Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1910 — ANCIENT AND MODERY GHOSTS. [ARTICLE]

ANCIENT AND MODERY GHOSTS.

Primal Intereat in the Supernatural Still Asserts Itself. The belief tn ghosts and in the supernatural generally has been prevalent In all ages and in all climes. The. twelve tables of the ancient Roman law contained previsions against witchcraft and sorcery. The eastern world has always been a prey to superstition. Science and common sense have frowned upon such beliefs in vain. When Shakespeare shows us the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the witches on the blasted heath and makes Macbeth alone of thecompany see the specter of the blood-bolter’s Banquo sitting at the feast, he is but giving us a vivid realization of the faith of his own time, not of distant periods with which these two great tragedies deal. In fact, it may safely. be inferred from several of his plays that Elizabethan and Jacobean England was reeking with belief in the preternatural, says the Washington Post. Besides, did not King James VI. of Scotland himself, ere yet he had succeeded his Tudor cousin on the throne of England, pen with his own royal hand a learned treatise on demonology, in which he stoutly maintained “the fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the diuel, the witches or enchanters.” and accuse of Sadduceeism all those who denied the existence of spirits? The stout-hearted pilgrim fathers and their immediate descendants, who faced wild nature and savage man with equanimity, could not, for all their puritan training, rid themselves of the dread of the preternatural and the fanatical outbreak against witchcraft at Salem, Mass., in which, toward the end of the seventeenth century, nineteen persons were executed, is a proof of their weird dread of uncanny agencies. In our own .day beliefs are in a mixed condition. It is a very material world we live in. We profess no longer to marvel. The wonders wrought by science are such as in an earlier age would have brought their inventors to a cruel death at the stake. We are Inclined on the whole to be of the earth earthy; but behind the veneer of our extreme modernity there lurk, regarding what the veil of another life conceals, those primal instincts which civilization in all its progress has signally failed to banish. Hence we have a society of phychical research. Hence we have Dr. Wu Ting-fang consulting mediums. And what is to be said of those mysterious visitants whose appearance at Windsor castle, at ancient country seats ip Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and in different parts of Scotland, have been vouched for by the baronets and ladies of high degree, by lord high chancellor of England, by King Edward Vll.—most modern of monarchs —himself? Katharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Queen Elizabeth, not to mention other less august personages, would seem to Eave again taken to walking the earth and revisiting the glimpses of the moon.