The higher education of the future will recognize and give prominence to the cultivation of this hitherto ignored faculty.
It is one of the possibilities of the future to encourage the culture of the sensitive faculty, and the results will be far more wonderful in normal education than now arises from what seems abnormal, and the product of chance.
Sensitiveness, as has been shown in the preceding pages, is possessed by all in greater or less degree, and may be cultivated like any other mental quality. As its laws and conditions are more thoroughly understood and its inestimable value realized, it will become a part of all substantial educational training.
The Extension of this Theory into the Life Beyond.—This theory, without calling to its aid spiritual beings, marks out the laws by which such beings may control the sensitive and become cognizant of the thoughts of each other. Man being a spirit, limited by a physical body, through the sensitive state, under certain conditions, he breaks away from his limitations and feels the waves of thought created by others through the psychic-ether.
When freed from the physical body the spirit must possess the same power in larger degree and impress its thoughts on the sensitive in the same manner. Sensitive beyond mortal conception in its most exalted state, it is in connection with all spiritual intelligences, and a converging and diverging center of telegraphic communication. As it advances in this sensitiveness, distance becomes a less and less factor, until eliminated, and a thought sent forth wings its way until it meets the one for whom it was intended.
Thus, what has been made the toy of a leisure hour, the imperfect attempts at thought-reading, mesmeric control of the will, and the mystery of communion of minds sympathetic, are really the crude manifestations of an undeveloped faculty, which, after the evolution wrought by death, becomes the glory of spirit-existence.
Prayer in the Light of Sensitiveness
and Thought Waves.
When President Garfield was lying tortured by the wound which caused his death, the prayers of a whole nation arose as one united voice for his recovery. From sixty thousand pulpits petitions to the throne of grace ascended. There were days set apart for united appeal to God. He was eminent in the church as in war and politics, and if prayer ever received answer, it would seem that it should be in his case. Yet the good man, the scholar, the statesman and theologian died, just as he would have died had no petition been sent to the throne of grace. The ocean ship, freighted with passengers, is broken through by an iceberg, and slowly filling, settles down into the waves. Wildly the best and purest men and women pray to God for help, but the ship is not thereby sustained, or delayed a single moment in her final plunge into the abysses of the sea.
On occasions of great public calamity, where drought blasts the harvest, locusts devour the fields, or pestilence rages, days are set apart for prayer. Every minister of the gospel and every layman daily prays with utmost fervor. Yet the rain falls not, the locusts devour, and the pestilence pursues its way without shadow of turning. Prayer in such cases is as hopeless as it would be if the maker should stand on a railroad track, and, when he saw a train approaching, pray to God to stop it. It is a petition for the impossible.