第20章 PROBLEMS AND LIMITATIONS(5)

"Spiritualism has been for me, in common with many others, such a lifting of the mental horizon and letting-in of the heavens -- such a formation of faith into facts, that I can only compare life without it to sailing on board ship with hatches battened down and being kept a prisoner, living by the light of a candle, and then suddenly, on some splendid starry night, allowed to go on deck for the first time to see the stupendous mechanism of the heavens all aglow with the glory of God."

SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTS

THE NEXT PHASE OF LIFEI have spoken in the text of the striking manner in which accounts of life in the next phase, though derived from the most varied and independent sources, are still in essential agreement -- an agreement which occasionally descends to small details.A variety is introduced by that fuller vision which can see and describe more than one plane, but the accounts of that happy land to which the ordinary mortal may hope to aspire, are very consistent.Since I wrote the statement I have read three fresh independent descriptions which again confirm the point.One is the account given by "A King's Counsel," in his recent book, I Heard a Voice (Kegan Paul), which I recommended to inquirers, though it has a strong Roman Catholic bias running through it which shows that our main lines of thought are persistent.A second is the little book Page 108The Light on the Future , giving the very interesting details of the beyond, gathered by an earnest and reverent circle in Dublin.The other came in a private letter from Mr.Hubert Wales, and is, I think, most instructive.Mr.Wales is a cautious and rather sceptical inquirer who had put away his results with incredulity (he had received them through his own automatic writing).On reading my account of the conditions described in the beyond, he hunted up his own old script which had commended itself so little to him when he first produced it.He says: "After reading your article, I was struck, almost startled, by the circumstance that the statements which had purported to be made to me regarding conditions after death coincided -- I think almost to the smallest detail -- with those you set out as the result of your collation of material obtained from a great number of sources.

I cannot think there was anything in my antecedent reading to account for this coincidence.I had certainly read nothing you had published on the subject.I had purposely avoided RaymondPage 109and books like it, in order not to vitiate my own results, and the Proceedings of the S.P.R.which I had read at that time, do not touch, as you know, upon after-death conditions.At any rate I obtained, at various times, statements (as my contemporary notes show) to the effect that, in this persisting state of existence, they have bodies which, though imperceptible by our senses, are as solid to them as ours to us, that these bodies are based on the general characteristies of our present bodies but beautified;that they have no age, no pain, no rich and poor; that they wear clothes and take nourishment; that they do not sleep (though they spoke of passing occasionally into a semiconscious state which they called `lying asleep'