s of paper presented an apparently
hopeless jumble, but when the sitting was over at the last, the Abbe
and I were able to make out the words and sentences without great
difficulty (he being accustomed to the task), and we then found a long,
coherent, and at anyrate perfectly sensible, message addressed to him,
and referring to the points of his coming discourse. This had to be
proved upon its own merits, and without prejudice, arising from the fact
that St Paul's name was given as the author. It was quite as helpful as
some of the Apostle's letters, with the advantage of being up to date as
regarded the question in hand. After all, the Abbe was about to embark
upon an enterprise requiring much courage and great tact, in the forlorn
hope that the walls of narrow Orthodoxy and Priestcraft might fall down
before the trumpets of advancing Knowledge and Light.

It may or may not have been St Paul who stood by the Abbe with words of
encouragement that night; but I, for one, find no difficulty in thinking
it conceivable that the great Apostle should take a keen interest in the
evolution of the planet upon which he once lived.

The charming young lady delivered up her script also. It was interesting
and well written, but the only paragraph which remains in my memory was
an excellent analysis of the initial difference between Christianity and
Theosophy.

The Abbe kindly copied it out for me next day, but I must quote from
memory.

"Christianity is a stretching down of the Divinity to Man.

"Theosophy is the attempt of Man, by his own efforts, to reach the
Divine."

This seems to me both terse and true.

We had sat from nine P.M. till one A.M., and I think we were all
relieved when an adjournment for supper was suggested by Lady Caithness.

Her son, the Duc de Pomar, joined us for _this_ part of the evening, and
was introduced to me. My enjoyment of the excellent fare, after so many
hours of exhaustion, was only tempered by an unfortunate and violent
quarrel between the mother and daughter mediums, on the score of the age
of the latter! The mother declared her daughter was forty-five; the
daughter said: "Not a day over thirty-five," and intimated that she
surely might be supposed to know her own age! The mother, however,
murmured provokingly: "_Moi, je sais mieux que ca_"; and so the wrangle
went on, until I made a diversion by taking leave of my hostess and
promising to be present at the lecture the "following afternoo