"I hear a wind
Of memory murmuring the past."
I do not myself regard this impersonal memory as a reasonable hypothesis, I think that the simpler view is likely to be the truer one, so I attach importance to trivial reminiscences and characteristic personal touches; but I do agree that abstention from recording and publishing, however apologetically, those other efforts has had the effect of making ill-informed people—i.e. people with very little personal experience—jump to the conclusion that all communications are of a trivial and contemptible nature.
CHAPTER XII
ON THE CONTENTION THAT ALL PSYCHIC COMMUNICATIONS
ARE OF A TRIVIAL NATURE
AND DEAL WITH INSIGNIFICANT TOPICS
THAT such a contention as that mentioned at the end of the preceding chapter is false is well known to people of experience; but so long as the demand for verification and proof of identity persists—and it will be long indeed before they can be dispensed with—so long are trifling reminiscences the best way to achieve the desired end. The end in this case amply explains and justifies the means. Hence it is that novices and critics are naturally and properly regaled with references to readily remembered and verifiable facts; and since these facts, to be useful, must not be of the nature of public news, nor anything which can be gleaned from biographical or historical records, they usually relate to trifling family affairs or other humorous details such as seem likely to stay in the memory. It can freely be admitted that such facts are only redeemed from triviality by the affectionate recollections interlinked with them, and by the motive which has caused them to be reproduced. For their special purpose they may be admirable; and there is no sort of triviality about the thing to be proven by them. The idea that a departed friend ought to be occupied wholly and entirely with grave matters, and ought not to remember jokes and fun, is a gratuitous claim which has to be abandoned. Humour does not cease with earth-life. Why should it?
It should be evident that communications concerning deeper matters are not similarly serviceable as proof of identity, though they may have a value and interest of their own; but it is an interest which could not be legitimately aroused until the first step—the recognition of veridical intercourse—had been taken; for, as a rule, they are essentially unverifiable. Of such communications a multitude could be quoted; and almost at random I select a few specimens from the automatic writings of the gentleman and schoolmaster known to a former generation as M.A.Oxon.[39] Take this one, which happens to be printed in a current issue of Light (22 April 1916), with the statement that it occurs in one of M.A.Oxon.'s subliminally written and private notebooks, under date 12 July 1873—many others will be found in the selections which he himself extracted from his own script and published in a book called Spirit Teachings:—
"You do not sufficiently grasp the scanty hold that religion has upon the mass of mankind, nor the adaptability of what we preach to the wants and cravings of men. Or perhaps it is necessary that you be reminded of what you cannot see clearly in your present state and among your present associations. You cannot see, as we see, the carelessness that has crept over men as to the future. Those who have thought over their future have come to know that they can find out nothing about it, except, indeed, that what man pretends to tell is foolish, contradictory, and unsatisfying. His reasoning faculties convince him that the Revelation of God contains very plain marks of human origin; that it will not stand the test of sifting such as is applied to works professedly human; and that the priestly fiction that reason is no measure of revelation, and that it must be left on the threshold of inquiry and give place to faith, is a cunningly planned means of preventing man from discovering the errors and contradictions which throng the pages of the Bible. Those who reason discover this soon; those who do not, betake themselves to the refuge of Faith, and become blind devotees, fanatical, irrational, and bigoted; conformed to a groove in which they have been educated and from which they have not broken loose simply because they have not dared to think. It would be hard for man to devise a means [more capable] of cramping the mind and dwarfing the spirit's growth than this persuading of a man that he must not think about religion. It is one which paralyses all freedom of thought and renders it almost impossible for the soul to rise. The spirit is condemned to a hereditary religion whether suited or not to its wants. That which may have suited a far-off ancestor may be quite unsuited to a struggling soul that lives in other times from those in which such ideas had vitality. The spirit's life is so made a question of birth and of locality. It is a question over which he can exercise no control, whether he is Christian, Mohammedan, or, as ye say, heathen: whether his God be the Great Spirit of the Red Indian, or the fetish of the savage; whether his prophet be Christ or Mahomet or Confucius; in short, whether his notion of religion be that of East, West, North, or South; for in all these quarters men have evolved for themselves a theology which they teach their children to believe.
"The days are coming when this geographical sectarianism will give place before the enlightenment caused by the spread of our revelation, for which men are far riper than you think. The time draws nigh apace when the sublime truths of Spiritualism, rational and noble as they are when viewed by man's standard, shall wipe away from the face of God's earth the sectarian jealousy and theological bitterness, the anger and ill-will, the folly and stupidity, which have disgraced the name of religion and the worship of God; and man shall see in a clearer light the Supreme Creator and the spirit's eternal destiny.
"We tell you, friend, that the end draws nigh; the night of ignorance is passing fast; the shackles which priestcraft has strung round the struggling souls shall be knocked off, and in place of fanatical folly and ignorant speculation and superstitious belief, ye shall have a reasonable religion and a knowledge of the reality of the spirit-world and of the ministry of angels with you. Ye shall know that the dead are alive indeed, living as they lived on earth, but more truly, ministering to you with undiminished love, animated in their perpetual intercourse with the same affection which they had whilst yet incarned."
Any one of these serious messages can be criticised and commented upon with hostility and suspicion; they are not suited to establish the first premise of the argument for continuance of personality; and if they were put forward as part of the proof of survival, then perhaps the hostility would be legitimate. It ought to be clear that they are not to be taken as oracular utterances, or as anything vastly superior to the capabilities of the medium through whom they come,—though in fact they often are superior to any known power of a given medium, and are frequently characteristic of the departed personality, as we knew him, who is purporting to be the Communicator: though this remark is not applicable to the particular class of impersonal messages here selected for quotation. Yet in all cases they must surely be more or less sophisticated by the channel, and by the more or less strained method of communication, and must share some of its limitations and imperfections.