The Genesis of Modern Spiritualism--It Crosses to Europe--The Beginnings of Trance-Mediumship--The Society for Psychical Research Begins Its Work--Confronts Difficulties--William James Enters the Field--The Limitations of Psychical Investigation--The Society for Psychical Research Gives Intellectual Standing to Spiritism--The Very Small Number of Dependable Mediums--Spiritism a Question of Testimony and Interpretation--Possible Explanations of Spiritistic Phenomena--Myers' Theory of Mediumship--Telepathy--Controls--The Dilemma of Spiritism--The Influence of Spiritism--The Real Alternative to Spiritism--The Investigations of Emile Boirac--Geley's Conclusions--The Meaning of Spiritism for Faith. XI. MINOR CULTS: THE MEANING OF THE CULTS FOR THE CHURCH 326 Border-land Cults--Bahaism--The Bab and His Successors--The Temple of Unity--General Conclusions--The Cults Are Aspects of the Creative Religious Consciousness of the Age--Their Parallels in the Past--The Healing Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by the Scientific Organization of Psycho-therapy--New Thought Will Become Old Thought--Possible Absorption of the Cults by a Widening Historic Christianity--Christianity Influenced by the Cults--Medical Science and the Healing Cults--A Neglected Force--Time and the Corrections of Truth. I THE FORMS AND BACKGROUNDS OF INHERITED CHRISTIANITY Chronologically the point of departure for such a study as this is the decade from 1880 to 1890. This is only an approximation but it will do. It was a particularly decorous decade. There was no fighting save on the outposts of colonial empires, the little wars of Soldiers Three and Barrack Room Ballads--too far away for their guns to be heard in the streets of capital cities, but lending a touch of colour to newspaper head-lines and supplying new material for rising young writers. It was the decade of triumphant Democracy and triumphant Science and triumphant Industrialism and, among the more open-minded, of triumphant Evolution. Western Civilization was sure of its forces, sure of its formulae, sure of its future; there were here and there clouds no bigger than a man's hand against particularly luminous horizons, but there was everywhere a general agreement that they would be dissolved by the force of benign development. The world seemed particularly well in hand.