“Many of them were sitting perfectly composed, as if, for them, very little interest was attached to this station, while others were already in motion (a kind of compressed motion), as if preparing to leave. I thought this somewhat strange, and was about turning to find a seat in another car, when a second glance around showed me that the passengers, who had appeared so indifferent were really losing their identity, and, in a moment, were invisible to me. I had had time to note the personal appearance of several; and taking a seat I awaited the return of the passengers, thinking it more than probable I might in them find the prototypes of the faces and forms I had a moment before so singularly beheld. Nor was I disappointed. A number of those who returned to the cars I recognized as being, in every particular, the counterparts of their late but transient representatives.”
Mary Dana Shindler, in the Voice of Truth, says:
“An aunt of ours was very ill with fever, and her only brother, commanding a packet ship between Havana and Charleston, was daily expected; but we feared he would arrive too late to see his sister in earth-life. One morning while we were watching at her bedside, she suddenly sat up, clapped her hands, and exclaimed joyfully, ‘Brother William has come!’ We all thought her mind wandering; but in about ten minutes he arrived at her house, and from that moment she began to recover. She could not tell us how she discovered that he had arrived, but only said, ‘I knew it; I heard, and felt him.’”
Bishop Bowman, in a sermon delivered in Philadelphia, narrated a remarkable experience, which shows how near the state of death approaches trance or clairvoyance. The usual light treatment of the fact of the result of cerebral disturbance is far from a satisfactory solution:
“On my return from Japan, I preached in California, and probably overworked myself. The last Sunday in February, after holding divine service in my St. Louis Church, I returned home, when I was immediately taken sick with a lingering fever, which the physicians predicted would end fatally. At this point I seemed to fall into a kind of ecstasy, and I did not know whether I was alive or dead. I imagined I was on board a magnificent ship, and heard the captain say, ‘Stop her,’ which I thought to be the voice of my Divine Master, when my young eighteen-months-old child, who had died twenty years ago, came to me and said that she had heard that I was coming, and had come to meet me. After some conversation which I do not recollect, she said, ‘Do you think I have grown, papa?’ She then arose in a form of glory I have never before witnessed, and never again expect to see until I die, and then returned to her usual state, saying that she came in that shape to see if I would know her. She said that many other friends had inquired after me, and that an old gentleman and lady had taken her up and kissed her, saying that her papa was their boy. I then asked her where her mama was. ‘Oh, she is away doing something for the Lord, but will meet us on our arrival at the wharf.’ It was a season of great preciousness to me. It seems to me that I have come back from the other world; and although it is peculiar for me to say I was dead, it seems to me I was not in the body.”
The testimony of those who have approached nearest to death, and have been brought back to life, favors, if not proves, that at that great crisis, as the senses fail, spiritual sensitiveness becomes acute, and the perceptions merge into a universal consciousness. A gentleman while swimming failed to sustain himself, and before assistance could reach him, sank, as he supposed, to rise no more.
“Then he saw, as if in a wide field, the acts of his own being, from the first dawn of memory until the time he entered the water. They were all grouped and ranged in the order of the succession of their happening, and he read the whole volume of existence at a glance; nay, its incidents and entities were photographed on his mind, illumined by light, the panorama of the battle of life lay before him.” (“Sleep, Memory and Sensation,” page 43.)
Clairvoyance has, as thus appears, a retrospection, and is as able to see the past as the present, or previse the future. The element of time does not appear to enter into the cognition of events by this faculty. Everything is in the present, and the past is only distinguished by order of sequence.
A gentleman in Iowa related to me his experience while insensible from the effect of cold. He was overtaken by a fearful storm, such as sometimes sweep across the prairies, and, losing his way after hours of vain struggling, sank exhausted in a drift of snow. The past events of his life came in a panoramic show before him, but so rapidly moving, that from boyhood until that moment was as an instant; then came a sense of perfect physical happiness, and he began dimly to see the forms of those whom he had known while living, but were now dead. They grew more and more distinct, but just as they came near and were, as he thought, overjoyed to receive him, darkness came suddenly and great pain; the vision faded, and he became conscious of the presence of his friends who had rescued him, and were applying every measure to restore him to life. How near he had reached the boundary line, the “dead line” beyond, from which there is no return to the body, was shown by his crippled hands and feet.
It is a singular fact that no one has ever recovered from a near approach to this line, who does not tell the same tale of an exalted perception and intensification of the mental faculties. Sometimes this is exhibited by the recognition of an event then transpiring, with which the subject is intimately connected, as in the following, wherein the deaths of near relatives or friends are discerned: