en if the spirits did not assert it. George Pelham says to his
friend, James Howard, that he will have an occupation soon.[66] The
first time that I read this statement, in a review which only reproduced
a short fragment and in no way gave the real effect of these sittings, I
remember that the impression produced on me was very disagreeable. How
unsophisticated, I thought, must these so-called investigators be not to
see that such a phrase as that cannot come from a spirit; it bears too
clearly the stamp of earth!

Since then reflection has made me admit that spirits might very well
also have their occupations; the next world, if it exists, must be a
sphere of fresh activity. Work is the universal law. When George Pelham
was asked in what consisted the occupations of spirits, he replied that
they were like the noblest occupations of men, and consisted in helping
others to advance. This reply will doubtless not satisfy those who are
actuated only by an idle curiosity, but it contains a profound
philosophic truth. If our varied occupations upon earth are regarded
from a somewhat superior point of view, it will be seen that their
ultimate end is nothing else than the perfection of mankind. Those of us
who have evolved furthest realise this, and the rest do not; the case
must be the same in the next world, though George Pelham does not say
so. All our efforts and exertions are regarded with indifference by
nature who has no use for them, but the necessities of life make men
feel that they are brothers, and oblige them to polish one another, like
the stones of the beach rolled to and fro by the waves and rounded and
polished by rubbing one against another. Willingly or not, consciously
or unconsciously, we force one another to advance and to improve in all
respects. The world has been, I think with justice, compared to a
crucible in which souls are purified by pain and work and prepared for
higher ends. I should not like to go as far as Schopenhauer and say that
it is a mere penal settlement.

A celebrated English medium, William Stainton Moses, in a book well
known to spiritualist readers, _Spirit Teachings_, developed, or rather
allowed his spirit-guides to develop, the theory that souls leave this
earth taking with them all their desires and all their evil passions.
Having no body in the next world to enable them to gratify these desires
they are subjected to a veritable punishment of Tantalus. Thereupon they
endeavour t