in was
extraordinarily accurate when judged by psychic law. There is the fact
that Peter, James and John (who formed the psychic circle when the dead
was restored to life, and were presumably the most helpful of the
group) were taken. Then there is the choice of the high pure air of
the mountain, the drowsiness of the attendant mediums, the
transfiguring, the shining robes, the cloud, the words: "Let us make
three tabernacles," with its alternate reading: "Let us make three
booths or cabinets" (the ideal way of condensing power and producing
materializations)--all these make a very consistent theory of the
nature of the proceedings. For the rest, the list of gifts which St.
Paul gives as being necessary for the Christian Disciple, is simply the
list of gifts of a very powerful medium, including prophecy, healing,
causing miracles (or physical phenomena), clairvoyance, and other
powers (I Corinth, xii, 8, 11). The early Christian Church was
saturated with spiritualism, and they seem to have paid no attention to
those Old Testament prohibitions which were meant to keep these powers
only for the use and profit of the priesthood.

CHAPTER III.

THE COMING LIFE

Now, leaving this large and possibly contentious subject of the
modifications which such new revelations must produce in Christianity,
let us try to follow what occurs to man after death. The evidence on
this point is fairly full and consistent. Messages from the dead have
been received in many lands at various times, mixed up with a good deal
about this world, which we could verify. When messages come thus, it
is only fair, I think, to suppose that if what we can test is true,
then what we cannot test is true also. When in addition we find a very
great uniformity in the messages and an agreement as to details which
are not at all in accordance with any pre-existing scheme of thought,
then I think the presumption of truth is very strong. It is difficult
to think that some fifteen or twenty messages from various sources of
which I have personal notes, all agree, and yet are all wrong, nor is
it easy to suppose that spirits can tell the truth about our world but
untruth about their own.

I received lately, in the same week, two accounts of life in the next
world, one received through the hand of the near relative of a high
dignitary of the Church, while the other came through the wife of a
working mechanician in Scotland. Neither could have bee