THE COMING WORLD
We come first to the messages which tell us of the life beyond the
grave, sent by those who are actually living it. I have already
insisted upon the fact that they have three weighty claims to our
belief. The one is, that they are accompanied by "signs," in the
Biblical sense, in the shape of "miracles" or phenomena. The second
is, that in many cases they are accompanied by assertions about this
life of ours which prove to be correct, and which are beyond the
possible knowledge of the medium after every deduction has been made
for telepathy or for unconscious memory. The third is, that they have
a remarkable, though not a complete, similarity from whatever source
they come.
It may be noted that the differences of opinion become most marked when
they deal with their own future, which may well be a matter of
speculation to them as to us. Thus, upon the question of reincarnation
there is a distinct cleavage, and though I am myself of opinion that
the general evidence is against this oriental doctrine, it is none the
less an undeniable fact that it has been maintained by some messages
which appear in other ways to be authentic, and, therefore, it is
necessary to keep one's mind open on the subject.
Before entering upon the substance of the messages I should wish to
emphasize the second of these two points, so as to reinforce the
reader's confidence in the authenticity of these assertions. To this
end I will give a detailed example, with names almost exact. The
medium was Mr. Phoenix, of Glasgow, with whom I have myself had some
remarkable experiences. The sitter was Mr. Ernest Oaten, the President
of the Northern Spiritual Union, a man of the utmost veracity and
precision of statement. The dialogue, which came by the direct voice,
a trumpet acting as megaphone, ran like this:--
The Voice: Good evening, Mr. Oaten.
Mr. O.: Good evening. Who are you?
The Voice: My name is Mill. You know my father.
Mr. O.: No, I don't remember anyone of the name.
The Voice: Yes, you were speaking to him the other day.
Mr. O.: To be sure. I remember now. I only met him casually.
The Voice: I want you to give him a message from me.
Mr. O.: What is it?
The Voice: Tell him that he was not mistaken at midnight on
Tuesday last.
Mr. O.: Very good. I will say so. Have you passed long?
The Voice: Some time. But our time is different from yours.
Mr. O.: What were you?
The Voice: A Surgeon.
Mr. O.: How did you pass?
The Voice: Blown up in a battleship during the war.
Mr. O.: Anything more?
The answer was the Gipsy song from "Il Trovatore," very accurately
whistled, and then a quick-step. After the latter, the voice said:
"That is a test for father."
This reproduction of conversation is not quite verbatim, but gives the
condensed essence. Mr. Oaten at once visited Mr. Mill, who was not a
Spiritualist, and found that every detail was correct. Young Mill had
lost his life as narrated. Mr. Mill, senior, explained that while
sitting in his study at midnight on the date named he had heard the
Gipsy song from "Il Trovatore," which had been a favourite of his
boy's, and being unable to trace the origin of the music, had finally
thought that it was a freak of his imagination. The test connected
with the quick-step had reference to a tune which the young man used to
play upon the piccolo, but which was so rapid that he never could get
it right, for which he was chaffed by the family.
I tell this story at length to make the reader realise that when young
Mill, and others like him, give such proofs of accuracy, which we can
test for ourselves, we are bound to take their assertions very
seriously when they deal with the life they are actually leading,
though in their very nature we can only check their accounts by
comparison with others.
Now let me epitomise what these assertions are. They say that they are
exceedingly happy, and that they do not wish to return. They are among
the friends whom they had loved and lost, who meet them when they die
and continue their careers together. They are very busy on all forms
of congenial work. The world in which they find themselves is very
much like that which they have quitted, but everything keyed to a
higher octave. As in a higher octave the rhythm is the same, and the
relation of notes to each other the same, but the total effect
different, so it is here. Every earthly thing has its equivalent.
Scoffers have guffawed over alcohol and tobacco, but if all things are
reproduced it would be a flaw if these were not reproduced also. That
they should be abused, as they are here, would, indeed, be evil
tidings, but nothing of the sort has been said, and in the much
discussed passage in "Raymond," their production was alluded to as
though it were an unusual, and in a way a humorous, instance of the
resources of the beyond. I wonder how many of the preachers, who have
taken advantage of this passage in order to attack the whole new
revelation, have remembered that the only other message which ever
associated alcohol with the life beyond is that of Christ Himself, when
He said: "I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine until
that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom."
This matter is a detail, however, and it is always dangerous to discuss
details in a subject which is so enormous, so dimly seen. As the
wisest woman I have known remarked to me: "Things may well be
surprising over there, for if we had been told the facts of this life
before we entered it, we should never have believed it." In its larger
issues this happy life to come consists in the development of those
gifts which we possess. There is action for the man of action,
intellectual work for the thinker, artistic, literary, dramatic and
religious for those whose God-given powers lie that way. What we have
both in brain and character we carry over with us. No man is too old
to learn, for what he learns he keeps. There is no physical side to
love and no child-birth, though there is close union between those
married people who really love each other, and, generally, there is
deep sympathetic friendship and comradeship between the sexes. Every
man or woman finds a soul mate sooner or later. The child grows up to
the normal, so that the mother who lost a babe of two years old, and
dies herself twenty years later finds a grown-up daughter of twenty-two
awaiting her coming. Age, which is produced chiefly by the mechanical
presence of lime in our arteries, disappears, and the individual
reverts to the full normal growth and appearance of completed man--or
womanhood. Let no woman mourn her lost beauty, and no man his lost
strength or weakening brain. It all awaits them once more upon the
other side. Nor is any deformity or bodily weakness there, for all is
normal and at its best.
Before leaving this section of the subject, I should say a few more
words upon the evidence as it affects the etheric body. This body is a
perfect thing. This is a matter of consequence in these days when so
many of our heroes have been mutilated in the wars. One cannot
mutilate the etheric body, and it remains always intact. The first
words uttered by a returning spirit in the recent experience of Dr.
Abraham Wallace were "I have got my left arm again." The same applies
to all birth marks, deformities, blindness, and other imperfections.
None of them are permanent, and all will vanish in that happier life
that awaits us. Such is the teaching from the beyond--that a perfect
body waits for each.
"But," says the critic, "what then of the clairvoyant descriptions, or
the visions where the aged father is seen, clad in the old-fashioned
garments of another age, or the grandmother with crinoline and chignon?
Are these the habiliments of heaven?" Such visions are not spirits,
but they are pictures which are built up before us or shot by spirits
into our brains or those of the seer for the purposes of recognition.
Hence the grey hair and hence the ancient garb. When a real spirit is
indeed seen it comes in another form to this, where the flowing robe,
such as has always been traditionally ascribed to the angels, is a
vital thing which, by its very colour and texture, proclaims the
spiritual condition of the wearer, and is probably a condensation of
that aura which surrounds us upon earth.
It is a world of sympathy. Only those who have this tie foregather.
The sullen husband, the flighty wife, is no longer there to plague the
innocent spouse. All is sweet and peaceful. It is the long rest cure
after the nerve strain of life, and before new experiences in the
future. The circumstances are homely and familiar. Happy circles live
in pleasant homesteads with every amenity of beauty and of music.
Beautiful gardens, lovely flowers, green woods, pleasant lakes,
domestic pets--all of these things are fully described in the messages
of the pioneer travellers who have at last got news back to those who
loiter in the old dingy home. There are no poor and no rich. The
craftsman may still pursue his craft, but he does it for the joy of his
work. Each serves the community as best he can, while from above come
higher ministers of grace, the "Angels" of holy writ, to direct and
help. Above all, shedding down His atmosphere upon all, broods that
great Christ spirit, the very soul of reason, of justice, and of
sympathetic understanding, who has the earth sphere, with all its
circles, under His very special care. It is a place of joy and
laughter. There are games and sports of all sorts, though none which
cause pain to lower life. Food and drink in the grosser sense do not
exist, but there seem to be pleasures of taste, and this distinction
causes some confusion in the messages upon the point.
But above all, brain, energy, character, driving power, if exerted for
good, makes a man a leader there as here, while unselfishness, patience
and spirituality there, as here, qualify the soul for the higher
places, which have often been won by those very tribulations down here
which seem so purposeless and so cruel, and are in truth our chances of
spiritual quickening and promotion, without which life would have been
barren and without profit.
The revelation abolishes the idea of a grotesque hell and of a
fantastic heaven, while it substitutes the conception of a gradual rise
in the scale of existence without any monstrous change which would turn
us in an instant from man to angel or devil. The system, though
different from previous ideas, does not, as it seems to me, run counter
in any radical fashion to the old beliefs. In ancient maps it was
usual for the cartographer to mark blank spaces for the unexplored
regions, with some such legend as "here are anthropophagi," or "here
are mandrakes," scrawled across them. So in our theology there have
been ill-defined areas which have admittedly been left unfilled, for
what sane man has ever believed in such a heaven as is depicted in our
hymn books, a land of musical idleness and barren monotonous adoration!
Thus in furnishing a clearer conception this new system has nothing to
supplant. It paints upon a blank sheet.
One may well ask, however, granting that there is evidence for such a
life and such a world as has been described, what about those who have
not merited such a destination? What do the messages from beyond say
about these? And here one cannot be too definite, for there is no use
exchanging one dogma for another. One can but give the general purport
of such information as has been vouchsafed to us. It is natural that
those with whom we come in contact are those whom we may truly call the
blessed, for if the thing be approached in a reverent and religious
spirit it is those whom we should naturally attract. That there are
many less fortunate than themselves is evident from their own constant
allusions to that regenerating and elevating missionary work which is
among their own functions. They descend apparently and help others to
gain that degree of spirituality which fits them for this upper sphere,
as a higher student might descend to a lower class in order to bring
forward a backward pupil. Such a conception gives point to Christ's
remark that there was more joy in heaven over saving one sinner than
over ninety-nine just, for if He had spoken of an earthly sinner he
would surely have had to become just in this life and so ceased to be a
sinner before he had reached Paradise. It would apply very exactly,
however, to a sinner rescued from a lower sphere and brought to a
higher one.
When we view sin in the light of modern science, with the tenderness of
the modern conscience and with a sense of justice and proportion, it
ceases to be that monstrous cloud which darkened the whole vision of
the mediaeval theologian. Man has been more harsh with himself than an
all-merciful God will ever be. It is true that with all deductions
there remains a great residuum which means want of individual effort,
conscious weakness of will, and culpable failure of character when the
sinner, like Horace, sees and applauds the higher while he follows the
lower. But when, on the other hand, one has made allowances--and can
our human allowance be as generous as God's?--for the sins which are
the inevitable product of early environment, for the sins which are due
to hereditary and inborn taint, and to the sins which are due to clear
physical causes, then the total of active sin is greatly reduced.
Could one, for example, imagine that Providence, all-wise and
all-merciful, as every creed proclaims, could punish the unfortunate
wretch who hatches criminal thoughts behind the slanting brows of a
criminal head? A doctor has but to glance at the cranium to predicate
the crime. In its worst forms all crime, from Nero to Jack the Ripper,
is the product of absolute lunacy, and those gross national sins to
which allusion has been made seem to point to collective national
insanity. Surely, then, there is hope that no very terrible inferno is
needed to further punish those who have been so afflicted upon earth.
Some of our dead have remarked that nothing has surprised them so much
as to find who have been chosen for honour, and certainly, without in
any way condoning sin, one could well imagine that the man whose
organic makeup predisposed him with irresistible force in that
direction should, in justice, receive condolence and sympathy.
Possibly such a sinner, if he had not sinned so deeply as he might have
done, stands higher than the man who was born good, and remained so,
but was no better at the end of his life. The one has made some
progress and the other has not. But the commonest failing, the one
which fills the spiritual hospitals of the other world, and is a
temporary bar to the normal happiness of the after-life, is the sin of
Tomlinson in Kipling's poem, the commonest of all sins in respectable
British circles, the sin of conventionality, of want of conscious
effort and development, of a sluggish spirituality, fatted over by a
complacent mind and by the comforts of life. It is the man who is
satisfied, the man who refers his salvation to some church or higher
power without steady travail of his own soul, who is in deadly danger.
All churches are good, Christian or non-Christian, so long as they
promote the actual spirit life of the individual, but all are noxious
the instant that they allow him to think that by any form of ceremony,
or by any fashion of creed, he obtains the least advantage over his
neighbour, or can in any way dispense with that personal effort which
is the only road to the higher places.
This is, of course, as applicable to believers in Spiritualism as to
any other belief. If it does not show in practice then it is vain.
One can get through this life very comfortably following without
question in some procession with a venerable leader. But one does not
die in a procession. One dies alone. And it is then that one has
alone to accept the level gained by the work of life.
And what is the punishment of the undeveloped soul? It is that it
should be placed where it WILL develop, and sorrow would seem always to
be the forcing ground of souls. That surely is our own experience in
life where the insufferably complacent and unsympathetic person softens
and mellows into beauty of character and charity of thought, when tried
long enough and high enough in the fires of life. The Bible has talked
about the "Outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of
teeth." The influence of the Bible has sometimes been an evil one
through our own habit of reading a book of Oriental poetry and treating
it as literally as if it were Occidental prose. When an Eastern
describes a herd of a thousand camels he talks of camels which are more
numerous than the hairs of your head or the stars in the sky. In this
spirit of allowance for Eastern expression, one must approach those
lurid and terrible descriptions which have darkened the lives of so
many imaginative children and sent so many earnest adults into asylums.
From all that we learn there are indeed places of outer darkness, but
dim as these uncomfortable waiting-rooms may be, they all admit to
heaven in the end. That is the final destination of the human race,
and it would indeed be a reproach to the Almighty if it were not so.
We cannot dogmatise upon this subject of the penal spheres, and yet we
have very clear teaching that they are there and that the no-man's-land
which separates us from the normal heaven, that third heaven to which
St. Paul seems to have been wafted in one short strange experience of
his lifetime, is a place which corresponds with the Astral plane of the
mystics and with the "outer darkness" of the Bible. Here linger those
earth-bound spirits whose worldly interests have clogged them and
weighed them down, until every spiritual impulse had vanished; the man
whose life has been centred on money, on worldly ambition, or on
sensual indulgence. The one-idea'd man will surely be there, if his
one idea was not a spiritual one. Nor is it necessary that he should
be an evil man, if dear old brother John of Glastonbury, who loved the
great Abbey so that he could never detach himself from it, is to be
classed among earth-bound spirits. In the most material and pronounced
classes of these are the ghosts who impinge very closely upon matter
and have been seen so often by those who have no strong psychic sense.
It is probable, from what we know of the material laws which govern
such matters, that a ghost could never manifest itself if it were
alone, that the substance for the manifestation is drawn from the
spectator, and that the coldness, raising of hair, and other symptoms
of which he complains are caused largely by the sudden drain upon his
own vitality. This, however, is to wander into speculation, and far
from that correlation of psychic knowledge with religion, which has
been the aim of these chapters.
By one of those strange coincidences, which seem to me sometimes to be
more than coincidences, I had reached this point in my explanation of
the difficult question of the intermediate state, and was myself
desiring further enlightenment, when an old book reached me through the
post, sent by someone whom I have never met, and in it is the following
passage, written by an automatic writer, and in existence since 1880.
It makes the matter plain, endorsing what has been said and adding new
points.
"Some cannot advance further than the borderland--such as never thought
of spirit life and have lived entirely for the earth, its cares and
pleasures--even clever men and women, who have lived simply
intellectual lives without spirituality. There are many who have
misused their opportunities, and are now longing for the time misspent
and wishing to recall the earth-life. They will learn that on this
side the time can be redeemed, though at much cost. The borderland has
many among the restless money-getters of earth, who still haunt the
places where they had their hopes and joys. These are often the
longest to remain . . . many are not unhappy. They feel the relief to
be sufficient to be without their earth bodies. All pass through the
borderland, but some hardly perceive it. It is so immediate, and there
is no resting there for them. They pass on at once to the refreshment
place of which we tell you." The anonymous author, after recording
this spirit message, mentions the interesting fact that there is a
Christian inscription in the Catacombs which runs: NICEFORUS ANIMA
DULCIS IN REFRIGERIO, "Nicephorus, a sweet soul in the refreshment
place." One more scrap of evidence that the early Christian scheme of
things was very like that of the modern psychic.
So much for the borderland, the intermediate condition. The present
Christian dogma has no name for it, unless it be that nebulous limbo
which is occasionally mentioned, and is usually defined as the place
where the souls of the just who died before Christ were detained. The
idea of crossing a space before reaching a permanent state on the other
side is common to many religions, and took the allegorical form of a
river with a ferry-boat among the Romans and Greeks. Continually, one
comes on points which make one realise that far back in the world's
history there has been a true revelation, which has been blurred and
twisted in time. Thus in Dr. Muir's summary of the RIG. VEDA, he
says, epitomising the beliefs of the first Aryan conquerors of India:
"Before, however, the unborn part" (that is, the etheric body) "can
complete its course to the third heaven it has to traverse a vast gulf
of darkness, leaving behind on earth all that is evil, and proceeding
by the paths the fathers trod, the spirit soars to the realms of
eternal light, recovers there his body in a glorified form, and obtains
from God a delectable abode and enters upon a more perfect life, which
is crowned with the fulfilment of all desires, is passed in the
presence of the Gods and employed in the fulfilment of their pleasure."
If we substitute "angels" for "Gods" we must admit that the new
revelation from modern spirit sources has much in common with the
belief of our Aryan fathers.
Such, in very condensed form, is the world which is revealed to us by
these wonderful messages from the beyond. Is it an unreasonable
vision? Is it in any way opposed to just principles? Is it not rather
so reasonable that having got the clue we could now see that, given any
life at all, this is exactly the line upon which we should expect to
move? Nature and evolution are averse from sudden disconnected
developments. If a human being has technical, literary, musical, or
other tendencies, they are an essential part of his character, and to
survive without them would be to lose his identity and to become an
entirely different man. They must therefore survive death if
personality is to be maintained. But it is no use their surviving
unless they can find means of expression, and means of expression seem
to require certain material agents, and also a discriminating audience.
So also the sense of modesty among civilised races has become part of
our very selves, and implies some covering of our forms if personality
is to continue. Our desires and sympathies would prompt us to live
with those we love, which implies something in the nature of a house,
while the human need for mental rest and privacy would predicate the
existence of separate rooms. Thus, merely starting from the basis of
the continuity of personality one might, even without the revelation
from the beyond, have built up some such system by the use of pure
reason and deduction.
So far as the existence of this land of happiness goes, it would seem
to have been more fully proved than any other religious conception
within our knowledge.
It may very reasonably be asked, how far this precise description of
life beyond the grave is my own conception, and how far it has been
accepted by the greater minds who have studied this subject? I would
answer, that it is my own conclusion as gathered from a very large
amount of existing testimony, and that in its main lines it has for
many years been accepted by those great numbers of silent active
workers all over the world, who look upon this matter from a strictly
religious point of view. I think that the evidence amply justifies us
in this belief. On the other hand, those who have approached this
subject with cold and cautious scientific brains, endowed, in many
cases, with the strongest prejudices against dogmatic creeds and with
very natural fears about the possible re-growth of theological
quarrels, have in most cases stopped short of a complete acceptance,
declaring that there can be no positive proof upon such matters, and
that we may deceive ourselves either by a reflection of our own
thoughts or by receiving the impressions of the medium. Professor
Zollner, for example, says:
"Science can make no use of the substance of intellectual revelations,
but must be guided by observed facts and by the conclusions logically
and mathematically uniting them"--a passage which is quoted with
approval by Professor Reichel, and would seem to be endorsed by the
silence concerning the religious side of the question which is observed
by most of our great scientific supporters. It is a point of view
which can well be understood, and yet, closely examined, it would
appear to be a species of enlarged materialism. To admit, as these
observers do, that spirits do return, that they give every proof of
being the actual friends whom we have lost, and yet to turn a deaf ear
to the messages which they send would seem to be pushing caution to the
verge of unreason. To get so far, and yet not to go further, is
impossible as a permanent position. If, for example, in Raymond's case
we find so many allusions to the small details of his home upon earth,
which prove to be surprisingly correct, is it reasonable to put a blue
pencil through all he says of the home which he actually inhabits?
Long before I had convinced my mind of the truth of things which
appeared so grotesque and incredible, I had a long account sent by
table tilting about the conditions of life beyond. The details seemed
to me impossible and I set them aside, and yet they harmonise, as I now
discover, with other revelations. So, too, with the automatic script
of Mr. Hubert Wales, which has been described in my previous book. He
had tossed it aside into a drawer as being unworthy of serious
consideration, and yet it also proved to be in harmony. In neither of
these cases was telepathy or the prepossession of the medium a possible
explanation. On the whole, I am inclined to think that these doubtful
or dissentient scientific men, having their own weighty studies to
attend to, have confined their reading and thought to the more
objective side of the question, and are not aware of the vast amount of
concurrent evidence which appears to give us an exact picture of the
life beyond. They despise documents which cannot be proved, and they
do not, in my opinion, sufficiently realise that a general agreement of
testimony, and the already established character of a witness, are
themselves arguments for truth. Some complicate the question by
predicating the existence of a fourth dimension in that world, but the
term is an absurdity, as are all terms which find no corresponding
impression in the human brain. We have mysteries enough to solve
without gratuitously introducing fresh ones. When solid passes through
solid, it is, surely, simpler to assume that it is done by a
dematerialisation, and subsequent reassembly--a process which can, at
least, be imagined by the human mind--than to invoke an explanation
which itself needs to be explained.
In the next and final chapter I will ask the reader to accompany me in
an examination of the New Testament by the light of this psychic
knowledge, and to judge how far it makes clear and reasonable much
which was obscure and confused.