. Paul seems to have been wafted in one short strange experience of
his lifetime, is a place which corresponds with the Astral plane of the
mystics and with the "outer darkness" of the Bible. Here linger those
earth-bound spirits whose worldly interests have clogged them and
weighed them down, until every spiritual impulse had vanished; the man
whose life has been centred on money, on worldly ambition, or on
sensual indulgence. The one-idea'd man will surely be there, if his
one idea was not a spiritual one. Nor is it necessary that he should
be an evil man, if dear old brother John of Glastonbury, who loved the
great Abbey so that he could never detach himself from it, is to be
classed among earth-bound spirits. In the most material and pronounced
classes of these are the ghosts who impinge very closely upon matter
and have been seen so often by those who have no strong psychic sense.
It is probable, from what we know of the material laws which govern
such matters, that a ghost could never manifest itself if it were
alone, that the substance for the manifestation is drawn from the
spectator, and that the coldness, raising of hair, and other symptoms
of which he complains are caused largely by the sudden drain upon his
own vitality. This, however, is to wander into speculation, and far
from that correlation of psychic knowledge with religion, which has
been the aim of these chapters.

By one of those strange coincidences, which seem to me sometimes to be
more than coincidences, I had reached this point in my explanation of
the difficult question of the intermediate state, and was myself
desiring further enlightenment, when an old book reached me through the
post, sent by someone whom I have never met, and in it is the following
passage, written by an automatic writer, and in existence since 1880.
It makes the matter plain, endorsing what has been said and adding new
points.

"Some cannot advance further than the borderland--such as never thought
of spirit life and have lived entirely for the earth, its cares and
pleasures--even clever men and women, who have lived simply
intellectual lives without spirituality. There are many who have
misused their opportunities, and are now longing for the time misspent
and wishing to recall the earth-life. They will learn that on this
side the time can be redeemed, though at much cost. The borderland has
many among the restless money-getters of earth, who still haunt the
pla