ormed, was not the case with
them--that all the requirements of life were somehow mysteriously
'provided.' Neither did I get any reference to a definite 'temporary
penal state,' but I gathered that people begin there at the point of
intellectual and moral development where they leave off here; and since
their state of happiness was based mainly upon sympathy, those who came
over in a low moral condition, failed at first for various lengths of
time to have the capacity to appreciate and enjoy it."

AUTOMATIC WRITING

This form of mediumship gives the very highest results, and yet in its
very nature is liable to self-deception. Are we using our own hand or
is an outside power directing it? It is only by the information
received that we can tell, and even then we have to make broad
allowance for the action of our own subconscious knowledge. It is
worth while perhaps to quote what appears to me to be a thoroughly
critic-proof case, so that the inquirer may see how strong the evidence
is that these messages are not self-evolved. This case is quoted in Mr.
Arthur Hill's recent book Man Is a Spirit (Cassell & Co.) and is
contributed by a gentleman who takes the name of Captain James Burton.
He is, I understand, the same medium (amateur) through whose
communications the position of the buried ruins at Glastonbury have
recently been located. "A week after my father's funeral I was writing
a business letter, when something seemed to intervene between my hand
and the motor centres of my brain, and the hand wrote at an amazing
rate a letter, signed with my father's signature and purporting to come
from him. I was upset, and my right side and arm became cold and numb.
For a year after this letters came frequently, and always at unexpected
times. I never knew what they contained until I examined them with a
magnifying-glass: they were microscopic. And they contained a vast
amount of matter with which it was impossible for me to be acquainted."
. . . "Unknown to me, my mother, who was staying some sixty miles
away, lost her pet dog, which my father had given her. The same night
I had a letter from him condoling with her, and stating that the dog
was now with him. 'All things which love us and are necessary to our
happiness in the world are with us here.' A most sacred secret, known
to no one but my father and mother, concerning a matter which occurred
years before I was born, was afterwards told me in the script, with t