e and are
confirmed by many witnesses. It is only the claims of infallibility
and of monopoly, the bigotry and pedantry of theologians, and the
man-made rituals which take the life out of the God-given thoughts--it
is only this which has defaced the truth.

I cannot end this little book better than by using words more eloquent
than any which I could write, a splendid sample of English style as
well as of English thought. They are from the pen of that considerable
thinker and poet, Mr. Gerald Massey, and were written many years ago.

"Spiritualism has been for me, in common with many others, such a
lifting of the mental horizon and letting-in of the heavens--such a
formation of faith into facts, that I can only compare life without it
to sailing on board ship with hatches battened down and being kept a
prisoner, living by the light of a candle, and then suddenly, on some
splendid starry night, allowed to go on deck for the first time to see
the stupendous mechanism of the heavens all aglow with the glory of
God."

SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS

I. THE NEXT PHASE OF LIFE

I have spoken in the text of the striking manner in which accounts of
life in the next phase, though derived from the most varied and
independent sources, are still in essential agreement--an agreement
which occasionally descends to small details. A variety is introduced
by that fuller vision which can see and describe more than one plane,
but the accounts of that happy land to which the ordinary mortal may
hope to aspire, are very consistent. Since I wrote the statement I
have read three fresh independent descriptions which again confirm the
point. One is the account given by "A King's Counsel," in his recent
book, I Heard a Voice (Kegan Paul), which I recommended to inquirers,
though it has a strong Roman Catholic bias running through it which
shows that our main lines of thought are persistent. A second is the
little book The Light on the Future, giving the very interesting
details of the beyond, gathered by an earnest and reverent circle in
Dublin. The other came in a private letter from Mr. Hubert Wales, and
is, I think, most instructive. Mr. Wales is a cautious and rather
sceptical inquirer who had put away his results with incredulity (he
had received them through his own automatic writing). On reading my
account of the conditions described in the beyond, he hunted up his own
old script which had commended itself so little to him