V IS IT THE SECOND DAWN?

APPENDICES

A. DR. GELEY'S EXPERIMENTS
B. A PARTICULAR INSTANCE
C. SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY
D. THE CLAIRVOYANCE OF MRS. B.

THE VITAL MESSAGE

CHAPTER I

THE TWO NEEDFUL READJUSTMENTS

It has been our fate, among all the innumerable generations of mankind,
to face the most frightful calamity that has ever befallen the world.
There is a basic fact which cannot be denied, and should not be
overlooked. For a most important deduction must immediately follow
from it. That deduction is that we, who have borne the pains, shall
also learn the lesson which they were intended to convey. If we do not
learn it and proclaim it, then when can it ever be learned and
proclaimed, since there can never again be such a spiritual ploughing
and harrowing and preparation for the seed? If our souls, wearied and
tortured during these dreadful five years of self-sacrifice and
suspense, can show no radical changes, then what souls will ever
respond to a fresh influx of heavenly inspiration? In that case the
state of the human race would indeed be hopeless, and never in all the
coming centuries would there be any prospect of improvement.

Why was this tremendous experience forced upon mankind? Surely it is a
superficial thinker who imagines that the great Designer of all things
has set the whole planet in a ferment, and strained every nation to
exhaustion, in order that this or that frontier be moved, or some fresh
combination be formed in the kaleidoscope of nations. No, the causes
of the convulsion, and its objects, are more profound than that. They
are essentially religious, not political. They lie far deeper than the
national squabbles of the day. A thousand years hence those national
results may matter little, but the religious result will rule the
world. That religious result is the reform of the decadent
Christianity of to-day, its simplification, its purification, and its
reinforcement by the facts of spirit communion and the clear knowledge
of what lies beyond the exit-door of death. The shock of the war was
meant to rouse us to mental and moral earnestness, to give us the
courage to tear away venerable shams, and to force the human race to
realise and use the vast new revelation which has been so clearly
stated and so abundantly proved, for all who will examine the
statements and proofs with an open mind.

Consider the awful condition of the world before this