Produced by Charles Keller. HTML version by Al Haines.
THE NEW REVELATION
BY
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Dedication
To all the brave men and women, humble or learned, who have the moral
courage during seventy years to face ridicule or worldly disadvantage
in order to testify to an all-important truth.
March, 1918
PREFACE
Many more philosophic minds than mine have thought over the religious
side of this subject and many more scientific brains have turned their
attention to its phenomenal aspect. So far as I know, however, there
has been no former attempt to show the exact relation of the one to the
other. I feel that if I should succeed in making this a little more
clear I shall have helped in what I regard as far the most important
question with which the human race is concerned.
A celebrated Psychic, Mrs. Piper, uttered, in the year 1899 words which
were recorded by Dr. Hodgson at the time. She was speaking in trance
upon the future of spiritual religion, and she said: "In the next
century this will be astonishingly perceptible to the minds of men. I
will also make a statement which you will surely see verified. Before
the clear revelation of spirit communication there will be a terrible
war in different parts of the world. The entire world must be purified
and cleansed before mortal can see, through his spiritual vision, his
friends on this side and it will take just this line of action to bring
about a state of perfection. Friend, kindly think of this." We have
had "the terrible war in different parts of the world." The second
half remains to be fulfilled.
A. C. D.
1918.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE SEARCH
II THE REVELATION
III THE COMING LIFE
IV PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS
SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS
I THE NEXT PHASE OF LIFE
II AUTOMATIC WRITING
III THE CHERITON DUGOUT
THE NEW REVELATION
CHAPTER I.
THE SEARCH
The subject of psychical research is one upon which I have thought more
and about which I have been slower to form my opinion, than upon any
other subject whatever. Every now and then as one jogs along through
life some small incident happens which very forcibly brings home the
fact that time passes and that first youth and then middle age are
slipping away. Such a one occurred the other day. There is a column
in that excellent little paper, Light, which is devoted to what was
recorded on the corresponding date a generation--that is thirty
years--ago. As I read over this column recently I had quite a start as
I saw my own name, and read the reprint of a letter which I had written
in 1887, detailing some interesting spiritual experience which had
occurred in a seance. Thus it is manifest that my interest in the
subject is of some standing, and also, since it is only within the last
year or two that I have finally declared myself to be satisfied with
the evidence, that I have not been hasty in forming my opinion. If I
set down some of my experiences and difficulties my readers will not, I
hope, think it egotistical upon my part, but will realise that it is
the most graphic way in which to sketch out the points which are likely
to occur to any other inquirer. When I have passed over this ground,
it will be possible to get on to something more general and impersonal
in its nature.
When I had finished my medical education in 1882, I found myself, like
many young medical men, a convinced materialist as regards our personal
destiny. I had never ceased to be an earnest theist, because it seemed
to me that Napoleon's question to the atheistic professors on the
starry night as he voyaged to Egypt: "Who was it, gentlemen, who made
these stars?" has never been answered. To say that the Universe was
made by immutable laws only put the question one degree further back as
to who made the laws. I did not, of course, believe in an
anthropomorphic God, but I believed then, as I believe now, in an
intelligent Force behind all the operations of Nature--a force so
infinitely complex and great that my finite brain could get no further
than its existence. Right and wrong I saw also as great obvious facts
which needed no divine revelation. But when it came to a question of
our little personalities surviving death, it seemed to me that the
whole analogy of Nature was against it. When the candle burns out the
light disappears. When the electric cell is shattered the current
stops. When the body dissolves there is an end of the matter. Each
man in his egotism may feel that he ought to survive, but let him look,
we will say, at the average loafer--of high or low degree--would anyone
contend that there was any obvious reason why THAT personality should
carry on? It seemed to be a delusion, and I was convinced that death
did indeed end all, though I saw no reason why that should affect our
duty towards humanity during our transitory existence.
This was my frame of mind when Spiritual phenomena first came before my
notice. I had always regarded the subject as the greatest nonsense
upon earth, and I had read of the conviction of fraudulent mediums and
wondered how any sane man could believe such things. I met some
friends, however, who were interested in the matter, and I sat with
them at some table-moving seances. We got connected messages. I am
afraid the only result that they had on my mind was that I regarded
these friends with some suspicion. They were long messages very often,
spelled out by tilts, and it was quite impossible that they came by
chance. Someone then, was moving the table. I thought it was they.
They probably thought that I did it. I was puzzled and worried over
it, for they were not people whom I could imagine as cheating--and yet
I could not see how the messages could come except by conscious
pressure.
About this time--it would be in 1886--I came across a book called The
Reminiscences of Judge Edmunds. He was a judge of the U.S. High Courts
and a man of high standing. The book gave an account of how his wife
had died, and how he had been able for many years to keep in touch with
her. All sorts of details were given. I read the book with interest,
and absolute scepticism. It seemed to me an example of how a hard
practical man might have a weak side to his brain, a sort of reaction,
as it were, against those plain facts of life with which he had to
deal. Where was this spirit of which he talked? Suppose a man had an
accident and cracked his skull; his whole character would change, and a
high nature might become a low one. With alcohol or opium or many other
drugs one could apparently quite change a man's spirit. The spirit
then depended upon matter. These were the arguments which I used in
those days. I did not realise that it was not the spirit that was
changed in such cases, but the body through which the spirit worked,
just as it would be no argument against the existence of a musician if
you tampered with his violin so that only discordant notes could come
through.
I was sufficiently interested to continue to read such literature as
came in my way. I was amazed to find what a number of great men--men
whose names were to the fore in science--thoroughly believed that
spirit was independent of matter and could survive it. When I regarded
Spiritualism as a vulgar delusion of the uneducated, I could afford to
look down upon it; but when it was endorsed by men like Crookes, whom I
knew to be the most rising British chemist, by Wallace, who was the
rival of Darwin, and by Flammarion, the best known of astronomers, I
could not afford to dismiss it. It was all very well to throw down the
books of these men which contained their mature conclusions and careful
investigations, and to say "Well, he has one weak spot in his brain,"
but a man has to be very self-satisfied if the day does not come when
he wonders if the weak spot is not in his own brain. For some time I
was sustained in my scepticism by the consideration that many famous
men, such as Darwin himself, Huxley, Tyndall and Herbert Spencer,
derided this new branch of knowledge; but when I learned that their
derision had reached such a point that they would not even examine it,
and that Spencer had declared in so many words that he had decided
against it on a priori grounds, while Huxley had said that it did not
interest him, I was bound to admit that, however great, they were in
science, their action in this respect was most unscientific and
dogmatic, while the action of those who studied the phenomena and tried
to find out the laws that governed them, was following the true path
which has given us all human advance and knowledge. So far I had got
in my reasoning, so my sceptical position was not so solid as before.
It was somewhat reinforced, however, by my own experiences. It is to
be remembered that I was working without a medium, which is like an
astronomer working without a telescope. I have no psychical powers
myself, and those who worked with me had little more. Among us we could
just muster enough of the magnetic force, or whatever you will call it,
to get the table movements with their suspicious and often stupid
messages. I still have notes of those sittings and copies of some, at
least, of the messages. They were not always absolutely stupid. For
example, I find that on one occasion, on my asking some test question,
such as how many coins I had in my pocket, the table spelt out: "We
are here to educate and to elevate, not to guess riddles." And then:
"The religious frame of mind, not the critical, is what we wish to
inculcate." Now, no one could say that that was a puerile message. On
the other hand, I was always haunted by the fear of involuntary
pressure from the hands of the sitters. Then there came an incident
which puzzled and disgusted me very much. We had very good conditions
one evening, and an amount of movement which seemed quite independent
of our pressure. Long and detailed messages came through, which
purported to be from a spirit who gave his name and said he was a
commercial traveller who bad lost his life in a recent fire at a
theatre at Exeter. All the details were exact, and he implored us to
write to his family, who lived, he said, at a place called Slattenmere,
in Cumberland. I did so, but my letter came back, appropriately
enough, through the dead letter office. To this day I do not know
whether we were deceived, or whether there was some mistake in the name
of the place; but there are the facts, and I was so disgusted that for
some time my interest in the whole subject waned. It was one thing to
study a subject, but when the subject began to play elaborate practical
jokes it seemed time to call a halt. If there is such a place as
Slattenmere in the world I should even now be glad to know it.
I was in practice in Southsea at this time, and dwelling there was
General Drayson, a man of very remarkable character, and one of the
pioneers of Spiritualism in this country. To him I went with my
difficulties, and he listened to them very patiently. He made light of
my criticism of the foolish nature of many of these messages, and of
the absolute falseness of some. "You have not got the fundamental
truth into your head," said he. "That truth is, that every spirit in
the flesh passes over to the next world exactly as it is, with no
change whatever. This world is full of weak or foolish people. So is
the next. You need not mix with them, any more than you do in this
world. One chooses one's companions. But suppose a man in this world,
who had lived in his house alone and never mixed with his fellows, was
at last to put his head out of the window to see what sort of place it
was, what would happen? Some naughty boy would probably say something
rude. Anyhow, he would see nothing of the wisdom or greatness of the
world. He would draw his head in thinking it was a very poor place.
That is just what you have done. In a mixed seance, with no definite
aim, you have thrust your head into the next world and you have met
some naughty boys. Go forward and try to reach something better."
That was General Drayson's explanation, and though it did not satisfy
me at the time, I think now that it was a rough approximation to the
truth. These were my first steps in Spiritualism. I was still a
sceptic, but at least I was an inquirer, and when I heard some
old-fashioned critic saying that there was nothing to explain, and that
it was all fraud, or that a conjuror was needed to show it up, I knew
at least that that was all nonsense. It is true that my own evidence
up to then was not enough to convince me, but my reading, which was
continuous, showed me how deeply other men had gone into it, and I
recognised that the testimony was so strong that no other religious
movement in the world could put forward anything to compare with it.
That did not prove it to be true, but at least it proved that it must
be treated with respect and could not be brushed aside. Take a single
incident of what Wallace has truly called a modern miracle. I choose
it because it is the most incredible. I allude to the assertion that
D. D. Home--who, by the way, was not, as is usually supposed, a paid
adventurer, but was the nephew of the Earl of Home--the assertion, I
say, that he floated out of one window and into another at the height
of seventy feet above the ground. I could not believe it. And yet,
when I knew that the fact was attested by three eye-witnesses, who were
Lord Dunraven, Lord Lindsay, and Captain Wynne, all men of honour and
repute, who were willing afterwards to take their oath upon it, I could
not but admit that the evidence for this was more direct than for any
of those far-off events which the whole world has agreed to accept as
true.
I still continued during these years to hold table seances, which
sometimes gave no results, sometimes trivial ones, and sometimes rather
surprising ones. I have still the notes of these sittings, and I
extract here the results of one which were definite, and which were so
unlike any conceptions which I held of life beyond the grave that they
amused rather than edified me at the time. I find now, however, that
they agree very closely, with the revelations in Raymond and in other
later accounts, so that I view them with different eyes. I am aware
that all these accounts of life beyond the grave differ in detail--I
suppose any of our accounts of the present life would differ in
detail--but in the main there is a very great resemblance, which in
this instance was very far from the conception either of myself or of
either of the two ladies who made up the circle. Two communicators
sent messages, the first of whom spelt out as a name "Dorothy
Postlethwaite," a name unknown to any of us. She said she died at
Melbourne five years before, at the age of sixteen, that she was now
happy, that she had work to do, and that she had been at the same
school as one of the ladies. On my asking that lady to raise her hands
and give a succession of names, the table tilted at the correct name of
the head mistress of the school. This seemed in the nature of a test.
She went on to say that the sphere she inhabited was all round the
earth; that she knew about the planets; that Mars was inhabited by a
race more advanced than us, and that the canals were artificial; there
was no bodily pain in her sphere, but there could be mental anxiety;
they were governed; they took nourishment; she had been a Catholic and
was still a Catholic, but had not fared better than the Protestants;
there were Buddhists and Mohammedans in her sphere, but all fared
alike; she had never seen Christ and knew no more about Him than on
earth, but believed in His influence; spirits prayed and they died in
their new sphere before entering another; they had pleasures--music was
among them. It was a place of light and of laughter. She added that
they had no rich or poor, and that the general conditions were far
happier than on earth.
This lady bade us good-night, and immediately the table was seized by a
much more robust influence, which dashed it about very violently. In
answer to my questions it claimed to be the spirit of one whom I will
call Dodd, who was a famous cricketer, and with whom I had some serious
conversation in Cairo before he went up the Nile, where he met his
death in the Dongolese Expedition. We have now, I may remark, come to
the year 1896 in my experiences. Dodd was not known to either lady. I
began to ask him questions exactly as if he were seated before me, and
he sent his answers back with great speed and decision. The answers
were often quite opposed to what I expected, so that I could not
believe that I was influencing them. He said that he was happy, that
he did not wish to return to earth. He had been a free-thinker, but had
not suffered in the next life for that reason. Prayer, however, was a
good thing, as keeping us in touch with the spiritual world. If he had
prayed more he would have been higher in the spirit world.
This, I may remark, seemed rather in conflict with his assertion that
he had not suffered through being a free-thinker, and yet, of course,
many men neglect prayer who are not free-thinkers.
His death was painless. He remembered the death of Polwhele, a young
officer who died before him. When he (Dodd) died he had found people
to welcome him, but Polwhele had not been among them.
He had work to do. He was aware of the Fall of Dongola, but had not
been present in spirit at the banquet at Cairo afterwards. He knew
more than he did in life. He remembered our conversation in Cairo.
Duration of life in the next sphere was shorter than on earth. He had
not seen General Gordon, nor any other famous spirit. Spirits lived in
families and in communities. Married people did not necessarily meet
again, but those who loved each other did meet again.
I have given this synopsis of a communication to show the kind of thing
we got--though this was a very favourable specimen, both for length and
for coherence. It shows that it is not just to say, as many critics
say, that nothing but folly comes through. There was no folly here
unless we call everything folly which does not agree with preconceived
ideas. On the other hand, what proof was there that these statements
were true? I could see no such proof, and they simply left me
bewildered. Now, with a larger experience, in which I find that the
same sort of information has come to very, many people independently in
many lands, I think that the agreement of the witnesses does, as in all
cases of evidence, constitute some argument for their truth. At the
time I could not fit such a conception of the future world into my own
scheme of philosophy, and I merely noted it and passed on.
I continued to read many books upon the subject and to appreciate more
and more what a cloud of witnesses existed, and how careful their
observations had been. This impressed my mind very much more than the
limited phenomena which came within the reach of our circle. Then or
afterwards I read a book by Monsieur Jacolliot upon occult phenomena in
India. Jacolliot was Chief Judge of the French Colony of Crandenagur,
with a very judicial mind, but rather biassed{sic} against
spiritualism. He conducted a series of experiments with native fakirs,
who gave him their confidence because he was a sympathetic man and
spoke their language. He describes the pains he took to eliminate
fraud. To cut a long story short he found among them every phenomenon
of advanced European mediumship, everything which Home, for example,
had ever done. He got levitation of the body, the handling of fire,
movement of articles at a distance, rapid growth of plants, raising of
tables. Their explanation of these phenomena was that they were done
by the Pitris or spirits, and their only difference in procedure from
ours seemed to be that they made more use of direct evocation. They
claimed that these powers were handed down from time immemorial and
traced back to the Chaldees. All this impressed me very much, as here,
independently, we had exactly the same results, without any question of
American frauds, or modern vulgarity, which were so often raised
against similar phenomena in Europe.
My mind was also influenced about this time by the report of the
Dialectical Society, although this Report had been presented as far
back as 1869. It is a very cogent paper, and though it was received
with a chorus of ridicule by the ignorant and materialistic papers of
those days, it was a document of great value. The Society was formed
by a number of people of good standing and open mind to enquire into
the physical phenomena of Spiritualism. A full account of their
experiences and of their elaborate precautions against fraud are given.
After reading the evidence, one fails to see how they could have come
to any other conclusion than the one attained, namely, that the
phenomena were undoubtedly genuine, and that they pointed to laws and
forces which had not been explored by Science. It is a most singular
fact that if the verdict had been against spiritualism, it would
certainly have been hailed as the death blow of the movement, whereas
being an endorsement of the phenomena it met with nothing by ridicule.
This has been the fate of a number of inquiries since those conducted
locally at Hydesville in 1848, or that which followed when Professor
Hare of Philadelphia, like Saint Paul, started forth to oppose but was
forced to yield to the truth.
About 1891, I had joined the Psychical Research Society and had the
advantage of reading all their reports. The world owes a great deal to
the unwearied diligence of the Society, and to its sobriety of
statement, though I will admit that the latter makes one impatient at
times, and one feels that in their desire to avoid sensationalism they
discourage the world from knowing and using the splendid work which
they are doing. Their semi-scientific terminology also chokes off the
ordinary reader, and one might say sometimes after reading their
articles what an American trapper in the Rocky Mountains said to me
about some University man whom he had been escorting for the season.
"He was that clever," he said, "that you could not understand what he
said." But in spite of these little peculiarities all of us who have
wanted light in the darkness have found it by the methodical,
never-tiring work of the Society. Its influence was one of the powers
which now helped me to shape my thoughts. There was another, however,
which made a deep impression upon me. Up to now I had read all the
wonderful experiences of great experimenters, but I had never come
across any effort upon their part to build up some system which would
cover and contain them all. Now I read that monumental book, Myers'
Human Personality, a great root book from which a whole tree of
knowledge will grow. In this book Myers was unable to get any formula
which covered all the phenomena called "spiritual," but in discussing
that action of mind upon mind which he has himself called telepathy he
completely proved his point, and he worked it out so thoroughly with so
many examples, that, save for those who were wilfully blind to the
evidence, it took its place henceforth as a scientific fact. But this
was an enormous advance. If mind could act upon mind at a distance,
then there were some human powers which were quite different to matter
as we had always understood it. The ground was cut from under the feet
of the materialist, and my old position had been destroyed. I had said
that the flame could not exist when the candle was gone. But here was
the flame a long way off the candle, acting upon its own. The analogy
was clearly a false analogy. If the mind, the spirit, the intelligence
of man could operate at a distance from the body, then it was a thing
to that extent separate from the body. Why then should it not exist on
its own when the body was destroyed? Not only did impressions come
from a distance in the case of those who were just dead, but the same
evidence proved that actual appearances of the dead person came with
them, showing that the impressions were carried by something which was
exactly like the body, and yet acted independently and survived the
death of the body. The chain of evidence between the simplest cases of
thought-reading at one end, and the actual manifestation of the spirit
independently of the body at the other, was one unbroken chain, each
phase leading to the other, and this fact seemed to me to bring the
first signs of systematic science and order into what had been a mere
collection of bewildering and more or less unrelated facts.
About this time I had an interesting experience, for I was one of three
delegates sent by the Psychical Society to sit up in a haunted house.
It was one of these poltergeist cases, where noises and foolish tricks
had gone on for some years, very much like the classical case of John
Wesley's family at Epworth in 1726, or the case of the Fox family at
Hydesville near Rochester in 1848, which was the starting-point of
modern spiritualism. Nothing sensational came of our journey, and yet
it was not entirely barren. On the first night nothing occurred. On
the second, there were tremendous noises, sounds like someone beating a
table with a stick. We had, of course, taken every precaution, and we
could not explain the noises; but at the same time we could not swear
that some ingenious practical joke had not been played upon us. There
the matter ended for the time. Some years afterwards, however, I met a
member of the family who occupied the house, and he told me that after
our visit the bones of a child, evidently long buried, had been dug up
in the garden. You must admit that this was very remarkable. Haunted
houses are rare, and houses with buried human beings in their gardens
are also, we will hope, rare. That they should have both united in one
house is surely some argument for the truth of the phenomena. It is
interesting to remember that in the case of the Fox family there was
also some word of human bones and evidence of murder being found in the
cellar, though an actual crime was never established. I have little
doubt that if the Wesley family could have got upon speaking terms with
their persecutor, they would also have come upon some motive for the
persecution. It almost seems as if a life cut suddenly and violently
short had some store of unspent vitality which could still manifest
itself in a strange, mischievous fashion. Later I had another singular
personal experience of this sort which I may describe at the end of
this argument.[1]
[1] Vide Appendix III.
From this period until the time of the War I continued in the leisure
hours of a very busy life to devote attention to this subject. I had
experience of one series of seances with very amazing results,
including several materializations seen in dim light. As the medium was
detected in trickery shortly afterwards I wiped these off entirely as
evidence. At the same time I think that the presumption is very clear,
that in the case of some mediums like Eusapia Palladino they may be
guilty of trickery when their powers fail them, and yet at other times
have very genuine gifts. Mediumship in its lowest forms is a purely
physical gift with no relation to morality and in many cases it is
intermittent and cannot be controlled at will. Eusapia was at least
twice convicted of very clumsy and foolish fraud, whereas she several
times sustained long examinations under every possible test condition
at the hands of scientific committees which contained some of the best
names of France, Italy, and England. However, I personally prefer to
cut my experience with a discredited medium out of my record, and I
think that all physical phenomena produced in the dark must necessarily
lose much of their value, unless they are accompanied by evidential
messages as well. It is the custom of our critics to assume that if
you cut out the mediums who got into trouble you would have to cut out
nearly all your evidence. That is not so at all. Up to the time of
this incident I had never sat with a professional medium at all, and
yet I had certainly accumulated some evidence. The greatest medium of
all, Mr. D. D. Home, showed his phenomena in broad daylight, and was
ready to submit to every test and no charge of trickery was ever
substantiated against him. So it was with many others. It is only
fair to state in addition that when a public medium is a fair mark for
notoriety hunters, for amateur detectives and for sensational
reporters, and when he is dealing with obscure elusive phenomena and
has to defend himself before juries and judges who, as a rule, know
nothing about the conditions which influence the phenomena, it would be
wonderful if a man could get through without an occasional scandal. At
the same time the whole system of paying by results, which is
practically the present system, since if a medium never gets results he
would soon get no payments, is a vicious one. It is only when the
professional medium can be guaranteed an annuity which will be
independent of results, that we can eliminate the strong temptation, to
substitute pretended phenomena when the real ones are wanting.
I have now traced my own evolution of thought up to the time of the
War. I can claim, I hope, that it was deliberate and showed no traces
of that credulity with which our opponents charge us. It was too
deliberate, for I was culpably slow in throwing any small influence I
may possess into the scale of truth. I might have drifted on for my
whole life as a psychical Researcher, showing a sympathetic, but more
or less dilettante attitude towards the whole subject, as if we were
arguing about some impersonal thing such as the existence of Atlantis
or the Baconian controversy. But the War came, and when the War came
it brought earnestness into all our souls and made us look more closely
at our own beliefs and reassess their values. In the presence of an
agonized world, hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our
race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one
the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved
ones had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which
I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the
rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a
breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable
message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race
at the time of its deepest affliction. The objective side of it ceased
to interest for having made up one's mind that it was true there was an
end of the matter. The religious side of it was clearly of infinitely
greater importance. The telephone bell is in itself a very childish
affair, but it may be the signal for a very vital message. It seemed
that all these phenomena, large and small, had been the telephone bells
which, senseless in themselves, had signalled to the human race:
"Rouse yourselves! Stand by! Be at attention! Here are signs for
you. They will lead up to the message which God wishes to send." It
was the message not the signs which really counted. A new revelation
seemed to be in the course of delivery to the human race, though how
far it was still in what may be called the John-the-Baptist stage, and
how far some greater fulness and clearness might be expected hereafter,
was more than any man can say. My point is, that the physical
phenomena which have been proved up to the hilt for all who care to
examine the evidence, are really of no account, and that their real
value consists in the fact that they support and give objective reality
to an immense body of knowledge which must deeply modify our previous
religious views, and must, when properly understood and digested, make
religion a very real thing, no longer a matter of faith, but a matter
of actual experience and fact. It is to this side of the question that
I will now turn, but I must add to my previous remarks about personal
experience that, since the War, I have had some very exceptional
opportunities of confirming all the views which I had already formed as
to the truth of the general facts upon which my views are founded.
These opportunities came through the fact that a lady who lived with
us, a Miss L. S., developed the power of automatic writing. Of all
forms of mediumship, this seems to me to be the one which should be
tested most rigidly, as it lends itself very easily not so much to
deception as to self-deception, which is a more subtle and dangerous
thing. Is the lady herself writing, or is there, as she avers, a power
that controls her, even as the chronicler of the Jews in the Bible
averred that he was controlled? In the case of L. S. there is no
denying that some messages proved to be not true--especially in the
matter of time they were quite unreliable. But on the other hand, the
numbers which did come true were far beyond what any guessing or
coincidence could account for. Thus, when the Lusitania was sunk and
the morning papers here announced that so far as known there was no
loss of life, the medium at once wrote: "It is terrible, terrible--and
will have a great influence on the war." Since it was the first strong
impulse which turned America towards the war, the message was true in
both respects. Again, she foretold the arrival of an important
telegram upon a certain day, and even gave the name of the deliverer of
it--a most unlikely person. Altogether, no one could doubt the reality
of her inspiration, though the lapses were notable. It was like
getting a good message through a very imperfect telephone.
One other incident of the early war days stands out in my memory. A
lady in whom I was interested had died in a provincial town. She was a
chronic invalid and morphia was found by her bedside. There was an
inquest with an open verdict. Eight days later I went to have a
sitting with Mr. Vout Peters. After giving me a good deal which was
vague and irrelevant, he suddenly said: "There is a lady here. She is
leaning upon an older woman. She keeps saying 'Morphia.' Three times
she has said it. Her mind was clouded. She did not mean it.
Morphia!" Those were almost his exact words. Telepathy was out of the
question, for I had entirely other thoughts in my mind at the time and
was expecting no such message.
Apart from personal experiences, this movement must gain great
additional solidity from the wonderful literature which has sprung up
around it during the last few years. If no other spiritual books were
in existence than five which have appeared in the last year or so--I
allude to Professor Lodge's Raymond, Arthur Hill's Psychical
Investigations, Professor Crawford's Reality of Psychical Phenomena,
Professor Barrett's Threshold of the Unseen, and Gerald Balfour's Ear
of Dionysius--those five alone would, in my opinion, be sufficient to
establish the facts for any reasonable enquirer.
Before going into this question of a new religious revelation, how it
is reached, and what it consists of, I would say a word upon one other
subject. There have always been two lines of attack by our opponents.
The one is that our facts are not true. This I have dealt with. The
other is that we are upon forbidden ground and should come off it and
leave it alone. As I started from a position of comparative
materialism, this objection has never had any meaning for me, but to
others I would submit one or two considerations. The chief is that God
has given us no power at all which is under no circumstances to be
used. The fact that we possess it is in itself proof that it is our
bounden duty to study and to develop it. It is true that this, like
every other power, may be abused if we lose our general sense of
proportion and of reason. But I repeat that its mere possession is a
strong reason why it is lawful and binding that it be used.
It must also be remembered that this cry of illicit knowledge, backed
by more or less appropriate texts, has been used against every advance
of human knowledge. It was used against the new astronomy, and Galileo
had actually to recant. It was used against Galvani and electricity.
It was used against Darwin, who would certainly have been burned had he
lived a few centuries before. It was even used against Simpson's use
of chloroform in child-birth, on the ground that the Bible declared "in
pain shall ye bring them forth." Surely a plea which has been made so
often, and so often abandoned, cannot be regarded very seriously.
To those, however, to whom the theological aspect is still a stumbling
block, I would recommend the reading of two short books, each of them
by clergymen. The one is the Rev. Fielding Ould's Is Spiritualism of
the Devil, purchasable for twopence; the other is the Rev. Arthur
Chambers' Our Self After Death. I can also recommend the Rev. Charles
Tweedale's writings upon the subject. I may add that when I first
began to make public my own views, one of the first letters of sympathy
which I received was from the late Archdeacon Wilberforce.
There are some theologians who are not only opposed to such a cult, but
who go the length of saying that the phenomena and messages come from
fiends who personate our dead, or pretend to be heavenly teachers. It
is difficult to think that those who hold this view have ever had any
personal experience of the consoling and uplifting effect of such
communications upon the recipient. Ruskin has left it on record that
his conviction of a future life came from Spiritualism, though he
somewhat ungratefully and illogically added that having got that, he
wished to have no more to do with it. There are many, however--quorum
pars parva su--who without any reserve can declare that they were
turned from materialism to a belief in future life, with all that that
implies, by the study of this subject. If this be the devil's work one
can only say that the devil seems to be a very bungling workman and to
get results very far from what he might be expected to desire.