p. 4 | Eminent Testimony Concerning Spiritualism by L. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 21, 1906

Eminent Testimony Concerning Spiritualism

By L. A. S.

THE late Carl Schurz, in his reminiscences now being published in McClure’s Magazine, relates an incident in which he came in contact with spiritualism, which furnishes trustworthy evidence that revelations of a supernatural character do proceed from that source. Mr. Schurz’s reputation for veracity, accuracy, and sober-mindedness is a guaranty that his statements on the subject are strictly true.

Mr. Schurz had been invited while in Paris, to attend a séance, but was prevented from doing so by a sudden trip to London. It occurred to him before leaving, however, to provide a test of the powers of the clairvoyant by whom the séance was to be given. He says:—

I cut off some of my hair, wrapped it in a piece of paper, and put this into a letter envelope which I closed with sealing wax. Then I tore a little strip from a letter I had received that morning from the Hungarian general, Klapka, the celebrated defender of the fortress Komorn, and put this strip containing the date of the letter also into a folded paper, and enclosed it likewise in an envelope sealed with wax. When Strodtmann had returned to me, I gave him the two envelopes without informing him of their contents, and instructed him to place them in the hands of the clairvoyant with the request that she give a description of the looks, the character, the past career, and the temporary sojourn of the person from whom the objects concealed in the envelopes were coming. Then I left for London.

A few days later I received a letter from Strodtmann in which he narrated the results of the séance as follows: The clairvoyant took one of my envelopes into her hand, and said it contained the hair of a young man who looked thus and so. She then described my appearance in the most accurate way, and added that this young man had won notoriety by his connection with a bold enterprise, and that at the present time he was on the other side of a deep water in a large city, and in the circle of a happy family. Then she gave a description of my character, my inclinations, and my mental faculties, which, as I saw them in black on white, surprised me greatly. Not only did I recognize myself in the main features of this description, but I found in it also certain statements which seemed to give me new disclosures about myself. . . . I received, so to speak, a revelation about my own inner self, a psychological analysis which I had to recognize as just, as soon as I perceived it.

What the clairvoyant said about the other envelope which contained Klapka’s writing was hardly less astonishing. She described the writer of the letters and figures contained in that envelope as a handsome, dark-bearded man with sparkling eyes, who once had governed a city full of armed men and besieged by enemies. The description of his person, of his past, and also of his character so far as I knew it, was throughout correct; but when the clairvoyant added that this man was at the time not in Paris, but in another city where he had gone to meet a person very dear to him, I thought we had caught her in a mistake. A few days later I returned to Paris, and had hardly arrived there when I met General Klapka on the street. I asked him at once whether since he had written his last letter to me he had been constantly in Paris, and I was not a little amazed when he told me that he had a few days ago made an excursion to Brussels, where he had stopped not quite a week, and the “dear person” whom he was to have seen there, I learned from an intimate friend of Klapka, was a lady whom, it was said, he would marry. The clairvoyant was therefore right in every point.

This occurrence mystified me very much. The more I considered the question whether the clairvoyant could possibly have received knowledge of the contents of my envelopes, or whether she could have had any cue for guessing at them, the more certain I became that this could not be. Strodtmann himself did not know what I had put into the envelopes. Of Klapka’s letter to me he had not the slightest information. He also assured me that he had put the envelopes into the hands of the clairvoyant, one after the other in exactly the same condition in which he had received them without for a moment confiding them to anybody else, and without telling to any one from whom they came; and I could absolutely depend upon the word of my thoroughly honest friend. But even if—which was quite unthinkable to me—there had been some collusion between him and the clairvoyant, or if he had without knowing it, betrayed from whom the envelope had come, it would not have solved the riddle of how the clairvoyant could have described my character, my inclinations, my impulses, my mental qualities, much more clearly and truthfully and sagaciously than Strodtmann or Melbye [another friend] ever could have done. . . . In short, I could not in the whole incident find the slightest reason for the suspicion that here we had to do with a merely clever juggler. . . . In later years I have had similar experiences.

The only reasonable explanation of this occult revelation which puzzled Mr. Schurz, is that it proceeded from a spiritual intelligence speaking through the human subject. It could have been nothing else than the agency of what was known anciently as a “familiar spirit,” intercourse with which was strictly forbidden by Jehovah.

L. A. S.