vainglorious and futile storming of the citadel of God. The secret of
the tomb must be preserved, though the masses of Christendom have ceased
to believe in the long and mouldering sleep of the centuries before the
summons to the Judgment. They are no longer scorched by the threat of
eternal fire, nor soothed by the hope of clouds and harps. The love that
is in them would not tolerate the infliction of an eternity of torture
on a fellow-soul, and their conception of the love of God cannot place
Him below the promptings of human mercy. The reason that is in them is
not attracted by the promise of a heaven of rosy inaction and strifeless
rest. The contrast of heaven and hell, so powerful a corrective of human
waywardness in mediaeval times, fails to impress the modern mind. The
windows of experience and knowledge have been opened too widely, the
powers and manifold possibilities of the earth lie open and tempt to the
search for a super-mundane world, not poorer and more complex, but
richer and more lavish in creative force.

The law supports the opposition of the Church and frowns on the practice
of mediumship and clairvoyance. The law denies the possibility of spirit
intercourse and forbids the exercise of supernormal faculties in
exploring the untrodden realms of the future. Prosecutions are
instituted under the old Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts, and psychic
practitioners are fined or sent to prison in the hope of stemming the
tide of inquiry. The law and the spirit were ever at variance. But it is
difficult to understand why those who mourn, and who ask questions,
should be deprived of the comfort which they may find through visits to
professional mediums. The risk of deception and false pretences is
there, it is true, but that risk exists everywhere. There are lawyers,
politicians, and physicians who tell "fortunes" and practise
"witchcraft" of their own brand, decidedly more harmful and disruptive
than the visions of the unlettered clairvoyant.

The magistrate, who sends a clairvoyant to prison because he is
convinced that all claims to psychic gifts and to communion with
discarnate spirits are fraudulent, is not troubled by his ignorance, and
the evidence of psychic research is not acceptable in his court. He
typifies the perpetual official, ever ready to suppress new and
evolutionary thought. After all, psychic science fares no worse than the
physical sciences in the judgment of respectable mediocrity. The
progres