talking, well-mannered gentleman in a dress-
coat and black satin waistcoat; credulity is
erased from the list of human frailties, and
hallucination is denied as a diseased condition
known to the faculty; even madness has been
asserted by them to mean spiritual possession,
and the disordered state of the brain or nerves
to be simply signs not causes  and I have heard
of the sect who proposed to treat insanity with
spiritualism as the fitting homoeopathic agent! In
fact spiritualism is at this moment the fashionable
superstition of the upper ten thousand, as
fortune-telling, and reading the stars, and
Zadkiel, and Old Moore, are of the lower. For there
is a fashion in faith as well as in bonnets and
crinolines; and education seems to have got but
a small " pull" upon credulity, and to be of less
influence than should be in determining the faith
of a man.

Cataract, is a troublesome disease to get rid
of. Certainly it can be broken up and the hard
horny veil between the brain and the sunlight
may be removed; but the operation is not always
successful, and the blindness is sometimes
persistent. So with the mental cataract of credulity.
With some it can be removed by a test or operation,
more or less severe according to the degree
of density attained; but with others it is
hopeless. Blind as they are, blind they will remain;
indeed, loving their darkness more than light,
and unwilling to be couched lest their steps
should become perplexed by reason of too many
allurements lying to the side. This abnegation
of judgment and critical reason stands these poor
people instead of religious reliance, and many
imagine that they are doing God and humanity
the truest service by reducing themselves to as
hopeless a condition of mental imbecility as is
possible to be attained by a sound brain in good
working order. Faith is no longer to them an
honest, manly reverence for what is beyond
sensual proof or mathematical demonstration;
a belief in the goodness and wisdom of the great
Father in Heaven; and an acceptance of the
strange problems of this life—sin, misery, and
death—in a childlike spirit of humility, sure that
all is good and wise and loving—but the
irreligious belief in knaves rather than in God's
laws of nature the credulous acceptance of a
few juggling tricks, not to be discovered in
their working by men not adepts at juggling,
as of higher meaning than the facts of science
and the immovable bases of truth the substitution
of men for God—of trickery for truth—
of jugglery for science—and of verbal lies glibly
uttered for the eternal word spoken in nature
since first time and nature were. It is not we
who are irreligious, it is they; but their blindness
to this is part of their cataract, and so they
must be left, till some tremendous exposure takes
place which will open even their tight-shut eyes.
In the mean time credulity must reign
triumphant, as at present; and gullibility must
be the seed-bed whence clever knaves reap
golden harvests; quacks must still find their
family doctor knows by heart, and could employ in
more skilful combination—saving the quackery;
false faiths, Mormonism and the like, must still
recruit their armies from the great, outstanding
ranks of the credulous eager for fiery chariots,
and revolting at the dull plodding way of
charity, and good works, and prayer, and
almsgiving, and the rest of the unexciting means by
which we are told we shall at last, by painful
striving, come to our rest; and still will there
be for ever appearing some new Messiah, either
in art or in literature, in politics or in religion,
who is to divert the whole current of human
thought, and change the whole face of human
life. King Arthur is always to reappear, you
know, in every land and every creed which
owned a King Arthur at all; and we have not
grown out of that superstition yet ourselves;
though we have re-christened our Arthur, and
called him vaguely the Coming Man. As if we
are not all, in our degree, the Coming Man
actually appeared, whose duty it is to cleanse
and heal and otherwise purify the dirty little
world of our own souls! and that once done
heartily by each, would diminish the sphere of
the resuscitated Arthur by more than ninety-
nine in every hundred. The legend of the
Coming Man may or may not be true—to me
it seems only a legend, very pleasant to the
imagination, and saving us a world of trouble by
simply offering us a pattern by which we are to
mould ourselves, instead of leaving us to the
weary toil of fashioning out our pattern for
ourselves; and the great revolution on the eve of
which the world has always been living, and
which it never recognises until it has come and
gone for sometimes many generations, may or
may not burst forth in our day; but assuredly
if it does it will not come from such paltry
charlatans as the so-called mediums; and
spiritualism as practised in the "structure"
and the dark séances, is not the new religion
which is to regenerate mankind or lead back
wandering steps to the great temple of truth.
When all these tricks and juggleries are
incontrovertibly exposed—as I believe they will be,
some day—I wonder what the arch believers will
feel like then; and where their manhood will
stand in their own esteem, when forced to
confess that they have been made the babyish
dupes of a few clever-handed scoundrels, simply
because they would not investigate and dared
not criticise, but opened their foolish mouths and
swallowed fat flies, which they swore were quails
and manna direct from Heaven!

NEW WORK BY MR. DICKENS,
In Monthly Parts, uniform with the Original Editions of
"Pickwick," "Copperfleld,"&c.
Now publishing, PART XIII., price 1s., of
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND.
BY CHARLES DICKENS.
IN TWENTY MONTHLY PARTS.
With Illustrations by MARCUS STONE.
London: CHAPMAN and HALL, 193, Piccadilly.