leaving the body, and that in consequence the
world is infested by many low and mischievous types, one can understand
that these untoward incidents are rather a confirmation of Spiritualism
than an argument against it. Personally I have received and have been
deceived by several such messages. At the same time I can say that
after an experience of thirty years of such communications I have never
known a blasphemous, an obscene or an unkind sentence come through. I
admit, however, that I have heard of such cases. Like attracts like,
and one should know one's human company before one joins in such
intimate and reverent rites. In clairvoyance the same sudden
inexplicable deceptions appear. I have closely followed the work of
one female medium, a professional, whose results are so extraordinarily
good that in a favourable case she will give the full names of the
deceased as well as the most definite and convincing test messages.
Yet among this splendid series of results I have notes of several in
which she was a complete failure and absolutely wrong upon essentials.
How can this be explained? We can only answer that conditions were
obviously not propitious, but why or how are among the many problems of
the future. It is a profound and most complicated subject, however
easily it may be settled by the "ridiculous nonsense" school of
critics. I look at the row of books upon the left of my desk as I
write--ninety-six solid volumes, many of them annotated and well
thumbed, and yet I know that I am like a child wading ankle deep in the
margin of an illimitable ocean. But this, at least, I have very
clearly realised, that the ocean is there and that the margin is part
of it, and that down that shelving shore the human race is destined to
move slowly to deeper waters. In the next chapter, I will endeavour to
show what is the purpose of the Creator in this strange revelation of
new intelligent forces impinging upon our planet. It is this view of
the question which must justify the claim that this movement, so long
the subject of sneers and ridicule, is absolutely the most important
development in the whole history of the human race, so important that,
if we could conceive one single man discovering and publishing it, he
would rank before Christopher Columbus as a discoverer of new worlds,
before Paul as a teacher of new religious truths, and before Isaac
Newton as a student of the laws of the Universe.

Before opening up