in opposition to the religion of authority. Nothing but this spirit of freedom and vital co-operation of man in God and God in man will ever solve the unsolved problems of crime, vice, poverty, prostitution, sleep and death.

We have all a common task. What finally rules? The answer which a man gives to this challenge will depend upon the extent of his confidence in the vitality of goodness, upon the measure in which he himself is good or evil. As he shapes his response he further shapes himself.

Spiritualism can never be repressed or suppressed, for love was its discoverer, and love will keep it alive.

All great discoveries arise through the passionate concentration of the whole life upon one particular flame that has kindled the imagination. The fervent love of the one left behind seeks to bridge the gulf, believing that beyond there is a reciprocal watching, waiting, longing to find some mode of communicating, to discover some rent in the thinning veil.

A friend who has just lost wife and mother in the space of a fortnight told me that his wife's death was kept most carefully from his mother. Yet, just as she was passing over the old lady cried out," Ah! Dora, you have come to fetch me." Does that not look as if the wife on the other side had been watching and waiting?

too

Such incidents are very, very common; common and well authenticated to be any longer relegated to superstitious nonsense."

66

Who shall now deny that the quick and the dead can communicate if they choose? The church

may condemn, and brand the Spiritualist with the heretic, but all one can say-in pity-is-so much the worse for the Church. No one who hears will

care. The time is passed for that.

Who shall set a limit to that holiest passion betwixt souls-love?

"For love is of God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God."

CHAPTER III

SPIRITUALISM. TO WHAT END?

"Those who know the Voice of the Living God in the Living Son of present Revelation can never more become the followers of any Man."

To what end is all this vast wave of Spiritualism tending ?

There is one stupendous result which is rapidly approaching, which may be said to be practically in sight.

Spiritualism is now the only means by which men and women, who have not the power to develop the Manifest through the Unmanifest, and who are anxious to prove survival after death, can do so to their own personal satisfaction.

It cannot be denied that religious teaching has absolutely failed to accomplish this prodigious result. Éternal life cannot be expressed in any teaching concerning it. If one could gain eternity through any one man then that man would be to us as God.

"And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent."

How are we to gain this knowledge? How can we arrive at the realisation of the Unmanifestthe Very God?

It can be done, but not through another, nor through any teaching. It must be gained through personal experience, and knowledge in the self. Not in one vision, nor in scattered experiences can one know it, but through much patient, continuous seeking to know, and then comes another hard task -to form the perfect fellowship of the heavenly and earthly life.

At our present stage of evolution this cannot be the way for all. The way of interior unfoldment is too subtle for the mass of men. Why seek to debar them from drawing inspiration from dear comrades left behind in Flanders, in Artois, and in Picardy?

We can see quite clearly that the failure to fill the churches arises from the fact that the majority learn nothing in them, and find no satisfaction in public worship.

One cannot draw any, satisfaction from the few clergy who attract vast congregations. They accomplish this feat easily by their unique personalities.

Men like Studdert Kennedy, Vale Owen, and Fielding Ould have no trouble in filling churches, and in listening to them one understands why. Their strong moral courage, and their absolute fearlessness is immensely attractive to the vast majority who entirely lack those qualifications. There is envy mixed with admiration in the minds of their congregation, the secret longing to be the true self, and free from the chains of convention and the herd instinct. The crowd perceives that these men are filled with a luminous spirituality which has severed their bonds and set them free

from that ossification of the letter which kills the spirit of Christ.

I heard Kennedy speak on the living, imminent Christ and the brotherhood of man, without which the Fatherhood of God is pure nonsense. He pointed out in his own vigorous fashion that, until we can feel the need of brotherhood with all, it is obviously nonsense to speak of the Almighty as Our Father. Here was teaching to which the people could respond. One could see on every rapt face the silent entreaty, "Oh! please don't stop.❞

Alas! the great majority of the clergy have no sense of progressive Christianity, and so they are left to a lingering death.

It is here that Spiritualism steps in and calls to the disheartened to try the great experiment. It can but fail to convince. We soon learn to discount apparent untruthfulness, not, by the way, confined to spirit communications, but abounding in the law courts, Parliament, anti-spiritualistic circles and social life in general.

It may succeed in establishing a connection between the quick and the dead which will instantly banish doubt, and afford firm conviction in the goodness of God and the immortality of the soul.

It is true that Spiritualism is in a state of crude infancy. We have had only the merest glimpses of that which is possible, but to-day there is actually nothing else by which survival after death can be proved to mankind. A moral government of the world is unintelligible without a future life, and only this imperfectly developed movement called