spiritual communications! A clergyman, a friend of mine, who witnessed the phenomena, and who before was in a state of the greatest depression, caused by the death of his son, said to me, “I am now full of confidence and cheerfulness. I am a changed man.”
It is not unnatural that the answers given to those who ask for admittance to the closed door of the mysteries of the human soul should be pitched in the same key as the inquiry. Disappointment is not uncommon. I have taken part in séances of every kind, with cautious investigators devoid of all spiritualistic bias, with unsophisticated believers in a supernatural source of all psychic phenomena, with scoffers convinced that every medium is an impostor, and that nothing but a little common sense is needed for the exposure. The results have been largely dependent on the mentality of the investigators. Failure to understand this is responsible for much of the disappointment and contempt with which otherwise intelligent critics have dismissed the subject. The accumulated thought-power, the collective mind of those who participate, profoundly influence the medium and the quality of the communications received.
One stubborn soul may wreck the meeting. I remember an evening at the house of Mr. W. T. Stead. There had been a series of highly successful demonstrations of “spirit voices,” distinctly audible and perfectly intelligible. A well-known minister of the Church visible joined the circle—a man clothed in all the outward signs of spirituality, uniting clerical decorum with an emotional fervour in preaching which had made him a popular favourite. Though feeling has now and then led him into unconventional paths of theological thought, fate has surely marked him for the adornment of a bishopric. He came to study the alleged powers of the medium. He doubted everything and everybody. The easy faith and unquestioning acceptance of miraculous events of which he was not ashamed whilst in the pulpit had now been exchanged for vigilant suspicion and impatient analysis. He plied the medium with questions, bludgeoned her with requests for evidence that she was not deluded or deluding. He turned himself into cross-examining counsel, proud of his discrimination and his immunity against the insidious appeal of the supernatural. He succeeded. The medium was confounded, she
lost her power; the phenomena did not occur. The atmosphere was chilled. Some of us felt we would rather have been visited by the village blacksmith than by this priestly exponent of sweet-faced materialism.
I do not deny that I have often been struck with the intellectual poverty of messages from the spirit world. They are often silly, and not seldom untruthful. The silliness and the untruthfulness are faithful reflections of common human failings, and only show that heavenly wisdom is as unattainable through the average spiritualistic channels as it is in the Houses of Parliament or the courts of law.
I can imagine a radiant and purely spiritual being attempting to convey a true description of the state of spiritual bliss to a circle of men and women representative of cultured thought, and practical efficiency in the affairs of the world. Let the circle include a few university professors, some successful men of business, a couple of judges, a sprinkling of journalists, an archdeacon or two, and some authors of repute. Let them all be actuated by a strong desire to obtain reliable information and to give a fair and unprejudiced hearing to the visitor.
The visitor is necessarily hampered by the necessity for a medium. It may be that the senior judge is gifted with psychic powers and that the method of communication chosen is that of trance.
The learned brain-cells would transmit the message up to a certain point, but when an effort was made to depict unfathomed depths and heights of transcendental experience, the judicial mind would rebel. The sense of logic would be strained. The conception of the possible would be violated. A fearful consciousness of being guilty of uttering lies would persist, in spite of efforts to subdue reason. Language would break in the attempt to find words for the inexpressible, the message would be blurred and incoherent. The judge might pull himself together, feeling that the turbulent thought-waves of contending counsel form a much safer ground on which to pronounce truth than the fourth-dimensional hurricane with which he had just battled. And the audience might turn with relief to the thought of dinner outside Bedlam.
By some wild flights of imagination we may picture another kind of circle. Let a poet be the medium; Swedenborg, Dante, Blake,