he mixture of truth and
falsehood, of genuine psychic powers and counterfeit practices. There
are impostors and parasites who by dint of glib tongues and nimble wit
deceive the foolish and the credulous. Browning's Sludge is not entirely
extinct. Honest workers who turn their gifts to professional uses and
who depend on the patronage of the public are subject to peculiar
temptations. They are visited by the worldly and the covetous, they are
exploited by sensation-mongers and fraud-hunters, they are subjected to
conditions entirely inimical to spiritual poise and lucidity. Some
resort to fraud. The report that the medium failed to satisfy the client
is apt to interfere with business, and failure is, therefore, shunned.
But the law does not trouble to distinguish between the honest and the
dishonest person who claims psychic gifts. From the legal point of view
it is all pretence. It is imperatively necessary that genuine psychic
gifts should be protected from the depredations of frivolity as well as
from the interference of an obsolete law. We have some idea of
protecting great and uncommon gifts in music, mathematics, and poetry,
but we leave psychic gifts without help or training. An institute for
the study of Psychic Science in all its branches, with facilities for
training and assisting individual gifts, would remove some of the worst
features of the present system. A genuine psychic should be the holder
of some form of certificate or licence entitling him to use his gifts
for the benefit of others.

Of course, the subject bristles with difficulties, but I do not see that
they are more insuperable than those which presented themselves when
first the idea of registering and licensing the medical and legal
professions presented itself. And those who are indignant at the thought
of the clairvoyant charging a fee may profitably reflect on the general
assumption that the labourer is worthy of his hire. The deans and
bishops who discourse so eloquently on the sins of the necromancers are
not, I believe, renouncing the material benefits and emoluments of
their priestly calling.

I do not look to visits to professional mediums for initiation into the
higher mysteries of the human spirit. They may show the casket--precious
as an indication of the contents, but of little value to those who are
bent on finding the jewel within. And I agree that no advanced soul is
"controlled" by a discarnate spirit, but rises through aspirati