nes about it.' Then I
knew it was Jimmy, for Jimmy always used to say 'don't make no bones
about it.' And now I feel he is alive somewhere, and I shall go again to
the medium and find out more."

I thought of this when the clergyman complained of the prevalence of
superstition and visits to mediums. I suggested that he should
investigate the subject of spiritualism and the reasons for its appeal
to sorrow-stricken relatives and friends of soldiers. The suggestion was
indignantly rejected. Religion was to him a theory based on revelation
vouchsafed thousands of years ago; it was now a system of stereotyped
belief and conduct, strangely removed from the perplexities and anguish
of the individual soul. His academic mind recoiled from the grotesque
and trivial messages associated with seances and the performances of
professional psychics.

We are wont to contemplate immortality in much the same manner as we
contemplate the moon. It is something remote and incapable of active
interference in our daily life and tasks. It sheds a pale and pleasant
light on our earthly pilgrimage, and we in our turn render homage to
the mellow beauty which it imparts to our poetic imagination. Only
children cry for the moon. We know it is unattainable.

The rejection of the crude theories of spiritualism is not altogether
the result of wilful blindness. In our innermost minds, in the region
beyond the grasp of the brain and its ready generalizations, we hunger
for inexpressible reality, for life beyond the stars. We have eaten of
the tree of sense-knowledge: we have seen, heard, felt, tasted. We want
a reality above the traffic and deception of the senses. Vaguely, but
insistently we feel the call to the life of the spirit, and when its
definition eludes us, we prefer silence and faith. It is then that the
familiar prattle of the seance-room offends us. We sought freedom,
light, absolution from the trammels of personality, and we are told that
the dead appear in bodies and clothes, that they toil and fret, that
they inhabit houses and cities. Our plains Elysian suffer an invasion of
lawyers and physicians, of merchants and moneylenders. The weariness of
repetition pursues us.

And yet we may be more completely the victims of illusion than our
vendor of spiritualistic revelation. We who cherish the belief in
immortality forget that death can be naught but the shedding of a form.
The substance is unchanged. The fabric of the mind is woven day