e main
reasons why we do not face reality as we should. I regard _Facing Reality_
as an important book and I am not alone in so regarding it. What do we
mean by reality? The answer is explicit in a sentence in Mr.
Wingfield-Stratford's introduction, where he says:

"But if we are to get right with reality or, in the time-honoured
evangelical phrase, with God, it must be by a ruthless determination to
get the truth in religion, even if we have to break down Church walls to
attain it."

Then the author proceeds to assess the social and ethical conditions which
threaten the world with spiritual bankruptcy. As he says:

"Whether Germany can be fleeced of a yearly contribution, of doubtful
advantage to the receiver, for forty years or sixty, what particular
economic laws decree that Poles should be governed by Germans or
vice-versa, whose honour or profit demands the possession of the town of
Fiume or the district of Tetschen or the Island of Yap, why all the horses
and men of the Entente are necessary to compel the Port of Dantzig to
become a free city, what particular delicacy of national honour requires
that the impartial distribution of colonies should be interpreted as
meaning the appropriation of the whole of them by the victors--all these
things are held by universal consent to be more urgent and interesting
than the desperate necessity that confronts us all."

And yet, for some, reality is not immanent in the affairs of this world
but only in those of the next. Among the men who, with Sir Oliver Lodge,
have gone most deeply and earnestly into the whole subject we call
"spiritualism," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is now the most widely known as he
has always been the most persuasive. The overflowing crowds which came out
to hear him lecture on psychic evidences during his recent tour of America
testify to the unquenchable hope of mankind in a life beyond ours. Sir
Arthur has written three books on this subject closest to his heart. _The
New Revelation_ and _The Vital Message_ are both short books presenting
the general case for spiritualists; _The Wanderings of a Spiritualist_,
the result of a lecture tour in India and Australia, commingles incidents
of travel with discussions of psychic phenomena. I believe Sir Arthur has
in preparation a more extensive work, probably to be published under the
title _Spiritualism and Rationalism_.

In recent years there has been something like a consensus honouring
Havelock Ellis as t