“Is memory with you as acute as answers to some of these questions seem to indicate?” one of us inquired.
“Not of material things, generally. We don’t pay much attention to them, unless they interfere with purpose. Just now they are interfering a good deal—or were, before the war, which is itself a material manifestation of purpose.” We said that we should have thought this interference in full force still, and she continued: “The real interference, from our point of view, came before the war, when the world outside of Germany was too much occupied in pursuit of material things to see what was happening. They failed even to see Germany’s intention. Much less did they discover their own danger, of which Germany’s purpose, materially, was the least. The war woke them up by degrees, fortunately, or there would be no use telling them this.”
A question concerning the possibility of communicating with a person recently departed from this plane, was met with the statement that he had “free communion” still to learn. This expression had been used several times by others, and now I asked: “Mary, what is free communion?”
“You don’t think we vocalize our talk, do you?”
Mansfield suggested that when a man found himself suddenly without his material veil, he must be at a loss how to proceed, and asked whether that was what she meant.
“Not entirely. The veil isn’t missed particularly, but there is a ... a....”
“Difference of medium?” he asked. “Like a water-color artist who can’t paint in oil?”
“That’s it.”
“Referring to your assertion in March that truth is absolute,” he said, “is not truth itself relative on this plane? Truth as a statement of eternal law is absolute, but when applied to concrete facts and ideas, it changes from time to time? That is, a concrete statement which expressed the relations of certain mundane conditions to the eternal verities in B.C. 1000, would not necessarily be a correct statement of the relations of corresponding conditions to those verities in the year 1900 A.D.”