In a moment Moody went to the bottom of the class, and Pember reigned in his stead. By hook or by crook I obtained the books that Pember signalled as so dangerously subversive of the truth: “Magic Black and White” by Dr. Franz Hartmann; “The Perfect Way,” by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland; “Esoteric Buddhism,” by A. P. Sinnett; “Voice of the Silence,” by Mabel Collins; “The Bhagavad Gita,” from the Upanishads; and Emma Hardinge Britten’s “History of American Spiritualism.” My first delicious alarm lest the sky might fall any moment, and Satan appear with the great and terrible Nephilim princes to rule the world, became less threatening.... Soon afterwards, too, I happened upon my first novel, Laurence Oliphant’s “Massollam,” followed, a good deal later, by his “Scientific Religion” and his “Sympneumata.” This history of his amazing subservience to Thomas Luke Harris helped to peel another thin skin from my eyes; Oliphant seemed a hero, but Harris a vile humbug. By this time other books had brought grist to the mill as well: Amiel’s “Journal Intime”; Drummond’s “Natural Law in the Spiritual World”--I knew Professor Drummond later, when he came to stay with us, and also when he lectured to the students at Edinburgh on Sunday nights, coming from his Glasgow Chair for the purpose: I can still see his large, glowing, far-seeing eyes--Cahagnet’s “Arcanes de la Vie Future”; and “Animal Magnetism,” by Binet and Féré. The experiments of Braid, and Dr. Esdaille in India, had also come my way. Such one-sided reading, of course, fed the growing sense of wonder, naturally strong in any case; Shelley coloured it; and nothing offered itself at the time to curb, shape or qualify it. Spiritualism, apart from the exciting phenomena it promised with such confident volubility, left me rather unstirred, but theosophy, of course, I swallowed whole, with its Mahatmas, development of latent powers, memory of past lives, astral consciousness, and description of other beings both superior and inferior to man. It was some years before scientific reading came to check and guide a too exuberant imagination; but, even so I have always taken ideas where I found them, regardless of their propounders; if Tibet and its shining Mahatmas faded, the theories of Karma and reincarnation were older than any modern movement, and the belief in extension of consciousness to some _n_th degree, with its correlative of greater powers and new faculties, have not only remained with me, but have justified themselves. The “Gita,” too, remains the profoundest world-scripture I have ever read. An immediate, happy result of this odd reading, at any rate, I recall with pleasure: my father’s Christianity became splendid in my eyes. I realized, even then, that it satisfied his particular and individual vision of truth, while the fact that he lived up to his beliefs nobly and consistently woke a new respect and admiration in me....