SPIRITUALISM AND SPIRITISM.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2262, 6 August 1870, Page 2

SPIRITUALISM AND SPIRITISM.

To the Editor of the Evening Star. Sir, —Instead of the Rev. Robert Scrimgeour feeling aggrieved at my exposure of his manner of treating Spiritualism and Spiritism ” he ought to express his thanks to me for my letter. He has had an opportunity which, apparently, otherwise he did not care to embrace, of explaining, first, how he came to quote Ferrier without acknowledgement, ending his letter with “this is all I have to say, &c. and, second, of giving the information, which will no doubt be thankfully received by the public, that he is in the habit of quoting from well-known authors without acknowledgment. Nay, he rroes further, he statei that he has suffered a species of martyrdom “ in purse and in person for a rigid to his invariable method’’--what the “method” is, he unfortunately in his “haste ” has failed to explain. As the sentence stands it may mean either that his method is to quote largely from authors, and give the “source” from which he got his “borrowed plumes,” or it may be quoting without acknowledgement. Whatever it may be, I am sure I am sorry that Mr Scrimgeour should have suffered any “martyrdom” on account of his “invariable method,” and doubly vexed that he should have imagined that I intended to persecute him either in “purse or in person” or “ damage his reputation.” As to his apology, I am willing to accept his explanation, however improbable it may appear, as I have no wish to charge him as he charges me with anj “gross fabrication;” only expressing mv regret that he should have allowed two issues of your journal to be published without informing the public that he had forgot to mention that he had quoted Professor Ferrier’s “well known invective against spirit rapping and tableturning.” And I can further assure him that had he not had the “invariable method” of quoting authors without acknowledgement, I would not have penned my letter, or if I had written not have used the “stale dodge of parallel columns. ” His lecture consisted mainly of a letter published by him in the Otugo Daily Times, of the 20th August, 1869, and copious extracts from the authors I named in my former letter. Indeed so slavishly had he followed Pearson’s works that with the poetic quotation with which he ends his chapter on “ Spiritualism as opposed to the Bible Redemption,” Mr Scrimgeour wound up his lecture. If, however, this be a “gross fabrication.” I pledge myself to show, if he will publish his lecture as delivered passage after passage quoted literally from Pearson’s work. And now as to the letter in the Bmce Standard. I find by reference to the files of this paper, that the writer, who signs himself “Spiritualist, No. 2,” did not accuse Mr Scrimgeour of, or use parallel columns or any “advertising style,” to prove that he hail quoted literally from Feuerbach ; the letter simply states that Mr Scrimgeour’s ideas and Feuerbach’s were identical, and perhaps Mr Scrimgeour got them, not from Feuerbach’s works, but “another source.” Whether 1 do or do not know who is the writer of this letter has nothing to do with this controversy.

As for my alleged “ want of courtesy” in criticising Mr Scntngeour, I must confess my ignorance of any rule of courtesy or of anything else which would have permitted me to write to a private gentlemen to whom 1 am personally unknown, so that he might explain to the public how he “ in his haste ” forgot to state that a great portion of a letter published bp him in a newspaper was copied without acknowledgment from the worl? s of Professor Ferrier. One word to the charge of “ gross fabrication” made against me, because I accuse Mr Scrimgeour of jumbling together the two subjects of “Spiritualism and Spiritism.” What I stated 1 again reiterate, that Mr S. did “ jumble together in the most extraordinary way possible” his own explanations and the denunciations of Professor Ferrier. I did not say he was one of those “ignorant parti- s” or those who “know better” who “jumbled together” the two subjects, thinking them identical; and whether the two are “jumbled together” or not “in haste,” or after “due reflection,” certainly quoting from a work by Professor Ferrier direct or second-hand is not to me a proper mode of treating any subject, especially when it is remembered that when Ferrier wrote Spiritism was little known and less understood.

In conclusion, and in answer to Mr Scrimgeour’s challenge, let me assure him that noawithstanding his sneer and vain remarks

about his not “ happily requiring to use borrowed plumes,’* that I am so “redoubtable and advanced” as not to be afraid “to brace my mental iaculties ” sufficiently to meet such a redoubtable anti-Spiritualist champion as Mr Scrimgeour on his own ground—that of Theological Spiritualism—but on tnese two conditions only : 1. That he keens his temper. 2 That he makes no use of quotations, from any source, without due acknowledgment. I am, &c., Robert Stout. Dunedin, sth August, 1870. [ln justice to Mr Scrimgeour, we may state that his reply was received as soon as possible after Mr Stout’s letter, and that it was held over one day through want of space.— Ed. E.S.]