e admits, that the so-called dead are
still alive; that our friends are often with us, though unseen,
and give direct proof of a future life--proof which so many
crave, but for want of which so many live and die in anxious
doubt. How valuable the certainty to be gained from spiritual
communications! A clergyman, a friend of mine, who witnessed
the phenomena, and who before was in a state of the greatest
depression, caused by the death of his son, said to me, "I am
now full of confidence and cheerfulness. I am a changed man."

It is not unnatural that the answers given to those who ask for
admittance to the closed door of the mysteries of the human soul should
be pitched in the same key as the inquiry. Disappointment is not
uncommon. I have taken part in seances of every kind, with cautious
investigators devoid of all spiritualistic bias, with unsophisticated
believers in a supernatural source of all psychic phenomena, with
scoffers convinced that every medium is an impostor, and that nothing
but a little common sense is needed for the exposure. The results have
been largely dependent on the mentality of the investigators. Failure to
understand this is responsible for much of the disappointment and
contempt with which otherwise intelligent critics have dismissed the
subject. The accumulated thought-power, the collective mind of those who
participate, profoundly influence the medium and the quality of the
communications received. One stubborn soul may wreck the meeting. I
remember an evening at the house of Mr. W. T. Stead. There had been a
series of highly successful demonstrations of "spirit voices,"
distinctly audible and perfectly intelligible. A well-known minister of
the Church visible joined the circle--a man clothed in all the outward
signs of spirituality, uniting clerical decorum with an emotional
fervour in preaching which had made him a popular favourite. Though
feeling has now and then led him into unconventional paths of
theological thought, fate has surely marked him for the adornment of a
bishopric. He came to study the alleged powers of the medium. He doubted
everything and everybody. The easy faith and unquestioning acceptance of
miraculous events of which he was not ashamed whilst in the pulpit had
now been exchanged for vigilant suspicion and impatient analysis. He
plied the medium with questions, bludgeoned her with requests for
evidence that she was not deluded or delu