Rather A Strong Dose

"Doctor John Campbell, the minister of the Tabernacle Chapel,
Finsbury, and editor of the British Banner, etc., with that massive
vigour which distinguishes his style," did, we are informed by Mr.
Howitt, "deliver a verdict in the Banner, for November, 1852," of
great importance and favour to the Table-rapping cause. We are not
informed whether the Public, sitting in judgment on the question,
reserved any point in this great verdict for subsequent
consideration; but the verdict would seem to have been regarded by a
perverse generation as not quite final, inasmuch as Mr. Howitt finds
it necessary to re-open the case, a round ten years afterwards, in
nine hundred and sixty-two stiff octavo pages, published by Messrs.
Longman and Company.

Mr. Howitt is in such a bristling temper on the Supernatural
subject, that we will not take the great liberty of arguing any
point with him. But--with the view of assisting him to make
converts--we will inform our readers, on his conclusive authority,
what they are required to believe; premising what may rather
astonish them in connexion with their views of a certain historical
trifle, called The Reformation, that their present state of unbelief
is all the fault of Protestantism, and that "it is high time,
therefore, to protest against Protestantism".

They will please to believe, by way of an easy beginning, all the
stories of good and evil demons, ghosts, prophecies, communication
with spirits, and practice of magic, that ever obtained, or are said
to have ever obtained, in the North, in the South, in the East, in
the West, from the earliest and darkest ages, as to which we have
any hazy intelligence, real or supposititious, down to the yet
unfinished displacement of the red men in North America. They will
please to believe that nothing in this wise was changed by the
fulfilment of our Saviour's mission upon earth; and further, that
what Saint Paul did, can be done again, and has been done again. As
this is not much to begin with, they will throw in at this point
rejection of Faraday and Brewster, and "poor Paley", and implicit
acceptance of those shining lights, the Reverend Charles Beecher,
and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher ("one of the most vigorous and
eloquent preachers of America"), and the Reverend Adin Ballou.

Having thus cleared the way for a healthy exercise of faith, our
advancing readers will next proceed especially to believe in the old
story of the Drummer of Tedworth, in the inspiration of George Fox,
in "the spiritualism, prophecies, and provision" of Huntington the
coal-porter (him who prayed for the leather breeches which
miraculously fitted him), and even in the Cock Lane