"My faith is THAT." Neither can prove it, so they wrangle for
ever, either mentally or in the old days physically. If one is
stronger than the other, he is inclined to persecute him just to twist
him round to the true faith. Because Philip the Second's faith was
strong and clear he, quite logically, killed a hundred thousand
Lowlanders in the hope that their fellow countrymen would be turned to
the all-important truth. Now, if it were recognised that it is by no
means virtuous to claim what you could not prove, we should then be
driven to observe facts, to reason from them, and perhaps reach common
agreement. That is why this psychical movement appears so valuable.
Its feet are on something more solid than texts or traditions or
intuitions. It is religion from the double point of view of both
worlds up to date, instead of the ancient traditions of one world.

We cannot look upon this coming world as a tidy Dutch garden of a place
which is so exact that it can easily be described. It is probable that
those messengers who come back to us are all, more or less, in one
state of development and represent the same wave of life as it recedes
from our shores. Communications usually come from those who have not
long passed over, and tend to grow fainter, as one would expect. It is
instructive in this respect to notice that Christ's reappearances to
his disciples or to Paul, are said to have been within a very few years
of his death, and that there is no claim among the early Christians to
have seen him later. The cases of spirits who give good proof of
authenticity and yet have passed some time are not common. There is,
in Mr. Dawson Roger's life, a very good case of a spirit who called
himself Manton, and claimed to have been born at Lawrence Lydiard and
buried at Stoke Newington in 1677. It was clearly shown afterwards that
there was such a man, and that he was Oliver Cromwell's chaplain. So
far as my own reading goes, this is the oldest spirit who is on record
as returning, and generally they are quite recent. Hence, one gets all
one's views from the one generation, as it were, and we cannot take
them as final, but only as partial. How spirits may see things in a
different light as they progress in the other world is shown by Miss
Julia Ames, who was deeply impressed at first by the necessity of
forming a bureau of communication, but admitted, after fifteen years,
that not one spirit in a million among the main b