The Conquest of Fear

by Basil King

XIV

My point is this, that if these things happened, they seem to bear out my suggestion that our own inducement of premature death cuts us off from fulfilling our appointed time and getting our appointed experience. Only on some such ground can we believe that any would be permitted to return.

Should this be so we would be in a position to assume that all who go over ahead of time would be allowed to come back, if we had sufficient spiritual power to recall them. But that power is of the rarest. Our Lord, apparently, was in control of it only at times, and on at least one occasion, that of the raising of Lazarus, its exercise was not what we should call easy. But that He believed it to be at human command to some extent is clear from the fact that its use became one of His four basic principles. "Raise the dead," was the second of the commands with which He sent out his first seventy disciples.