h in something above and beyond this world is the man and woman to
be envied, even though everybody cannot emulate their implicit trust.

_Spiritualism_

All the same, I do not think I shall ever dare to become a
spiritualist. If you can understand my meaning, so much, so very much
depends upon the truth and veracity of its tenets that I cannot go
blindly forward, as so many people seem to be able to do, because I
realise that disillusion would mean something so terrible that a kind
of instinctive faith in another life, without reason, without
scientific demonstration, seems far safer for the peace of mind. To
believe in spiritualism, and then to be deceived, would be so
unsettling, so devastating to the "soul," that, in my own self-defence,
I prefer to be sceptical unreasonably than to be equally unreasonably
believing. So many people, who have loved and lost, rush towards
spiritualism demanding no real evidence whatsoever, bringing to it a
kind of passionate yearning to find therein some kind of illusion that
their loved ones, who are dead, still live on waiting for reunion in
another world. Such a yearning is very human, very understandable,
very forgivable; but these people are the enemies of true spiritualism
as a new branch of scientific speculation. I would not rob them of the
glamour of their faith, since, as I have just written, I have reached
that time of life when I realise that humanity does not necessarily
want truth for the foundation of its happiness, but a whole-hearted
faith, a belief sufficiently sublime to make the common Everyday
significant in the march forward toward the Great Unknown. But I,
alas! am not one of those who can merely believe because without belief
my heart would be broken and my life would be drearier than the
loneliest autumn twilight. I find a greater comfort in uncertain hope
and a more uncertain faith. If I ever really and truly believed in
spiritualism and then found, as so many people have done, alas! that
the prophet of it was himself a fraud, I should be cut, as it were,
from all my spiritual bearings, to flounder hopeless and broken-hearted
mid the desolate wastes of agnosticism. I cannot give myself unless I
am convinced that the sacrifice is for something which _I must believe_
in spite of all doubt; not entirely what I _want to believe_ because
belief is full of happiness and comfort. I am of those who demand
"all, or not at all." I cannot go on struggl