s yet justifying
Spiritualism, certainly make a dogmatic materialism increasingly
different. Those of us who are as anxious for a sustaining faith in
immortality as any of our comrades in the great quest may possibly be,
but who are as yet unwilling to accept their conclusions, may
nevertheless find in this subject matter which is common both to us and
to them, the permission to believe that that which is most distinctly
ourselves possesses enduring possibilities. If it may from time to time
break through in curious ways the walls which now shut it in, may it not
in some very real way pass through the gate which Death opens and still
continue in such a richness of consciousness and identity as to organize
for itself another life beyond the grave?

_The Meaning of Spiritism for Faith_

Faith may find its permissions and witnesses in many regions. The writer
believes that faith in immortality finds an added permission in this
region also. Beyond debate, there are laws which we now but dimly
discern and possible forces which only now and again touch the coasts of
our present experience, as tides which sweep in from distant and
mysterious seas. Beyond debate, we may not confine the interplay of mind
with mind to purely physical channels, and under exceptional
circumstances effects may be produced whose causes we have not yet been
able to tabulate. Our conscious lives are rooted deeper than we dream.
They reach out in directions which we do not ourselves know. It may well
be, therefore, that they ascend to heights whose summits we do not see,
and possess a permanence independent of the body which they inhabit, or
the things of seeming sense which surround them, and it may be also that
what is now occult and perplexing and capricious may in the future
become as truly an organized science as the alchemy and the astrology of
the Middle Ages have become the chemistry and astronomy of our own time.
Beyond this one may assert the wholesome commonplace that the main
business of living is in the region of the known and the normal. It is
for our own well-being that the veil hangs dark between this world and
the next. An order in which there was constant passing and repassing
would be impossible. It would be either one thing or the other. It does
demoralize us to be always searching after the secrets of the unseen.
Might it not demoralize those who have passed through the veil to be
always trying to come back? Surely the most fitti