ding. He turned himself into
cross-examining counsel, proud of his discrimination and his immunity
against the insidious appeal of the supernatural. He succeeded. The
medium was confounded, she lost her power; the phenomena did not occur.
The atmosphere was chilled. Some of us felt we would rather have been
visited by the village blacksmith than by this priestly exponent of
sweet-faced materialism.

I do not deny that I have often been struck with the intellectual
poverty of messages from the spirit world. They are often silly, and not
seldom untruthful. The silliness and the untruthfulness are faithful
reflections of common human failings, and only show that heavenly wisdom
is as unattainable through the average spiritualistic channels as it is
in the Houses of Parliament or the courts of law.

I can imagine a radiant and purely spiritual being attempting to convey
a true description of the state of spiritual bliss to a circle of men
and women representative of cultured thought, and practical efficiency
in the affairs of the world. Let the circle include a few university
professors, some successful men of business, a couple of judges, a
sprinkling of journalists, an archdeacon or two, and some authors of
repute. Let them all be actuated by a strong desire to obtain reliable
information and to give a fair and unprejudiced hearing to the visitor.

The visitor is necessarily hampered by the necessity for a medium. It
may be that the senior judge is gifted with psychic powers and that the
method of communication chosen is that of trance.

The learned brain-cells would transmit the message up to a certain
point, but when an effort was made to depict unfathomed depths and
heights of transcendental experience, the judicial mind would rebel.
The sense of logic would be strained. The conception of the possible
would be violated. A fearful consciousness of being guilty of uttering
lies would persist, in spite of efforts to subdue reason. Language
would break in the attempt to find words for the inexpressible, the
message would be blurred and incoherent. The judge might pull himself
together, feeling that the turbulent thought-waves of contending
counsel form a much safer ground on which to pronounce truth than the
fourth-dimensional hurricane with which he had just battled. And the
audience might turn with relief to the thought of dinner outside Bedlam.

By some wild flights of imagination we may picture another kind of
cir