 'Martin Harris came in: he seemed almost overcome with joy, and testified boldly to what he had both seen and heard. And so did David and Oliver, adding, that no tongue could express the joy of their hearts, and the greatness of the things which they had both seen and heard.'^[23]

The final details of the transaction are obtained from the account of the chief actor. Joseph says in his History of the Church:—

'Not many days after the above commandment was given, we four, viz., Martin Harris, David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and myself, agreed to retire into the woods, and try to obtain, by fervent and humble prayer, the fulfilment of the promise given in the revelation—that they should have a view of the plates, etc. We accordingly made choice of a piece of ​woods convenient to Mr. Whitmer's house, to which we retired, and having knelt down, we began to pray in much faith to Almighty God to bestow upon us a realization of these promises. According to previous arrangements I commenced by vocal prayer to our heavenly Father, and was followed by each of the rest in succession. We did not, however, obtain any answer or manifestation of the divine favor in our behalf. We again observed the same order of prayer, each calling on and praying fervently to God in rotation, but with the same result as before. Upon this, our second failure, Martin Harris proposed that he should withdraw himself from us, believing, as he expressed himself, that his presence was the cause of our not obtaining what we wished for; he accordingly withdrew from us, and we knelt down again, and had not been many minutes engaged in prayer, when presently we beheld a light above us in the air, of exceeding brightness: and behold, an angel stood before us; in his hands he held the plates which we had been praying for these to have a view of; he turned over the leaves one by one, so that we could see them, and discover the engravings thereon distinctly. He then addressed himself to David Whitmer, and said, "David, blessed is the Lord and he that keeps His commandments." When, immediately afterwards, we heard a voice from out of the bright light above us, saying, "These plates have been revealed by the power of God, and they have been translated by the power of ​God. The translation of them which you have seen is correct and I command you to bear record of what you now see and hear." I now left David and Oliver, and went in pursuit of Martin Harris, whom I found at a considerable distance, fervently engaged in prayer. He soon told me, however, that he had not yet prevailed with the Lord, and earnestly requested me to join him in prayer, that he also might realize the same blessings which we had just received. We accordingly joined in prayer, and ultimately obtained our desires, for, before we had yet finished, the same vision was open to our view, at least it was again to me, and I once more beheld and heard the same things, whilst at the same moment Martin Harris cried out, apparently in ecstasy of joy, "'Tis enough; mine eyes have beheld," and jumping up, he shouted "Hosannah," blessing God, and otherwise rejoiced exceedingly.'^[24]

Beneath these cryptic accounts, with their legendary accretions, it remains to discover the psychology of the Saints; to find to what degree the mani​festations are explicable on the grounds of subjective hallucination, induced by hypnotic suggestion. A closer scrutiny of the evidence will show how nearly it fills the various conditions demanded. But before that is undertaken, various traditions must be cleared away, especially certain occult assumptions and explanations of a generation ago. It was claimed of Smith that he possessed a 'fascination of glance,' and that he was 'a magnet in a large way.'^[25] Brigham Young asserted the former, the electro-biologists the latter. The various upholders of these emanation theories ignored the fact that as spiritual head of his church, the prophet had untold influence over the bodies and souls of his devotees. Given then, such an influence, and sensitive subjects, and mental suggestion could produce anything in the way of illusion. Thus the explanation is subjective, not objective; it was captivation but not fascination; there was leader and led, and the former succeeded in inducing in the latter all the phantasmagoria of religious ardor. In the Kirtland frenzy and the Nauvoo excitement, the Saints had illusive images ranging from bears and wolves and scalping Indians, to concourses of angels and the New Jerusalem.

Again, the vision of the plates may be related in a larger way with what has gone before. Of the ​three classes of hallucinations two have already been explicated. Joseph's father had the ordinary hallucination of dream; his grandfather that which persists into the waking state. The vision of the three witnesses is that form of hallucination which may occur either in the normal state, or be induced in the state of light hypnosis. The former is exemplified in day-dreams; it is largely self-induced and implies some capacity for visualizing. The latter may also occur with the eyes open, but it is induced by the positive suggestion of another.

But integrally connected with all this is the question whether, in the vision of the Records, the three subjects were conscious of an extra-mental impulse. Whitmer was once asked if he was in his usual condition of consciousness while he beheld the plates, and if he was sensible of surrounding objects. He refused to answer the inquiry.^[26] This silence might connote a deep state of hypnosis, in which the subject is not aware that he has been hypnotized. But the loss of memory of the initial impulse is not the same as forgetfulness of the hallucination, as such. Amnesia does not occur in the light stages, nor need there be abnormality of memory in its three functions of retention, reproduction, and recognition of its ideas.

If the substantial agreement between the earliest ​and latest testimonies of the witnesses meets the requirements of psychological reproduction, so does the original form of the hallucination. Association of ideas plays its leading part. As the hypnotized soldier will hear the voice of his old commander, or the devout French peasant see his patron Saint, so was it in these manifestations. The ideas and interests which were uppermost in the mind were projected outwards. Harris had received the first 'transcription of the gold plates'; Whitmer had been saturated with notions of ancient engravings; Cowdery, for weeks at a time, had listened to the sound of a voice translating the record of the Nephites. When that voice was again heard in the grove, when the four sought 'by fervent and humble prayer to have a view of the plates,' there is little wonder that there arose a psychic mirage, complete in every detail. Furthermore, the rotation in praying, the failure of the first two attempts, the repeated workings of the prophet over the doubting Harris, but serve to bring out the additional incentives to the hypnotic hallucination. Repetition, steady attention, absence of mistrust, self-surrender to the will of the principal,—all the requisites are present, not as formulæ but as facts. The variations in method were many, the results were one.

In a few days there followed the episode of the ​eight witnesses.^[27] In their testimony, they claimed not only to have seen the plates, but to have handled and 'hefted' them. The bucolic phrases, properly interpreted, suggest both visual and tactual sense illusions. But other explanations should be glanced at before the psychological explanation is attempted. To peer into the wilderness of guesses is a waste of time, unless it shows the characteristic tendency to believe things without logical proof. Thus the credulity of the Mormons is evidenced by their irritation at the various surmises of the profane,—from the no-plate theory repudiated by Mother Smith,^[28] to the 'yellow-tin-plate-ventriloquist ​theory' derided by the reorganized Saints.^[29] To finish the matter: there is a choice between two things. The Testimony of the Eight Witnesses is a pure fabrication. It is a document due to the affidavit habit. Like the slanderous manifestoes against the Smiths, this has the suspicious uniformity of a patent medicine testimonial.

The other alternative is that the Testimony of the Eight is a record of collective hypnotization. In form it might be either an hallucination or an illusion,—the perception of an object where in reality there is nothing, or the false interpretation of some existing external object.^[30] The possibility of collective hypnosis is shown by the numerous historic instances of contagious psychic epidemics, arising from religious fervor and an overstimulated imagination.^[31] Even in modern time these have ranged from the more orderly visionary occurrences at Lourdes, to the Swedish preaching disease,' and its attendant hallucinatory mania. Whatever the phase, the eight witnesses formed a close psychic corporation, consisting of two family parties and one outsider. ​Although little is known of these Whitmers, and nothing of Page, it is certain that the abnormal religious influences of the times had rendered them more or less susceptible to suggestion. Given Joseph Smith, senior, as a nucleus of credulity, there may easily have happened here what happens under modern experimental methods of hypnosis,—when persons endowed with a vivid power of representation are gathered together, 'by exchanging confidences, or by imparting their respective impressions, they reciprocally hallucinate each other.'^[32]

Smith's achievements as prophet, seer, and revelator have been explained on the basis of auto-hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion. The use of such terms is of course proleptic. A difficult problem now arises: What historic connection, if any, was there between the founder of Mormonism and those movements of his day which formed the antecedents of hypnotism?^[33] Did he borrow from Swedenborgianism, Animal Magnetism, Spiritualism and other pseudo-scientific cults which swept over the country? To anticipate,—the answer is negative. At the founding of the church, these movements were as yet below the horizon of the prophet, ​while his most mature theories were simple in the extreme. The true explanation must be connected with both ancestry and environment. As his progenitors took a prehistoric view of dreams, and his followers held to the savage's animistic conception of evil spirits, so Joseph's mental habit was most primitive. With him hypnosis was of the timeworn sort, the kind which was to be found in the witchcraft at Endor and the priestcraft at Ephesus. Incidentally if any paganism is to be found in Mormonism, it lies in this continuity of heathen thought, on the occult side. As for Smith himself, his case was sporadic, his achievements empirical, and his abnormal performances a resultant of a faith tinged with superstition. To his overwrought imagination, these appeared true apostolic gifts,—trances, speaking with tongues, anointing with holy oil, and healing by prayer.^[34]

To bring the latter-day problem to a head: the historic points of attachment may be largely resolved into questions of place and time. This was an occult locality. Rochester, known as the 'Boston of the West,' was confessedly a 'hotbed of isms.'^[35] Canandaigua, about ten miles from Joseph's home, was the early stamping ground of the Fox sisters,^[36] ​and the starting point of spiritualism proper. Along the Erie canal there had already spread an American variety of Mesmerism. The place was likely, but not the time. The spirit rappings did not begin until April, 1848; nor electro-magnetism until the first workings of the electric telegraph in 1844.

But to take up the various alternate explanations in detail. There was the supposition that Joseph Smith, like Swedenborg, was a seer-nature.^[37] The suggested connection is not impossible. There was a convention of the American New Church, at Philadelphia in 1817.^[38] Already a regularly ordained Swedenborgian missionary had traveled to the Western Reserve.^[39] In the early thirties a volume of Swedenborg was in the possession of a Mormon convert.^[40] Lastly, in the forties Smith himself, as an expert in sectarianism, was doubtless cognizant of the New Jerusalem Church; his Revelation on ​Celestial Marriage has a formal likeness to parts of the Arcana Cœlestia, while his Address to the Church, of September 6, 1842, enumerates these celestial messages:—'A voice of the Lord in the Wilderness of Fayette . . . the voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, . . . the voice of Gabriel and of Raphael and of divers angels.' This reads like the ravings of Swedenborg, but in the Wilderness of Fayette the motley angels of the seer of Stockholm^[41] had not yet made their appearance; Smith's celestial visitants were of the orthodox variety.

The second explanation of Smith's occultism was that he was a Mesmerist. This rests on the authority of a female apostate. By her the prophet is said to exclaim, 'I could transform my enemies to lifeless, senseless lumps of clay. . . . I could deprive them of their senses, or compel them to do my bidding, even to take their own lives.'^[42] The force of this testimony is spoiled by exaggeration and also by an acknowledged difficulty of date,—'the mystery of it is, how Smith came to possess the knowledge of that magnetic influence, several years before its general circulation throughout the country.' Another untrustworthy female claims to know the exact source of Joseph's 'mysterious ​power.' It was Mrs. Bradish who said, 'Smith obtained his information, and learned all the strokes, and passes, and manipulations from a German peddlar.^[43] The story is ingenious, but this was not true Mesmerism, for Mesmer did not use the peculiar, monotonous, long-continued passes.^[44]

Smith's power of fascination was, in the next place, attributed to a magnetic force, which permeated and radiated from his whole being.^[45] A prominent statesman was averred to have held this view, after seeing Smith 'electrify' and cure a paralyzed arm.^[46] The theory is interesting, but it overexplains. Joseph had immense influence long before this country was permeated by a distorted mesmerism. How the latter was imported into America is hard to say. After his downfall, Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism was indeed continued, but under another name; Pétetins' work on animal electricity was published in 1808, but its historic influence was slight.^[47] In France by its own excesses mesmerism had given itself a black eye. In England the efforts of two reputable physicians to introduce magnetism were unavailing.^[48] ​No regular experimenter seems to have taken hold of the subject until Braid, in 1842, published his Satanic Agency and Mesmerism.^[49] What the charlatans were doing in the meanwhile was but subterranean. Judging from the scanty literary remains,^[50] the movement must have got into America in the dark; at any rate its academic entry into New York State was late. It is said that Dr. Grimes, then a medical student in Buffalo, learned Mesmer's Parisian methods and applied them in a journey along the Erie canal.^[51] The Fox sisters were especially susceptible and next year, in Canandaigua the 'Bethlehem of the Dispensation,' there came a message that 'a reformation was going on in the spirit world.'^[52] These phenomena in their quasi-scientific form cannot be pushed back of the forties. It was in 1848 that the 'spirit-circles' began to spread over the land,^[53] while Grimes' town hall lectures, on what he called electro-biology, were later than Braid's first work.

​Finally attempts have been made to connect Smith with spiritualism of the Yankee variety. The allegations are so curious as to merit quotation. One of the cult says: 'the conclusions to which we have arrived are, that the Book of Mormon is to a very great extent, a spiritual romance, originating in the spiritual world, and that Joseph Smith was the medium, or the principal one, through whom it was given.'^[54] A later writer is more eloquent:—'The spiritual beings who have originated our system announce a grander spiritual movement, one acting with all the power and the benefit of organization and unity. For this purpose Joseph Smith was raised up, mainly that he might gather an inspirational people, among whom such a system could in due time be founded. . . . Joseph Smith was raised up to prepare the way for the establishment of a central spiritual power which, when fully developed, shall sweep all that there is valuable in spiritualism within its ample folds, taking its highest order of seers, its prophets, its spiritual healers.'^[55] It is true that Joseph, like the spiritualists, had his beliefs in possession and obsession, but they were of the good old ecclesiastical sort, while his revelation of Celestial Marriage in 1844, ​antedated by a decade the prosaic free-love doctrine of the degenerate 'Rochester rappers.'^[56]

To sum up: even at the time of Smith's death, ofcial spiritualism was beyond his ken. Yet there were forerunners of the movement, which may have affected the young man. Thus there was a confessed likeness between the spiritualists and the primitive Quakers, who 'also believed in manifestations through outward voices and appearances, through dreams, and through inward spiritual impressions.' Such a comparison furnishes the real clue in Joseph's case,^[57] not because his family had a chance acquaintance with the Friends,^[58] but because of the religious primitiveness common to the minor sects. Quakers, Primitive Baptists, Restorationers and Latter-day Saints, all hoped for the return of apostolic gifts. A Mormon elder might speak of being a 'medium of communication and intelligence'^[59] but only in the scriptural sense; the prophet himself might receive revelations, but it was as the 'mouth-piece of the Lord.' At first he was far from being an 'exponent of the spiritual philosophy of the ​nineteenth century';^[60] in fact he was rather cautious in interpreting messages from the other world. To an anxious seeker after the interpretation of a trance communication, he gave but a general answer.^[61] This was in 1833; ten years later, it is true, there is a 'philosophical' passage with some resemblance to the teachings of the spiritualists, but the precise style and the nice distinctions point to another source. This crass materialism came from Orson Pratt, the 'gauge of philosophy,' father of Mormon metaphysics and author of The Absurdities of Immaterialism.^[62] Joseph's presentation is as follows:

​'In tracing the thing to the foundation, and looking at it philosophically we shall find a very material difference between the body and the spirit:—the body is supposed to be organized matter, and the spirit by many is thought to be immaterial, without substance. With this latter statement we should beg leave to differ—and state that spirit is a substance, that it is material, but that it is more pure, elastic, and refined matter than the body;—that it existed before the body, can exist in the body, and will exist seperate from the body.'^[63]

​Only occasionally, did the prophet, seer and revelator essay to be a philosopher; at such times he was a mystic rather than a materialist, and his views savored more of the sects than of the schools. For example, the Irvingites, who claimed to be sacred mediums of communication between heaven and earth, once came to express sympathy with the Mormons for their belief in the restoration of primitive gifts.^[64] Smith scouted their achievements, and linked with them the strange performances of the two Campbells in Scotland.^[65] This was but two years before the prophet's death; his outlook had broadened, but not his way of looking at psychic phenomena. His very language bewrayed more of the medieval than the modern. As final proof that he had but the remotest connection with the crude ontologies of his generation, two examples may be taken, one his so-called tests of supernatural messengers,^[66] the other his editorial entitled, 'Try ​the Spirits.'^[67] The first was meant for his worried devotees. 'If an angel,' he says, 'shakes hands and you can feel his hand, all is well; if he is the spirit of a just man made perfect, he will not move; if he is the devil, as an angel of light, you cannot feel his hand.'^[68] This was meant for home consumption; ​the editorial, of April 1st, 1842, was directed to the public:—

'Recent events compel me to say something about the spirits. 'One great evil is that men are ignorant of the nature of spirits; their power, laws, government, intelligence, etc., and imagine that when there is anything like power, revelation, or vision manifested that it must be of God:—hence the Methodists, Presbyterians, and others frequently possess a spirit that will cause them to lay down, and during its operation animation is frequently entirely suspended; they consider it to be the power of God, and a glorious manifestation from God; a manifestation of what?—is there any intelligence communicated? are the curtains of heaven withdrawn, or the purposes of God developed?—have they seen and conversed with an angel; or have the glories of futurity burst upon their view? No! but their body has been inanimate, the operation of their spirit suspended, and all the intelligence that can be obtained from them when they arise, is a shout of glory, or hallelujah, or some incoherent expression; but they have had "the power." The Shaker will whirl around on his heel impelled by a supernatural agency, or spirit, and think that he is governed by the spirit of God; and the jumper will jump, and enter into all kinds of extravagancies, a Primi​tive Methodist will shout under the influence of that spirit until he will rend the heavens with his cries; while the Quakers, (or Friends) moved as they think by the spirit of God, will sit still and say nothing.'