THE DAWNING OF THE LIGHT
Some sixty years ago that acute thinker Lord Brougham remarked that in
the clear sky of scepticism he saw only one small cloud drifting up and
that was Modern Spiritualism. It was a curiously inverted simile, for
one would surely have expected him to say that in the drifting clouds
of scepticism he saw one patch of clear sky, but at least it showed how
conscious he was of the coming importance of the movement. Ruskin,
too, an equally agile mind, said that his assurance of immortality
depended upon the observed facts of Spiritualism. Scores, and indeed
hundreds, of famous names could be quoted who have subscribed the same
statement, and whose support would dignify any cause upon earth. They
are the higher peaks who have been the first to catch the light, but
the dawn will spread until none are too lowly to share it. Let us
turn, therefore, and inspect this movement which is most certainly
destined to revolutionise human thought and action as none other has
done within the Christian era. We shall look at it both in its
strength and in its weakness, for where one is dealing with what one
knows to be true one can fearlessly insist upon the whole of the truth.
The movement which is destined to bring vitality to the dead and cold
religions has been called "Modern Spiritualism." The "modern" is good,
since the thing itself, in one form or another, is as old as history,
and has always, however obscured by forms, been the red central glow in
the depths of all religious ideas, permeating the Bible from end to
end. But the word "Spiritualism" has been so befouled by wicked
charlatans, and so cheapened by many a sad incident, that one could
almost wish that some such term as "psychic religion" would clear the
subject of old prejudices, just as mesmerism, after many years of
obloquy, was rapidly accepted when its name was changed to hypnotism.
On the other hand, one remembers the sturdy pioneers who have fought
under this banner, and who were prepared to risk their careers, their
professional success, and even their reputation for sanity, by publicly
asserting what they knew to be the truth.
Their brave, unselfish devotion must do something to cleanse the name
for which they fought and suffered. It was they who nursed the system
which promises to be, not a new religion--it is far too big for
that--but part of the common heritage of knowledge shared by the whole
human race. Perfected Spiritualism, however, will probably bear about
the same relation to the Spiritualism of 1850 as a modern locomotive to
the bubbling little kettle which heralded the era of steam. It will
end by being rather the proof and basis of all religions than a
religion in itself. We have already too many religions--but too few
proofs.
Those first manifestations at Hydesville varied in no way from many of
which we have record in the past, but the result arising from them
differed very much, because, for the first time, it occurred to a human
being not merely to listen to inexplicable sounds, and to fear them or
marvel at them, but to establish communication with them. John
Wesley's father might have done the same more than a century before had
the thought occurred to him when he was a witness of the manifestations
at Epworth in 1726. It was only when the young Fox girl struck her
hands together and cried "Do as I do" that there was instant
compliance, and consequent proof of the presence of an INTELLIGENT
invisible force, thus differing from all other forces of which we know.
The circumstances were humble, and even rather sordid, upon both sides
of the veil, human and spirit, yet it was, as time will more and more
clearly show, one of the turning points of the world's history, greater
far than the fall of thrones or the rout of armies. Some artist of the
future will draw the scene--the sitting-room of the wooden, shack-like
house, the circle of half-awed and half-critical neighbours, the child
clapping her hands with upturned laughing face, the dark corner shadows
where these strange new forces seem to lurk--forces often apparent, and
now come to stay and to effect the complete revolution of human
thought. We may well ask why should such great results arise from such
petty sources? So argued the highbrowed philosophers of Greece and
Rome when the outspoken Paul, with the fisherman Peter and his
half-educated disciples, traversed all their learned theories, and with
the help of women, slaves, and schismatic Jews, subverted their ancient
creeds. One can but answer that Providence has its own way of
attaining its results, and that it seldom conforms to our opinion of
what is most appropriate.
We have a larger experience of such phenomena now, and we can define
with some accuracy what it was that happened at Hydesville in the year
1848. We know that these matters are governed by law and by conditions
as much as any other phenomena of the universe, though at the moment it
seemed to the public to be an isolated and irregular outburst. On the
one hand, you had a material, earth-bound spirit of a low order of
development which needed a physical medium in order to be able to
indicate its presence. On the other, you had that rare thing, a good
physical medium. The result followed as surely as the flash follows
when the electric battery and wire are both properly adjusted.
Corresponding experiments, where effect, and cause duly follow, are
being worked out at the present moment by Professor Crawford, of
Belfast, as detailed in his two recent books, where he shows that there
is an actual loss of weight of the medium in exact proportion to the
physical phenomenon produced.[1] The whole secret of mediumship on
this material side appears to lie in the power, quite independent of
oneself, of passively giving up some portion of one's bodily substance
for the use of outside influences. Why should some have this power and
some not? We do not know--nor do we know why one should have the ear
for music and another not. Each is born in us, and each has little
connection with our moral natures. At first it was only physical
mediumship which was known, and public attention centred upon moving
tables, automatic musical instruments, and other crude but obvious
examples of outside influence, which were unhappily very easily
imitated by rogues. Since then we have learned that there are many
forms of mediumship, so different from each other that an expert at one
may have no powers at all at the other. The automatic writer, the
clairvoyant, the crystal-seer, the trance speaker, the photographic
medium, the direct voice medium, and others, are all, when genuine, the
manifestations of one force, which runs through varied channels as it
did in the gifts ascribed to the disciples. The unhappy outburst of
roguery was helped, no doubt, by the need for darkness claimed by the
early experimenters--a claim which is by no means essential, since the
greatest of all mediums, D. D. Home, was able by the exceptional
strength of his powers to dispense with it. At the same time the fact
that darkness rather than light, and dryness rather than moisture, are
helpful to good results has been abundantly manifested, and points to
the physical laws which underlie the phenomena. The observation made
long afterwards that wireless telegraphy, another etheric force, acts
twice as well by night as by day, may, corroborate the general
conclusions of the early Spiritualists, while their assertion that the
least harmful light is red light has a suggestive analogy in the
experience of the photographer.
There is no space here for the history of the rise and development of
the movement. It provoked warm adhesion and fierce opposition from the
start. Professor Hare and Horace Greeley were among the educated
minority who tested and endorsed its truth. It was disfigured by many
grievous incidents, which may explain but does not excuse the perverse
opposition which it encountered in so many quarters. This opposition
was really largely based upon the absolute materialism of the age,
which would not admit that there could exist at the present moment such
conditions as might be accepted in the far past. When actually brought
in contact with that life beyond the grave which they professed to
believe in, these people winced, recoiled, and declared it impossible.
The science of the day was also rooted in materialism, and discarded
all its own very excellent axioms when it was faced by an entirely new
and unexpected proposition. Faraday declared that in approaching a new
subject one should make up one's mind a priori as to what is possible
and what is not! Huxley said that the messages, EVEN IF TRUE,
"interested him no more than the gossip of curates in a cathedral
city." Darwin said: "God help us if we are to believe such things."
Herbert Spencer declared against it, but had no time to go into it. At
the same time all science did not come so badly out of the ordeal. As
already mentioned, Professor Hare, of Philadelphia, inventor, among
other things, of the oxy-hydrogen blow-pipe, was the first man of note
who had the moral courage, after considerable personal investigation,
to declare that these new and strange developments were true. He was
followed by many medical men, both in America and in Britain, including
Dr. Elliotson, one of the leaders of free thought in this country.
Professor Crookes, the most rising chemist in Europe, Dr. Russel
Wallace the great naturalist, Varley the electrician, Flammarion the
French astronomer, and many others, risked their scientific reputations
in their brave assertions of the truth. These men were not credulous
fools. They saw and deplored the existence of frauds. Crookes'
letters upon the subject are still extant. In very many cases it was
the Spiritualists themselves who exposed the frauds. They laughed, as
the public laughed, at the sham Shakespeares and vulgar Caesars who
figured in certain seance rooms. They deprecated also the low moral
tone which would turn such powers to prophecies about the issue of a
race or the success of a speculation. But they had that broader vision
and sense of proportion which assured them that behind all these
follies and frauds there lay a mass of solid evidence which could not
be shaken, though like all evidence, it had to be examined before it
could be appreciated. They were not such simpletons as to be driven
away from a great truth because there are some dishonest camp followers
who hang upon its skirts.
A great centre of proof and of inspiration lay during those early days
in Mr. D. D. Home, a Scottish-American, who possessed powers which make
him one of the most remarkable personalities of whom we have any
record. Home's life, written by his second wife, is a book which
deserves very careful reading. This man, who in some aspects was more
than a man, was before the public for nearly thirty years. During that
time he never received payment for his services, and was always ready,
to put himself at the disposal of any bona-fide and reasonable
enquirer. His phenomena were produced in full light, and it was
immaterial to him whether the sittings were in his own rooms or in
those of his friends. So high were his principles that upon one
occasion, though he was a man of moderate means and less than moderate
health, he refused the princely fee of two thousand pounds offered for
a single sitting by the Union Circle in Paris.
As to his powers, they seem to have included every form of mediumship
in the highest degree--self-levitation, as witnessed by hundreds of
credible witnesses; the handling of fire, with the power of conferring
like immunity upon others; the movement without human touch of heavy
objects; the visible materialisation of spirits; miracles of healing;
and messages from the dead, such as that which converted the
hard-headed Scot, Robert Chambers, when Home repeated to him the actual
dying words of his young daughter. All this came from a man of so
sweet a nature and of so charitable a disposition, that the union of
all qualities would seem almost to justify those who, to Home's great
embarrassment, were prepared to place him upon a pedestal above
humanity.
The genuineness of his psychic powers has never been seriously
questioned, and was as well recognised in Rome and Paris as in London.
One incident only darkened his career, and it, was one in which he was
blameless, as anyone who carefully weighs the evidence must admit. I
allude to the action taken against him by Mrs. Lyon, who, after
adopting him as her son and settling a large sum of money upon him,
endeavoured to regain, and did regain, this money by her unsupported
assertion that he had persuaded her illicitly to make him the
allowance. The facts of his life are, in my judgment, ample proof of
the truth of the Spiritualist position, if no other proof at all had
been available. It is to be remarked in the career of this entirely
honest and unvenal medium that he had periods in his life when his
powers deserted him completely, that he could foresee these lapses, and
that, being honest and unvenal, he simply abstained from all attempts
until the power returned. It is this intermittent character of the
gift which is, in my opinion, responsible for cases when a medium who
has passed the most rigid tests upon certain occasions is afterwards
detected in simulating, very clumsily, the results which he had once
successfully accomplished. The real power having failed, he has not
the moral courage to admit it, nor the self-denial to forego his fee
which he endeavours to earn by a travesty of what was once genuine.
Such an explanation would cover some facts which otherwise are hard to
reconcile. We must also admit that some mediums are extremely
irresponsible and feather-headed people. A friend of mine, who sat
with Eusapia Palladino, assured me that he saw her cheat in the most
childish and bare-faced fashion, and yet immediately afterwards
incidents occurred which were absolutely beyond any, normal powers to
produce.
Apart from Home, another episode which marks a stage in the advance of
this movement was the investigation and report by the Dialectical
Society in the year 1869. This body was composed of men of various
learned professions who gathered together to investigate the alleged
facts, and ended by reporting that they really WERE facts. They were
unbiased, and their conclusions were founded upon results which were
very soberly set forth in their report, a most convincing document
which, even now in 1919, after the lapse of fifty years, is far more
intelligent than the greater part of current opinion upon this subject.
None the less, it was greeted by a chorus of ridicule by the ignorant
Press of that day, who, if the same men had come to the opposite
conclusion in spite of the evidence, would have been ready to hail
their verdict as the undoubted end of a pernicious movement.
In the early days, about 1863, a book was written by Mrs. de Morgan,
the wife of the well-known mathematician Professor de Morgan, entitled
"From Matter to Spirit." There is a sympathetic preface by the
husband. The book is still well worth reading, for it is a question
whether anyone has shown greater brain power in treating the subject.
In it the prophecy is made that as the movement develops the more
material phenomena will decrease and their place be taken by the more
spiritual, such as automatic writing. This forecast has been
fulfilled, for though physical mediums still exist the other more
subtle forms greatly predominate, and call for far more discriminating
criticism in judging their value and their truth. Two very convincing
forms of mediumship, the direct voice and spirit photography, have also
become prominent. Each of these presents such proof that it is
impossible for the sceptic to face them, and he can only avoid them by
ignoring them.
In the case of the direct voice one of the leading exponents is Mrs.
French, an amateur medium in America, whose work is described both by
Mr. Funk and Mr. Randall. She is a frail elderly lady, yet in her
presence the most masculine and robust voices make communications, even
when her own mouth is covered. I have myself investigated the direct
voice in the case of four different mediums, two of them amateurs, and
can have no doubt of the reality of the voices, and that they are not
the effect of ventriloquism. I was more struck by the failures than by
the successes, and cannot easily forget the passionate pantings with
which some entity strove hard to reveal his identity to me, but without
success. One of these mediums was tested afterwards by having the
mouth filled with coloured water, but the voice continued as before.
As to spirit photography, the most successful results are obtained by
the Crewe circle in England, under the mediumship of Mr. Hope and Mrs.
Buxton.[2] I have seen scores of these photographs, which in several
cases reproduce exact images of the dead which do not correspond with
any pictures of them taken during life. I have seen father, mother,
and dead soldier son, all taken together with the dead son looking far
the happier and not the least substantial of the three. It is in these
varied forms of proof that the impregnable strength of the evidence
lies, for how absurd do explanations of telepathy, unconscious
cerebration or cosmic memory become when faced by such phenomena as
spirit photography, materialisation, or the direct voice. Only one
hypothesis can cover every branch of these manifestations, and that is
the system of extraneous life and action which has always, for seventy
years, held the field for any reasonable mind which had impartially
considered the facts.
I have spoken of the need for careful and cool-headed analysis in
judging the evidence where automatic writing is concerned. One is
bound to exclude spirit explanations until all natural ones have been
exhausted, though I do not include among natural ones the extreme
claims of far-fetched telepathy such as that another person can read in
your thoughts things of which you were never yourself aware. Such
explanations are not explanations, but mystifications and absurdities,
though they seem to have a special attraction for a certain sort of
psychical researcher, who is obviously destined to go on researching to
the end of time, without ever reaching any conclusion save that of the
patience of those who try to follow his reasoning. To give a good
example of valid automatic script, chosen out of many which I could
quote, I would draw the reader's attention to the facts as to the
excavations at Glastonbury, as detailed in "The Gate of Remembrance" by
Mr. Bligh Bond. Mr. Bligh Bond, by the way, is not a Spiritualist, but
the same cannot be said of the writer of the automatic script, an
amateur medium, who was able to indicate the secrets of the buried
abbey, which were proved to be correct when the ruins were uncovered.
I can truly say that, though I have read much of the old monastic life,
it has never been brought home to me so closely as by the messages and
descriptions of dear old Brother Johannes, the earth-bound
spirit--earthbound by his great love for the old abbey in which he had
spent his human life. This book, with its practical sequel, may be
quoted as an excellent example of automatic writing at its highest, for
what telepathic explanation can cover the detailed description of
objects which lie unseen by any human eye? It must be admitted,
however, that in automatic writing you are at one end of the telephone,
if one may use such a simile, and you have, no assurance as to who is
at the other end. You may have wildly false messages suddenly
interpolated among truthful ones--messages so detailed in their
mendacity that it is impossible to think that they are not deliberately
false. When once we have accepted the central fact that spirits change
little in essentials when leaving the body, and that in consequence the
world is infested by many low and mischievous types, one can understand
that these untoward incidents are rather a confirmation of Spiritualism
than an argument against it. Personally I have received and have been
deceived by several such messages. At the same time I can say that
after an experience of thirty years of such communications I have never
known a blasphemous, an obscene or an unkind sentence come through. I
admit, however, that I have heard of such cases. Like attracts like,
and one should know one's human company before one joins in such
intimate and reverent rites. In clairvoyance the same sudden
inexplicable deceptions appear. I have closely followed the work of
one female medium, a professional, whose results are so extraordinarily
good that in a favourable case she will give the full names of the
deceased as well as the most definite and convincing test messages.
Yet among this splendid series of results I have notes of several in
which she was a complete failure and absolutely wrong upon essentials.
How can this be explained? We can only answer that conditions were
obviously not propitious, but why or how are among the many problems of
the future. It is a profound and most complicated subject, however
easily it may be settled by the "ridiculous nonsense" school of
critics. I look at the row of books upon the left of my desk as I
write--ninety-six solid volumes, many of them annotated and well
thumbed, and yet I know that I am like a child wading ankle deep in the
margin of an illimitable ocean. But this, at least, I have very
clearly realised, that the ocean is there and that the margin is part
of it, and that down that shelving shore the human race is destined to
move slowly to deeper waters. In the next chapter, I will endeavour to
show what is the purpose of the Creator in this strange revelation of
new intelligent forces impinging upon our planet. It is this view of
the question which must justify the claim that this movement, so long
the subject of sneers and ridicule, is absolutely the most important
development in the whole history of the human race, so important that,
if we could conceive one single man discovering and publishing it, he
would rank before Christopher Columbus as a discoverer of new worlds,
before Paul as a teacher of new religious truths, and before Isaac
Newton as a student of the laws of the Universe.
Before opening up this subject there is one consideration which should
have due weight, and yet seems continually to be overlooked. The
differences between various sects are a very small thing as compared to
the great eternal duel between materialism and the spiritual view of
the Universe. That is the real fight. It is a fight in which the
Churches championed the anti-material view, but they have done it so
unintelligently, and have been continually placed in such false
positions, that they have always been losing. Since the days of Hume
and Voltaire and Gibbon the fight has slowly but steadily rolled in
favour of the attack. Then came Darwin, showing with apparent truth,
that man has never fallen but always risen. This cut deep into the
philosophy of orthodoxy, and it is folly to deny it. Then again came
the so-called "Higher Criticism," showing alleged flaws and cracks in
the very foundations. All this time the churches were yielding ground,
and every retreat gave a fresh jumping-off place for a new assault. It
has gone so far that at the present moment a very large section of the
people of this country, rich and poor, are out of all sympathy not only
with the churches but with the whole Spiritual view. Now, we intervene
with our positive knowledge and actual proof--an ally so powerful that
we are capable of turning the whole tide of battle and rolling it back
for ever against materialism. We can say: "We will meet you on your
own ground and show you by material and scientific tests that the soul
and personality survive." That is the aim of Psychic Science, and it
has been fully attained. It means an end to materialism for ever. And
yet this movement, this Spiritual movement, is hooted at and reviled by
Rome, by Canterbury and even by Little Bethel, each of them for once
acting in concert, and including in their battle line such strange
allies as the Scientific Agnostics and the militant Free-thinkers.
Father Vaughan and the Bishop of London, the Rev. F. B. Meyer and Mr.
Clodd, "The Church Times" and "The Freethinker," are united in battle,
though they fight with very different battle cries, the one declaring
that the thing is of the devil, while the other is equally clear that
it does not exist at all. The opposition of the materialists is
absolutely intelligent since it is clear that any man who has spent his
life in saying "No" to all extramundane forces is, indeed, in a
pitiable position when, after many years, he has to recognise that his
whole philosophy is built upon sand and that "Yes" was the answer from
the beginning. But as to the religious bodies, what words can express
their stupidity and want of all proportion in not running halfway and
more to meet the greatest ally who has ever intervened to change their
defeat into victory? What gifts this all-powerful ally brings with
him, and what are the terms of his alliance, will now be considered.