e believed, an objective explanation, which none but
the spiritualistic thesis offered. He had far more evidence, he
considered sincerely enough, for his spiritualism than most Christians
for their Christianity.

He had no very definite theory as to the spiritual world beyond
thinking that it was rather like this world. For him it was peopled
with individualities of various characters and temperaments, of
various grades and achievements; and of these a certain number had the
power of communicating under great difficulties with persons on this
side who were capable of receiving such communications. That there
were dangers connected with this process, he was well aware; he had
seen often enough the moral sense vanish and the mental powers decay.
But these were to him no more than the honorable wounds to which all
who struggle are liable. The point for him was that here lay the one
certain means of getting into touch with reality. Certainly that
reality was sometimes of a disconcerting nature, and seldom of an
illuminating one; he hated, as much as anyone, the tambourine
business, except so far as it was essential; and he deplored the fact
that, as he believed, it was often the most degraded and the least
satisfactory of the inhabitants of the other world that most easily
got into touch with the inhabitants of this. Yet, for him, the main
tenets of spiritualism were as the bones of the universe; it was the
only religion which seemed to him in the least worthy of serious
attention.

He had not practiced as a medium for longer than ten or a dozen years.
He had discovered, by chance as he thought, that he possessed
mediumistic powers in an unusual degree, and had begun then to take up
the life as a profession. He had suffered, so far as he was aware, no
ill effects from this life, though he had seen others suffer; and, as
his fame grew, his income grew with it.

It is necessary, then, to understand that he was not a conscious
charlatan; he loathed mechanical tricks such as he occasionally came
across; he was perfectly and serenely convinced that the powers which
he possessed were genuine, and that the personages he seemed to come
across in his mediumistic efforts were what they professed to be; that
they were not hallucinatory, that they were not the products of fraud,
that they were not necessarily evil. He regarded this religion as he
regarded science; both were progressive, both liable to error, both
capable of abuse.