England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Spiritualism -- Fiction
These things came from those regions, those conditions of existence into
which people passed when they died. But in those regions there existed
not only the souls of the dead who lived in an environment and under
conditions at which we could not ever so faintly conjecture, but other
spirits, some good, some evil. Every good impulse that came into the
hearts of men, came from over there; so, too, did every evil impulse
that would blight, if it could, the garden of God. And who knew whether
the man who by that strange faculty which Archie possessed of opening
the doors of his subliminal self, through which, as he averred, these
messages came, might not open them to other and evil things? If
possession by an evil spirit was a psychical possibility (and certainly
it was not more fantastically strange than such phenomena as Archie
could produce) would it not be thus, and in no other way, that the evil
possession would enter? Yet in childhood Archie had, in ignorance and in
white defencelessness, opened more than once the door of his soul, and
no harm surely had come to him. Was she being unreasonable, full of fear
where no fear was, twittering with groundless and superstitious fancies?
There was yet another side to the question. If the spirits of the dead
could indeed return, and speak of what they knew, was it not worth while
running some risk on the chance of the wonders they might tell of the
existence which now was theirs? Whatever else might be of interest in
human life, supreme over all was any hint or fragment of information
about the timeless and everlasting day that lay beyond the dawnings and
settings of the sun. Nay, more: if to any one was given this wonderful
gift by means of which voices could reach him from beyond the veil, was
it not his duty to use this endowment for the enlightenment and
consolation of those who mourned and who sat in darkness? God would
never have bestowed so spiritual a gift on any, if He did not mean it to
be used. The Christian Faith taught that the dead were alive in a wider
sense than ever they had been on earth; why then should it be forbidden,
to those who had this amazing gift, to speak with them, to learn about
their life? The Roman Church had fulminated its anathemas on Galileo, a
thing scarcely credible to a more enlightened age; it was more than
possible that its pronouncements against this intercourse with the dead
was but one instance the more of a similar cowardice and narrowness. Who
could doubt that a man of science three hundred years ago would have
been burned as a dabbler in diabolism and witchcraft, if he had
exhibited a manifestation of wireless telegraphy or an X-ray photograph?
But nowadays there was not a living being who did not rank such as the
discoveries of a natural law. The sorcery of one age was the science of
the next.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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