第7章 THE SEARCH(6)

Mediumship in its lowest forms is a purely physical gift with no relation to morality and in many cases it is intermittent and cannot be controlled at will.Eusapia was at least twice convicted of very clumsy and foolish fraud, whereas she several times sustained long examinations under every possible test condition at the hands of scientific committees which contained some of the best names of Page 37France, Italy, and England.However, I personally prefer to cut my experience with a discredited medium out of my record, and I think that all physical phenomena produced in the dark must necessarily lose much of their value, unless they are accompanied by evidential messages as well.It is the custom of our critics to assume that if you cut out the mediums who got into trouble you would have to cut out nearly all your evidence.That is not so at all.

Up to the time of this incident I had never sat with a professional medium at all, and yet I had certainly accumulated some evidence.The greatest medium of all, Mr.D.D.Home, showed his phenomena in broad daylight, and was ready to submit to every test and no charge of trickery was ever substantiated against him.So it was with many others.It is only fair to state in addition that when a public medium is a fair mark for notoriety hunters, for amateur detectives and for sensational reporters, and when he is dealing with obscure elusive phenomena and has to defend himself before juries and judges who, as a rule, know nothing about the conditions Page 38which influence the phenomena, it would be wonderful if a man could get through without an occasional scandal.At the same time the whole system of paying by results, which is practically the present system, since if a medium never gets results he would soon get no payments, is a vicious one.It is only when the professional medium can be guaranteed an annuity which will be independent of results, that we can eliminate the strong temptation, to substitute pretended phenomena when the real ones are wanting.

I have now traced my own evolution of thought up to the time of the War.I can claim, I hope, that it was deliberate and showed no traces of that credulity with which our opponents charge us.It was too deliberate, for I was culpably slow in throwing any small influence I may possess into the scale of truth.I might have drifted on for my whole life as a psychical Researcher, showing a sympathetic, but more or less dilettante attitude towards the whole subject, as if we were arguing about some impersonal thing such as the existence of Atlantis or the Baconian controversy.But the War Page 39came, and when the War came it brought earnestness into all our souls and made us look more closely at our own beliefs and reassess their values.

In the presence of an agonized world, hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved ones had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.The objective side of it ceased to interest for having made up one's mind that it was true there was an end of the matter.

The religious side of it was clearly of infinitely greater importance.

The telephone bell is in itself a very childish affair, but it may be the signal for a very vital message.It seemed that all these phenomena, large and small, had been the telephone Page 40bells which, senseless in themselves, had signalled to the human race:

"Rouse yourselves! Stand by! Be at attention! Here are signs for you.They will lead up to the message which God wishes to send." It was the message not the signs which really counted.A new revelation seemed to be in the course of delivery to the human race, though how far it was still in what may be called the John-the-Baptist stage, and how far some greater fulness and clearness might be expected hereafter, was more than any man can say.

My point is, that the physical phenomena which have been proved up to the hilt for all who care to examine the evidence, are really of no account, and that their real value consists in the fact that they support and give objective reality to an immense body of knowledge which must deeply modify our previous religious views, and must, when properly understood and digested, make religion a very real thing, no longer a matter of faith, but a matter of actual experience and fact.It is to this side of the question that I will now turn, but I must add to my previous remarks about personal experience Page 41that, since the War, I have had some very exceptional opportunities of confirming all the views which I had already formed as to the truth of the general facts upon which my views are founded.

These opportunities came through the fact that a lady who lived with us, a Miss L.S., developed the power of automatic writing.