derful if a man could get through without an occasional scandal. At
the same time the whole system of paying by results, which is
practically the present system, since if a medium never gets results he
would soon get no payments, is a vicious one. It is only when the
professional medium can be guaranteed an annuity which will be
independent of results, that we can eliminate the strong temptation, to
substitute pretended phenomena when the real ones are wanting.

I have now traced my own evolution of thought up to the time of the
War. I can claim, I hope, that it was deliberate and showed no traces
of that credulity with which our opponents charge us. It was too
deliberate, for I was culpably slow in throwing any small influence I
may possess into the scale of truth. I might have drifted on for my
whole life as a psychical Researcher, showing a sympathetic, but more
or less dilettante attitude towards the whole subject, as if we were
arguing about some impersonal thing such as the existence of Atlantis
or the Baconian controversy. But the War came, and when the War came
it brought earnestness into all our souls and made us look more closely
at our own beliefs and reassess their values. In the presence of an
agonized world, hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our
race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one
the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved
ones had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which
I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the
rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a
breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable
message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race
at the time of its deepest affliction. The objective side of it ceased
to interest for having made up one's mind that it was true there was an
end of the matter. The religious side of it was clearly of infinitely
greater importance. The telephone bell is in itself a very childish
affair, but it may be the signal for a very vital message. It seemed
that all these phenomena, large and small, had been the telephone bells
which, senseless in themselves, had signalled to the human race:
"Rouse yourselves! Stand by! Be at attention! Here are signs for
you. They will lead up to the message which God wishes to send." It
was the message not the signs which really counted