I have therefore reached the conviction that human survival is a fact, that the life over there is something like an improved version of the present one, and—a comforting thought, supported by much of my evidence—that we are met at death by those who have gone before. Some of my more mystical friends, who have not needed such prolonged jolting to get them out of materialistic grooves, are rather bored with me for dwelling so much on the evidence and on the nature of the next state. They call it “merely astral”; as for them, their minds soar in higher flights. One friend, a sort of radical High Churchman, said to me some time ago that he was “not interested in the intermediate state”. But I rather think that he will have to be. I may be wrong, but I suspect that, whether they like it or not, these good people will have to go through the intermediate state before they get anywhere else. Good though they are, I do not believe they are good enough for unalloyed bliss or union with the Godhead. Such sudden jumps do not happen. Progress is gradual. Indeed, I have noticed lately that my High Churchman friend has shown much more interest in these merely psychical things. Perhaps he thinks he had better turn back and make sure of the next state and its nature, perceiving that it is a necessary bridge or “tarrying-place” (which is the alternative reading for the “mansions” of our Father’s house) on the way to the heaven which he quite rightly aims at.
As to the future of psychical science and opinion, I feel sure that great things are now ahead. The war, with the terrible amount of mourning it entails, has quickened interest in the subject, and for millions of people the question of survival and the next state has become an urgent and abiding one. Their interest, instead of being almost wholly on this side, is very largely over there, whither their loved ones have gone. Similarly with the soldiers who have come safely through the war. All have lost friends, all have faced the possibility of sudden or slow and painful death. And probably all young people at present, and most adults, have out-grown the crude beliefs of last century’s orthodoxy with its everlasting hell, and are ready for a more rational system. This is being supplied, backed by scientific proof, by psychical research and scientific spiritualism. It seems likely that the religion of the best minds for the next half-century or so, and perhaps onward, will be something like that which Myers came to hold in his later years. It does not much matter whether the spiritualist sect grows as an institution or not. Many people will accept its main belief without feeling it necessary to leave the communion to which they already belong. It seems certain that the idea itself will be the ruling idea in many minds for a long time, and no doubt psychic faculty will become much more common, for thousands are now trying to develop it who never cared to try before. Quite possibly the effort on both sides of the veil, in consequence of so many premature deaths, may bring about a closer communion between the two sides than has ever been known hitherto. A great lift-up of earthly thought would be the result, a perhaps final emergence from the chrysalis stage of materialism; and we shall then be near the time when, as the inspired Milton makes his Raphael say:
“Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit,
Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend
Ethereal, as we, or may, at choice,
Here or in heavenly Paradises dwell.”
DO MIRACLES HAPPEN?
Mr G. K. Chesterton, with true journalistic instinct, recently stimulated public interest in himself and other worthy things by engineering a discussion on “Do Miracles Happen?” The debate furnished an opportunity of harmlessly letting off steam, but apparently each disputant “was of his own opinion still” at the finish; though some of the newspapers thought that the affirmative was proved, not by argument, but by the actual occurrence of a miracle at the meeting—for Mr Bernard Shaw was present, but remained silent! Joking apart, however, these discussions are usually rendered nugatory by each debater attaching a different meaning to the word. To one of them, a “miracle” involves the action of some non-human mind; to others it is only a “wonderful” occurrence, which is the strictly etymological meaning. It is only in the latter sense that orthodox science has anything to say on the subject.
David Hume, in the most famous of his essays, says that a miracle is “a violation of the laws of nature”, which laws a “firm and unalterable experience has established”. A century later, Matthew Arnold disposed of the question in an even shorter manner. “Miracles do not happen”, said he, in the preface to Literature and Dogma. Modern science has, speaking generally, concurred.
But the two statements are not very satisfactory. It is true, no doubt, that miracles did not enter into the experience of David Hume and Matthew Arnold; but this does not prove that they have never entered into the experience of anybody else. If I must disbelieve all assertions concerning phenomena which I have not personally observed, I must deny that the sun can ever be north at mid-day, as indeed the Greeks did (according to Herodotus), when the circumnavigators of Africa came back with their story. But if I do, I shall be wrong. (Histories, book iv, “I for my part do not believe them”, says even this romantic historian.)
It is as unsafe to reject all human testimony to the marvellous as it is to accept it all without question. The modern mind has gone to the negative extreme, as the medieval mind went to the other. Take for instance the twenty-five thousand Lives of the Saints in the great Bollandist collection. They are full of miracles, of most incredible kinds; yet in those days the accounts caused no astonishment. There was no organised knowledge of nature, outside the narrow orbit of daily life—and how narrow that was, we with our facile means of communication and travel can hardly realise. Consequently there was little or no conception of law or orderliness in nature, and therefore no criterion by which to test stories of unusual occurrences. Anything might happen; there was no apparent reason why it shouldn’t. One saint having retired into the desert to lead a life of mortification, the birds daily brought him food sufficient for his wants; and when a brother joined him they doubled the supply. When the saint died, two lions came and dug his grave, uttered a howl of mourning over his body, and knelt to beg a blessing from the survivor. (Cf. the curious story of St Francis taming “Brother Wolf”, of Gubbio, in chapter 21 of the Fioretti.) The innumerable miracles in the Little Flowers and Life of St Francis are repeated in countless other lives; saints are lifted across rivers by angels, they preach to the fishes, who swarm to the shore to listen, they are visited by the Virgin, are lifted up in the air and suspended there for twelve hours while in ecstasy they perceive the inner mystery of the Most Blessed Trinity. Almost every town in Europe could produce its relic which has produced its miraculous cures, or its image that had opened or shut its eyes, or bowed its head to a worshipper. The Virgin of the Pillar, at Saragossa, restored a worshipper’s leg that had been amputated. This is regarded by Spanish theologians as specially well attested. There is a picture of it in the Cathedral at Saragossa. (Lecky, Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, vol. 1, page 141.) The saints were seen fighting for the Christian army, when the latter battled with the infidel. In medieval times this kind of thing was accepted without question and without surprise.