visions. Man working within time and space is influenced by what is
beyond the one and the other, the full significance of this world would
seem to be in another scheme of things to which this is only the
vestibule. The soul's wave movements have their laws. In that soul is
some fine Marconi-like instrument which registers impressions, and from
time to time receives spiritual warnings and perceives spiritual beings.
Serious men are now boldly investigating. Little help comes from the
sectarians who seem to begrudge God his universe; everything has to be
cheapened to the worm's-eye view of little Bethel, which steeped in
politics has long lost sense of the spiritual. The old Greeks and Latins
were acute thinkers, yet they believed in spiritual beings and their
appearances. It was only in the days of cheap thinking that it required
a special valour to express belief in the super-natural. The fact is,
most people are like the devils of scripture who "believe and tremble"
without admitting the authority of their belief. It is refreshing to
find a writer like Mr. W. S. Lilley in the _Nineteenth Century_
professing his absolute belief in ghosts. To man, and it would appear to
man alone on this plane, it is given to explore the unknown and to
establish the communion of soul with soul.

After all it is a question of evidence. If a man say "I won't believe in
anything super-natural whatever the evidence may be," it is best to
leave him to his folly. If he will accept the evidence that would pass
muster in a court of law, then you have a common ground, you can weigh
evidence. To me the evidence for spiritual appearances is overwhelming
looking at it from the strictly legal angle of vision.

In years gone by the scientific genius began with the assertion that
everything must have had a beginning, and to assert that there was a
spiritual Being with no beginning was nonsense. To the dim indistinct
crowd such appeared to be clever reasoning. But our very consciousness
insists that there is something which had no beginning, and Reason adds,
"else there could be nothing now." For example, Space could not have had
a beginning, that Duration could not, that Truth could not, that
somehow, somewhere these Three Eternals must have been co-eternal,
incomprehensible. And in this Trinity "none is afore or after the
other," which recalls the Athanasian Creed.

I cannot prove that Truth had no beginning, yet my consciousness tells
me at no pe